[kuri]

One of the first Westerner's to live and study in Japan following WWII, and certainly the person that delved the deepest, Draeger is a legend in the MA world.

Anyone into martial arts should do themselves a favor and check out any of his books that have been reprinted.

Life of Donn Draeger

Martial Musings

In Japan, Donn lived in a rambling house in the Ichigaya section of Tokyo. Big and well made, it nevertheless shivered its timbers when Wang Shujin, the neijia master, would visit and punch anything anchored. By the time of my six-week stay in 1961, Wang had taken the best that several high-ranking Japanese karate, kenpo, and other martial art experts could offer, and hurt the indestructible Jon Bluming with a no-inch punch that the film actor Bruce Lee would have envied. Bluming tried to get even by taking a free hit at Wang's paunch and only hurt his own wrist. In Wang's taiji classes (he would not teach his forte, xingyi, to the Japanese then, but did later), he had many highly placed Japanese executives and a handful of yakuza (Mafia-style low-lifers). When other warriors of the night stalked him for a short time (Wang himself probably never knew this), one of his yakuza godfathers got wind of it, Donn told me, and the stalkers disappeared into the night mists.

While studying for my 3rd-dan in judo, I spent six weeks living in that storied house. Besides Donn, other residents included the aforementioned Jon Bluming, young Jim Bregman (the 1964 Tokyo Olympics 3-rd place winner), Doug Rogers (the Canadian heavyweight champion and a 2nd-place winner in the same Olympics), Bill Fuller, and a dyspeptic Japanese housekeeper with an expression stronger than Wang's punch. Her stony aspect was probably the result of the practical jokes this crew played. On anyone. I awoke my first morning there to find Donn holding a shinai one inch from my nose. Five minutes later I was killed again. As I was returning down the hall from the toilet to my room, Bluming and Fuller fell on me from opposite rooms with bo and kiai. Alertness was all--no one could afford to completely relax in that house. The occasional prank involving girlfriends and water-filled condoms often breached taste and brought a guarded tension to the occupants. As far as I know, it never went beyond that. Nor could it afford to. With those heavy hitters, a punch-out would have severely tested the house, which had survived earthquakes, the massive firestorms created by U.S. bombing in 1945, and Wang's occasional beatings since then.

Jimmy Bregman was the youngest in that house. I had known him in the Washington, D.C. area since he was fifteen, when he tossed me with a shoulder throw to the merriment of Donn and others. He more than fulfilled his early promise by going off to Tokyo and placing third in the 1964 Olympics. Later, he returned to America and a lot of the contest promise died when a freakish accident on the mat injured his leg. At lunch in Washington one day, he recalled what I'd told him about his training at the Kodokan in 1961. I had called it, he said, the judo gray life: "Every day you came to practice in drab surroundings, the air almost astringent with sweat. You doffed your street clothes and winced as you tried to get into your limpid heavy judogi, which never completely dried out from the exertions of the day before. You walked toward the mat and there first up for some rousing randori was the monster you were happy not to see the day before."

I knew Donn well before that time in his house in Tokyo, but there I got to see him more closely. I came to admire not only his high skills, but also how gladly and patiently he assisted foreigners with their problems. It was said that he had more than a hundred black belts in the various martial arts. While that may have been true, it seems excessive. But perhaps not. Douglas Chadwick said in his seminal The Fate of the Elephant (1992), "I wouldn't claim that all elephant stories are true--but with elephants, you don't need to make up all that much."

What I do know is this. In judo when his knees gave out, Donn pursued groundwork. I learned from a good source that he was in the top echelon in Japan in that area. I also learned that Donn taught a few top Japanese swordsmen in a mountain retreat for several weeks each year. As for details, I was never able to corroborate these claims because of the bureaucracy surrounding such things in Japan. But the fact that Isao Inokuma, who won the 1964 heavyweight judo title, told Japanese television journalists that Donn's coaching was the key to his success--an unprecedented acknowledgment by a Japanese judoka--gives one pause.

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