David Fultz began studying Judo in 1968 at the University of Chicago Judo Club, where he trained under Dr. Paul Harper and Barry Brunsden. In January 1975, Fultz began studying Aikido with John Eley at the University of Chicago Aikido Club. He remained with Eley for twenty-seven years, serving as his second in command and basically as uchi deshi for approximately ten years. During this time, Fultz also traveled to Hawaii and Japan to train and attended numerous National Instructors Conferences. Although he stopped teaching regularly in 2002, Fultz continued his personal practice through Ki Exercises, breathing, meditation, and Tai Chi. All images provided by David Fultz.
MAYTT: You mentioned that John went through twelve different schools or dojo locations over the course of his career. Why were there so many?
DF: One of them was because we got kicked out of the university, so there’s one down; a couple more because they raised the rent. But what we were doing was literally trying to find the right place in the city to attract students.
In Chicago, there’s a traditional north-south divide. People on the South Side don’t really go to the North Side all that much, and vice versa, with the exception of Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. There was a long period, up through the 1990s, where the area between the Loop, the center of the city, and Hyde Park, Kenwood, and South Shore was really kind of isolated.
So we would go someplace for a couple of years, and if we didn’t see a big increase in students, we’d say, “Okay, well, where can we go?” Of course, you’re always conditioned by how cheaply you can find a storefront. It would have been great for us to go right into the middle of the Loop, but where would we have come up with $5,000 a month? So you always find dojos in marginal areas, whether it’s Chicago or New York, or wherever, precisely because of that. You want to find someplace where it’s okay enough and there’s a population around you who might be interested in it.
For those twelve dojos, that’s what was literally going on. We’d try a place for a while, not see much of an increase after a couple of years, and say, “Okay, let’s try another one,” and try another one, and another one. There were legitimate reasons to try all of these different places. There is a reason why the majority of the still-large aikido dojos are on the North Side of Chicago. They’re literally within a mile or so of one another. They’re not all in the far northern suburbs. The big three or four are all within a couple of miles of one another, and it’s because that part of the city is filled with twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings who have the money to be able to take classes. That’s now been true for going on fifty years. Those dojos are still there because they’re smack dab in the middle of the population of people who might be really interested in it.
MAYTT: When you started practicing in the 1960s and 1970s, what was the aikido landscape like?
DF: When we started out in the 1960s and 1970s, it was really kind of a Wild West. You had no idea who somebody was who said they had trained in Japan. Sometimes it was kind of fun. John and I would get asked to go out and teach seminars way outside of the city. We went down to Lafayette, Indiana, one time, and I did a couple up in Madison. Both of those were university towns. There were also a couple of other smaller places where somebody might have had a third or fourth kyu from someplace out on the East Coast and moved there for work but still wanted to practice. We would say, “Yeah, we’d like to help you out,” and go visit. Sometimes they had the most peculiar ideas about how techniques worked. It turned out they had been trying to learn them from a book! We loved doing it because they were so excited, and you had this small potential feeder dojo there, but because there wasn’t a senior enough person, it was hard for them to develop.
I think one of the things that the larger karate and judo organizations do is a lot more supportive work, such as having regional competitions and all of that kind of thing. If you don’t have somebody like Kashiwaya, who spent the latter part of his career going all over the country and teaching seminars every couple of weeks, it becomes difficult. I mean, his frequent-flyer miles must have been fantastic. I think that’s another component to how you grow and develop: hopefully, you have a national organization that can support people by sending out senior teachers regularly. Like the old preachers on the circuit, the priests and ministers going from church to church. Something like that would probably help a lot.
Fortunately, with the Illinois Aikido Club, they had absolutely first-rate teachers, and they were able to build it. It is so interesting to me that, quite literally, sixty years later, after the start of the Illinois Aikido Club, they’re still going strong. They’ve been split, but both sides are still large. I don’t know what their current student population is, but it’s certainly not twenty; it’s sixty or seventy. They’ve moved several times, too. It’s not just John. I think they’ve moved four or five times, maybe. But it’s finding a large enough space for a modest enough rent so that you can handle your monthly expenses.
MAYTT: Why do you think Ki Aikido did not gain a large following in the Midwest?
DF: I think one of the reasons why there is a reduction in people interested in any kind of martial art, much less our beloved aikido, is helicopter parenting. People are much more worried about their kids. “What, they’re gonna throw them to the floor?” I’m sure that goes through their heads.
I’ve got a wonderful kind of story about this: When I started in judo, in 1968, during the summers, the university closed the gym at night. My teacher, Dr. Harper, who was a distinguished researcher and, by the way, the grandson of the founder of the University of Chicago, still wanted to have his judo practice three times a week. So, what he did is he had an old spray-paint can right by the door to where the mat area was. There was a string that went about eighty feet, and the string was pushed out under the front door of the gym. When you wanted to visit, you went up to the front door and pulled the string, which caused the can to rattle. Somebody would come out and open the door for you, and you could practice. Absolutely logical, simple, easy way to do it. You can imagine somebody else pulling the string when a guy in a judo uniform opens the door and says, “Who the hell are you?” But it wasn’t a problem because Dr. Harper was well known in judo, we would get touring people from places like Waseda University and visiting judoka from Japan. They would come to the university club, and they would all have to be told, “Well, you pull the string and someone will come to let you in.” And you’d get in, and we’d have all these wonderful visitors. Very, very easygoing.
