Densho Digital Archive - Clyde Tichenor Interview (denshovh-tclyde

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KL: So let's go back to the judo. You started taking judo and it was in Seinan Dojo?

CT: Well, yeah, when I really got into judo after getting away from the YMCA after meeting Jack Sergil, the club that he had taken over was Seinan Dojo, and that means "southwest school."

KL: Okay. So he took it over from Kuniyuki-sensei.

CT: He took it over from Kuniyuki-sensei, right. I never met Kuniyuki. I think to this day I've never met him. I've been around things he's done and so forth and so on, but it just didn't work out with the Japanese being in camp for about a year and all the disruption of that. I didn't know any Japanese.

KL: Kuniyuki came back to Los Angeles?

CT: Yes.

KL: Who were the other students who studied with you and Jack Sergil?

CT: Well, I say the main student that took much the same interest as I was one of my friends named John Hamilton. And Johnny and I were pretty much buddies all the time amongst others. And because I had gotten into the activity of Jack Sergil, who was teaching judo, and I went to the Seinan Dojo property, and discovered it was only a half a mile from where I lived, so it wasn't too long before Jack gave me a key to the property because it was convenient, I could get there and open up and stuff. And that gave me an advantage also because I could go on a weekend and practice judo with anybody I wanted. And my various friends from, especially judo, would then come and then two or three of us would practice without the whole judo class there. And I so I got a lot of special practice that way, having that kind of access to a judo club with such a large mat. And practically all my friends, including their sisters, ended up being in the judo club.

KL: Because you started talking to them about it?

CT: Well, I was, their brothers were going through my efforts, and they became interested knowing, finding out that they weren't excluded. And so they joined, and there already were several older women who were members of the judo club.

KL: Oh. Had they been studying for many years already?

CT: Yes. Yeah, they were brown belts in judo.

KL: Did they talk about what that was like in, say, the late 1930s when they were studying?

CT: No, they didn't. We didn't talk about that with them. But there was a large picture with us fellows in it at Manzanar when we attended Manzanar contest, judo shiai, which is a judo contest. And they were, they came along, too, but they did not do contests.

KL: The women?

CT: They did practice. Yeah, there wasn't a contest as I recall that included the women at that time. Though there were judo contests, but not at that particular time, at least where I was.

KL: Did your friends who were boys mind that their sisters came?

CT: Didn't seem to, no, didn't seem to. And Johnny's sister was one of those who came, and she was several years older than that, so she was semi-adult, you might say, in relation to us.

KL: Did John think it was a great idea right away?

CT: All my friends evidently did, because without me really proselytizing extensively, they all ended up being members of the judo clubs, which is very interesting.

KL: Yeah.

CT: They didn't all sustain the memberships as long, and none of them as long as I did. None of them reached a rank higher than brown belt, top brown belt rank, and I went on to fourth degree black belt. Yodan is the Japanese name for my rank.

KL: I'm curious about those older women who had been studying for a couple years, about their reception.

CT: I don't think of them as older women. [Laughs]

KL: Those brown belts, those female brown belts. I'll have to do some more reading and see how people in the judo community responded to them.

CT: Well, when we were practicing judo, we practiced with them equally, like with the other fellows. So we certainly didn't discriminate against them in any way. And some of them, being a little older, with a little more practice, some of them were actually a little bit better than us at first.

KL: Yeah, it'd be dangerous.

CT: 'Til we began to get our abilities enhanced.

KL: And you said you participated in a few competitions or tournament before Manzanar in Los Angeles?

CT: Yes. There were some sitting competitions, a few, that were held in the downtown dojo in Los Angeles. And we went to them several times, but then we also had our own more local competitions between more local judo groups.

KL: Was it mostly Caucasian students who came to those competitions?

CT: They were all Caucasian.

KL: All Caucasian. Something else I want to read more about, I mentioned to you last night about that African American student who supposedly studied in the '30s, and the Korean man that I saw --

CT: They were more rare. But nobody in judo would discriminate against them, because it wasn't a philosophy that taught you to discriminate against people or take advantage of them, it was quite the opposite. The "gentle way" was rather literally the philosophy of anybody who became involved in judo.