15/03/2025
Yesterday, I was contacted by one of Ishizuka Sensei’s fellow students and informed that he had passed away hours earlier. While getting my head around that, shortly after I started receiving messages with condolences from many people who would become friends after training together at his dojo. Sensei and I had talked about his illness so I suspected this day was coming but it still came too soon.
I was in Japan in January and had called him up seeing if he was up for getting together for some food, drink, and a good talk like we have done so often together in the past. He told me his illness had taken so much out of him and he couldn’t do those things. Instead I thought I would drop by to see him when I came to the Dojo for training with his students but that week I was ill and decided staying away was the best option. I didn’t want to bring anything close to him and his weakened immune system.
The last time I did get to spend time with him was when I was there for four weeks two years ago. I stayed at his wife’s little apartments and was able to see him frequently whether having meals and drinks together, sitting together in his dojo talking about the book he was writing, training in the dojo, and going out for food after those training sessions. It was a wonderful time and was just like when I lived there for over a decade and we would see each other two or three times a week. At the end of that time together he told me again to keep teaching people budo and to use his name for my own training group/dojo.
He taught me so much about budo, people, and life. He was like a father to 30 year-old me who was navigating life in a different country and language. I was in awe of him.
He affectionately called me Shiddo-chan and would tease me calling me his drinking buddy (which was fair enough given the number of times we were together in his Paradise Bar at the Dojo or staying late after the end of the year Dojo cleaning party).
On the few training days where I also had to take care of my young daughter I would bring her to the Dojo and he would gladly pick her up and carry her around, introducing her to the visitors there that day.
I cherish the memories of the training. Each time he’d laugh after hitting me, tossing me halfway across the Dojo then telling my training partner at the time to go for it because I could take it (thanks, Sensei), freezing like a deer in headlights when he came at me with a tsuki the first time (and the second, and the third…), telling me I’d finally gotten it after telling me each and every time I didn’t get it.
So many memories of such an important person to me and so many others. He would ask me to come to his music performances and I would come and bring my video camera. He gave a speech at my wedding and played a song for me and my new wife. My oldest son is named after him.
My condolences go out to his family, his lovely wife and their children, and his grandchildren, to the people who were all, and each, important to Sensei just as much as he was important to them. To sempai Ogawa san and Aida san. To Kacem who, as I was able to observe having a close relationship with Sensei, had an even closer one. May we all appreciate and celebrate Sensei’s life as we grieve and come to terms with his death.