A couple of years ago, Kagan Arik, the current sensei at the University Ki Aikido club, said, “Hey, Dave, would you like to come down and teach a couple of times?” I thought, “Oh, wow, that’d be great.” He said, “Yeah, the president of the club will get in contact with you.” And I said, “Hmm, okay.” I then received from the president a university-required form that was a six-page questionnaire about my aikido practice. It was not produced by the club. It was produced by the university, by the University Athletic Department. Apparently, they had some trouble with a scoundrel in one of the other student clubs, which may have provoked the policy. But I look at this, again, as this kind of nanny-state thing, where they’re trying to protect the students. And yet, here I was, a University of Chicago alumnus, a fifth dan, who’d been one of the original founders of the club. They were asking me to fill out a six-page form with the full curriculum vitae of everything I’d done, what my ranks were, when I was tested, and all of that kind of thing. 1968 to 2024, you know. Boom. There’s something weird about it, and I think I’d put that down to the university protecting itself, of course. But I think it’s also that, in some subtle way, people are less enthusiastic about the idea of having their kids being thrown to the floor. Whereas when I was growing up, it was, “Oh, cool!” Parents were absolutely fine with it.
MAYTT: You mentioned earlier that a major source of support for martial arts in Chicago was the Japanese American community. Could you tell us more about that?
DF: In the early days, the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, a big portion of the support for aikido, judo, and karate was the Japanese American community. The Nisei and Issei were quite often in your dojo, or they helped start it. Certainly, the original Illinois Aikido Club was started by Japanese Americans, who then invited Tohei to send a teacher to them. That continued to be true and is still true in an interesting way.
There’s a Buddhist church right in Old Town here in Chicago called the Midwest Buddhist Church. They have a large, lovely building in the Japanese style, with a large side yard, and every summer they have a Ginza festival, like the Tokyo Ginza. They invite people to demonstrate. It’s an Obon festival with Odori, somebody showing off ikebana, Sumi-e, Japanese sword collectors and on and on, and then they have a stage. Guess who’s up there? Dancers, Taiko groups, and the aikido clubs, the judo club, kendo, and the karate club.
There would always be a tussle as to which of the aikido clubs would do it that year. It was always the same judo club, the one affiliated with the Midwest Buddhist Church, and then usually JKA, Shojiro Sugiyama’s dojo, the main JKA dojo. We all saw one-another there. You might not be great friends, but whenever you ran into somebody, you knew who they were connected to. It all sort of revolved around that Japanese American community and all of their internal ties that would link people.
A wonderful example of that was a sushi restaurant called Itto Sushi, which unfortunately closed in 2016 after thirty-five years. It was the real deal, a real izakaya. You walked in there and it felt like you were in Tokyo – in America. You could walk in on any weekday or even weekend evening and probably see someone from one of the other dojos there. Maybe Akira Tohei just had a test, so there would be ten people there. Or maybe Mr. Sugiyama’s karate students had just had a tournament, so suddenly you’d see all these people there. A fair portion of the clientele were members of the Japanese American community. I went there near weekly for about ten years because I moved close by, so every week or two I could think, “Oh, I have time for a sushi lunch.” I became good friends with the head sushi chef and owner, Juco Hattori. After a few years, he knew that I practiced aikido, and he seemed to know something about it. I said, “Juco, did you ever do aikido?” He said, “Oh, yeah. They sent me from Japan to Los Angeles.” I said, “Really, Juco? What rank were you?” “Fifth dan.” “Oh.” He said he couldn’t make any money at aikido, so he started learning how to do sushi. He did sushi ever since and never did aikido afterward. 99.9 percent of the people who came into that restaurant would have had no idea. I’m sure some knew, though. It was a wonderful example of how these communities overlapped.
When the restaurant announced it was closing in 2016, it was filled day after day with people from the Japanese American community. One day, right before they finally closed, I was sitting there and saw somebody who looked familiar. I said, “Wait a minute. Are you Joanne?” She said, “Yes.” It was Joanne Tohei, Akira Tohei’s wife. We sat there at the counter chatting about a little Aikido gossip, but mostly she was doing a lot with the taiko group. We spent our entire lunch talking about taiko and, “Oh, do you remember so-and-so?” It was wonderful. That’s an example of how the Japanese American community formed a sort of hub for all of these martial arts offshoots. In some cases, they were actually the teachers, but there was also the surrounding community. It made it unsurprising that I could sit down twenty or thirty years after I had last seen Joanne, at a sushi restaurant, and have both of us recognize one another. There it is. Because it was at the sushi restaurant, a longtime pillar of the community. It would not surprise me if this were true throughout the country. Any place where there was a large Japanese American community, I’m sure that’s where those dojos started, and that’s where a fair amount of their support came from, too.
