I was the only kid in my group who actually did martial arts, and I was the last one to see The Karate Kid. By two years.
Go figure.
By the time I caught it on VHS, my friends had already ruined the ending, reenacted the crane kick until it stopped being cool. But I watched it anyway.
Daniel gets bullied. Old janitor turns out to be a karate master. Takes him on. Underdog wins. You've seen it.
I was mid-teens. Watching Daniel struggle with not belonging, with getting his ass kicked for being the new kid... yeah, I got that. The trying to learn from books. The rec center training. That wanting to go back ‘home’… to a place that didn't exist anymore.
But it was Mr. Miyagi that got me. Not the karate. Screw the karate.
It was watching this old Okinawan janitor tend his bonsai, wear his rank like it meant nothing (seriously, 'JC Penney $3.98'… still funny), being calm and present like I've only seen in one other place: my grandmother's house in Tokyo.
Those precise movements. The way ritual had purpose.
I was an ‘ai no ko’, a kid caught between Japan and Europe, and later, America.
Never fitting in, always the new kid, the weird one, the one who didn't get the references everyone else seemed born knowing. Martial arts was the only constant.
My grandmother had tried to teach me. Tea ceremony, etiquette, the importance of the right movements at the right moment. I was too young, too impatient. All those rituals felt like pointless formality. Just give me the tea and the candy, dammit.
But watching Mr. Miyagi with his garden, his lessons, his humility... I realized she'd been teaching me the same thing all along.
How you are. How you behave. The rituals weren't decoration. They were the discipline. Self-control. Mastery of oneself, not others.
That's what she'd been trying to give me. That's what I saw in Miyagi. That Japanese part of me I’d started to lose touch with.
Her lessons had already set me on this path. I just hadn't been paying attention.
I needed a mentor like him.
And that was the problem.
I wanted someone who could do the impossible. Heal with his hands, see through my bullshit, fix what was broken in me without me having to explain it. The movie made it look simple. Miyagi rubs his palms together, places them on Daniel, and the pain disappears. Magic that looked like technique.
I found teachers who came close.
One made me part of his family. Trained at his house, ate at his table. Another did the same… opened his home, shared what couldn't be taught in a dojo. For a while, I thought I'd found it.
Both taught Japanese arts. Both taught me the same lessons my grandmother had been trying to give me. The ‘kuden’ (口伝), the verbal teachings passed down secretly to trusted students.
The importance of kata, the pattern practice that modern martial artists love to dismiss as outdated choreography.
Even things I thought were unrelated at the time. Flower arranging. Calligraphy. Tea ceremony, though my grandmother had already shown me the basics. Even kendama, a children's toy, taught with the same seriousness as a weapon form.
I should have known they were all connected. Just like my grandmother's tea ceremony was connected to everything else she tried to teach me.
But life got in the way. Work demanded more. Training became obligation instead of refuge. Or I moved and distance killed it. You stop training together, you stop talking.
They gave me pieces. History. Relationships. A sense of belonging I'd been chasing since the lessons with my grandmother. They finally made sense.
But Miyagi stayed.
These teachers? They were chapters, not the whole book.
There were others.
The guy with the beautiful school in the posh neighborhood. All brand new, everything gleaming. He looked slick, and he was. Broke down technique like a surgeon during the first few months of private lessons.
Precise.
Articulate.
What I'd been looking for at the time. Then one day I showed up and got handed off to one of his other instructors. No explanation. No warning. Just "he'll be taking over your training now." Then that guy passed me off to someone else.
Classic bait and switch.
I was hooked enough to keep paying, and that's all that mattered.
The one who sold fear. Not self-defense.
Fear.
Every class was about how dangerous the world was getting, how you needed to be ready for the worst. Never mind that every study, every statistic showed the exact opposite. Crime rates dropping. Streets getting safer. Didn't matter. He needed us afraid because fear sold memberships.
And the techniques matched the mindset. Everything started with "when they try to kill you" and ended with lawyers and courtrooms. No talk about de-escalation, about walking away, about the discipline required to NOT use what you know. Just violence as the answer to violence. The mantra was “better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6”.
As if learning to hurt people better somehow made you a better person.
Self-defense without discipline just manufactures better thugs. I was in martial arts to become a better person, not a more paranoid one.
At least they taught me what I didn't want. And who I don't want to become. But that only gets you so far. You can't build a practice on negatives. You need something to move toward, not just away from.
One teacher had skills I couldn't even comprehend at the time. Moved like water, hit like a truck, understood energy, timing, and distance at a level I'm still trying to reach. I was in awe of him.
Until I mentioned him to some acquaintances on a message board. This was before social media, and it lit up. Rumors circulated like wildfire. I didn't believe them. Then other sources confirmed it. Then someone showed me a newspaper clipping.
I left.
That's all there is to say about that.
Except this: the fantasy breaks hard when you realize Miyagi's skill meant nothing without his character. And some people have one but not the other.
I stayed with some for years. Taught with them. They trusted me with their system, and I stayed partly out of loyalty, partly because walking away felt wrong. Loyal to a fault. But loyalty isn't the same as connection.
We never got close. Not really. The gap between our worlds was too wide. Different generations, different priorities, different reasons for showing up.
But they were solid. That counted for something.
It just wasn't what I had been searching for.
Twenty-five years of that.
Different teachers, different systems, different cities. Looking for something I couldn't name but would know when I found it.
Or so I thought.
I train with people I call family now. My best friends. Training partners I've known for almost twenty years. Actually longer… My mentor, he's only a few years older. We started around the same time. But he didn't go looking for Mr. Miyagi the way I did, hopping from teacher to teacher, school to school, always searching for the next one who might finally be it.
That's the thing about searching for Miyagi. Even when you find good people, great people, you're still looking past them at someone else. Someone who isn't there. Someone who never was.
Somewhere along the way, I became the guy students bow to. The one they project their own Miyagi fantasies onto. The calm yet strict mentor who sees them, guides them, gives a shit about more than just technique.
I try. I show up.
I remember what the good teachers gave me and try to pass it along. Remember what the bad ones took and make sure I don't do that.
But I'm no Miyagi.
Just someone who's trained long enough to have something worth sharing, broken enough to know that how you treat your students matters.
The kids don't know that though. They see the black belt, the years, the confidence that comes from repetition. They see what they need to see.
Just like I did.
I don't search anymore. Not actively. Got too old for that.
But sometimes I catch myself. Watching a teacher move, listening to someone explain a concept, wondering if this is the one who has what I've been looking for. That deeper thing. That Miyagi thing.
Old habit. Probably always will be.
The kids bow. I bow back.
And somewhere, in that moment between teacher and student, I'm still that teenager watching a videotape, looking for something I'll never find.
Probably never did exist in the first place.
But I searched anyway.