Densho Digital Archive - Clyde Tichenor Interview (denshovh-tclyde

<Begin Segment 12>

KL: Tell me about gaining your black belt.

CT: Well...

KL: You said it was on your way back from the Pacific.

CT: Well, they gave me one at Tokyo at the Kodo Kan. As I was gonna leave, because I was only there off a ship for a few days, and I was lucky to even be there at all. And they knew I was going to have to go, I wasn't going to be able to hang around.

KL: Why was your ship in Tokyo? Why was your ship in Tokyo?

CT: Oh, it was a ship that was taking us after the war back to the States. And the ship went down to Okinawa to pick up a few more people to bring back, and got down there and the propeller got all screwed up, and they couldn't make the trip across, they had to tow us all the way back to Tokyo. So there I was back in Tokyo again, and so I took advantage of... I was smart enough to take and get a job on the ship, and all the people who were workers on the ship got night, overnight liberty, so I got to go out into the town, which I did. And that was where I, right away I made a beeline to the Kodo Kan and met everybody there, Mr. Ito in particular, who was a fifth degree black belt at the time. And he and I got along real good and I practiced, they got a gi for me, the gi is clothing. They got a gi for me and I practiced judo with them and they were impressed enough because Jack did legitimate, our club was a legitimate club. And they gave me a black belt and he said to, "Give this to your teacher," and I was number one. And then the United States Judo Association, because I'd been in judo so long, was making corrections for all of the people that had been kind of passing by on things. So they put out a bunch of corrective boosts to people in the black belt, and they bumped me up to fourth degree because I'd been so long doing it. And I just wasn't... if you're the head of a club, who is there over you to raise your rank? It has to be somebody in the association to do that.

KL: Did you teach? What was your involvement with judo when you came back from World War II?

CT: Well, I went back to the judo club.

KL: To Seinan?

CT: Black belt and taught, just like anybody else. I've done martial arts for sixty years all told.

KL: Was it always with Southwest?

CT: I finally quit when I was eighty, and the reason I quit was I was doing ballroom dancing with my wife. And if you really put your heart into ballroom dancing, you can get a lot of exercise out of it because you go like this and you're moving around as well as the dancing. And it also seemed to me at eighty I had to consider that I don't know what my bones were going to do on some of the hard knocks you take in judo. What might come apart and stay apart, so I decided it might be smarter if I just don't spent my time doing judo anymore, but get enough exercise with dance.