The dojos don’t pop up out of nowhere – unless it’s somebody who trained with Imaizumi Sensei and then ended up in South Dakota. It pops up that way, but otherwise it tended to be from these communities. Of course, the sine qua non of that is Hawaii. You could walk into any door, on any island, and somebody knew somebody else who knew Suzuki Sensei.
MAYTT: What was the most impactful lesson that you received from John, whether it was about aikido or everyday life?
DF: Wow. It’s been so long ago. There’s nothing that really sticks out, but I would say one thing. One of the four basic principles is “relax completely.” One time we were working on something – I can’t remember what – and John came over to me and said, “Relax completely means relax completely.” And that changed me. It was probably the right time. Maybe I was a nidan or something like that. It was the right time, and he was serious. Relax completely actually means relax completely. I’m sure you may have encountered this yourself. After I had been doing it for fifteen years or so, I finally started to understand what it meant. I discovered why John was smiling when he was telling me this.
I’d have a young student who had been doing it for a year or so, and I’d say, “Okay, now, you really need to relax completely here. Your hand shouldn’t be a claw when you’re gripping somebody. You’re relaxed, right?” “Yes!” They would grip, and it would be like a death grip. No. Relax completely really does mean relax completely. Then, all of a sudden, you’re holding correctly. Nage can’t do anything if you’re holding correctly – or rather, they have to do it right instead of getting away with stuff. So, I would say that was a real moment when he simply said, “Relax completely means relax completely.”
You can spread that out over all the principles and over your understanding of technique, too. What you realize is that the longer you do it, the less energy you need. You’re doing it more and more correctly. You start out when you’re young and vigorous, and you’re flailing all over the place. You’re doing techniques and all that kind of thing. Then, the longer you go, the less energy you need because you understand what “relax completely” really means. Technique really becomes a part of you, so there’s not so much extraneous movement.
When you look at people who are really good, the reason why aikido looks kind of odd to people who have no experience with it is because it looks like you aren’t doing all that much. But if you are the uke, attacking a person who doesn’t seem to be doing much, you find out very quickly that you have no choice. I uke’d for Tohei Sensei a number of times, both in class and for demonstrations, and that was immensely valuable. To take falls from Tohei Sensei is an experience that not everybody gets. The thing that was interesting and really unique about him, and the senior-most teachers, is that you would attack and the result was not, “Oh, that was a strong technique.” What you found was that it was an inevitable technique. There was simply no other way than what happened. There was no force. All of a sudden, you’re in the air, looking up at the ceiling and wondering how the hell you got there. You had no choice. You were about to go down on the floor.
I think that’s what everybody discovers through long-term practice with good teachers. You discover that it takes less and less physical effort to do techniques. It’s even true with meditation. Since I stopped teaching regularly in 2002, I’ve done a lot of meditation. It’s the same thing. You think it’s some big, special thing, but the longer you do it, the more you realize it’s less and less and less, until eventually you’re just sitting there and your ki is extending. You spend less and less effort getting to full mind and body coordination, which is what meditation is all about, actually. It’s sitting with complete mind and body coordination. That just takes practice. Eventually you get better and better and better and better and better. At least that’s the plan and if my recent experience is any indication I have a long way to go so best get back to work. “Oh, that’s what all you old guys say!” We say it because it’s true. As soon as you think “I’ve got it” you’ve lost. You’ve cut your ki. It’s a secret known to old persons that once you start training you can never stop no matter how much you’d like to hang up the gi. Fortunately life’s much more interesting and fun that way.
MAYTT: Since John recently passed, what do you think his ultimate legacy is in Aikido, and what was his contribution to the Ki Society?
DF: Even though he had a small dojo for all of those years – fifteen students, something like that – the people that he trained did go out and train with other people. When we had the National Instructors Conferences, we were all training with other, more senior instructors, and they all got to work with him and they saw that he was always focused on aikido with mind and body coordination. Four basic principles. How does it work? His aikido was really good stuff.
That heritage, the line from Tohei and then Isao Takahashi and the other instructors that Tohei sent out, John was always following that. It would never have occurred to him to go and train with Tomiki Aikido, for example. There were very good people in Tomiki, but what he wanted was to develop and learn as much as he possibly could about how mind and body coordination works. That kind of attitude spreads by osmosis. When I was in Hawaii and training with Yamamoto Sensei for a very brief time, it was just like training with John because John’s attitude toward the fundamental ideas of aikido was exactly the same as Yamamoto Sensei’s.
So, I would say that his steadfast search for the best, most effective, kind of aikido, with mind and body coordinated, was what characterized everything that he did and everything that he taught. That had an effect on anybody who he worked with or taught at seminars.
MAYTT: Thank you again for taking the time to talk with us, Fultz Sensei!
DF: It was a pleasure.
