For the active tourist, Vero Beach has a lot to recommend it: surfing, kayaking, fishing – and, for one young family visiting from New Zealand, sword fighting.
For nine weeks this summer, for the second year in a row, a New Zealand family is visiting Vero to study a particular style of martial arts that has long been a passion of a longtime resident: island jeweler John Michael Matthews.
Raymond Tainui and his sons Niko, 15, and Cole, 11, are spending as much time as they can with Matthews, a student of martial arts for nearly 50 years. Matthews divides his time between his Beachland Boulevard shop and Bamboo Dojo, his martial arts studio in the Pocahontas building downtown.
Soft-spoken and with a seemingly permanent deferential smile, the respected jeweler is a former Marine sergeant. In his six years in uniform, he served in the infantry in Vietnam and as an MP in Da Nang. Raised in Washington, DC, he had a mild interest in karate after a friend started taking classes.
Mostly, though, his training came in the military. “A lot of the sergeants had been to Okinawa and were black belts,” he says. “As an MP, it was part our training.”
Tainui had a drastically different upbringing. He grew up on New Zealand’s South Island in a remote settlement, or “pa,” of less than 10 houses, near the banks of the Arahura River. They were the homes of Maori families, the indigenous people of New Zealand. The closest township was five miles away; the only commercial building in his pa was an old pub.
“There was a strong family connection to the Arahura River. It was a source for greenstone which is important to Maori culture,” says Tainui, trying to explain his roots there. “And up the hill was a cemetery where generations of our ancestors were buried.”
Families would move on, he says; others replaced them. But by the time he was 12or 13, there were few connections left. His family broke away from the settlement and moved to Christchurch.
The adjustment was both difficult and positive.
“In high school, I never really got into team sports very much,” says Tainui. But following his sister’s lead, he started taking karate at a privately run club. “It was just something cool to do.”
He would go on to study more seriously when he went to university, stopping for a time and coming back to it in his mid-30s. Now he owns a dojo as a sideline to his main business, a wholesale bakery.
Initially Tainui learned an Okinawan style of karate that focuses more on self-defense than the more spiritual, process-oriented Japanese karate. Okinawan karate involves weapons based on what peasants used to fend off the fierce sword-laden Samurai, and had to press into use whatever farm implement or paddle they had at hand.
Eventually he was drawn to a different style, the Japanese karate known as Yoshukai developed by Mamoru Yamamoto. An American disciple, Mike Foster, furthered the style to suit the American interest in full-contact karate. A serviceman stationed in Japan in the late 1950s, Foster over time spent ten years studying with the Japanese master Yamamoto, and he taught the style in his Tampa dojo.
Today the technique has spread to a number of countries, including Germany, Canada and New Zealand.
Florida remains a hotbed of followers of Foster, who eventually opened dojos in Orlando, Daytona and Titusville. Other practitioners have opened schools in West Palm and Gainesville.
Matthews’ Bamboo Dojo, one of four karate studios he has opened here since the 1980s, is one of the most respected.
Tainui sought him out for not only martial arts technique, but for advice on buying a sword, one of the skills involved in Yoshukai.
For that, Matthews has more knowledge than necessary. An avid collector of military swords dating back to the 12th century, he has a special interest in Japanese samurai swords. Many are of museum quality, verified by experts in Japan; Matthews has visited a number of times.
The family name etched in characters on the tang, the portion of the blade that fits into the handle, or hilt, many swords were passed down to fighters through generations of Japanese families until they were seized in surrender or death by the enemy, in many cases, U.S. soldiers in World War II.
“It’s sad, but there are more swords in the U.S. than in Japan,” says Matthews, who supports efforts to repatriate Japanese swords to their original families. “If they buy them, they can take them,” he says. “I’m not on a mission to send them back. Some of these are 400 years old. I don’t really own them; they should go on forever, so I’m trying to preserve them or protect them.”
Rising over his collection is a samurai facsimile: a mustachioed mask with a 17th century helmet above it and 18th century armor below.
The swords used to practice with are mostly wooden, Matthews explains, and he has some ancient examples of those as well. “These (with a steel blade) would cut a human body completely in half,” he says.
That grisly result is belied by the balletic moves involved as Matthews breaks down the discipline known as “sword arts.”
“When you’re studying martial arts, you’re practicing drawing the sword, swinging the sword and practicing against an imaginary opponent the way a boxer would shadow box,” he says.
“Then there’s the cutting, to make sure if I was using the sword, would I really be able to cut something. So we’re test-cutting, testing the sword and the martial artist.”
At the dojo, the test-cutting is done on rolled up tatami mats, the traditional Japanese floor cover made of rush. To prepare them for the sword’s edge, the mats are soaked in water and stuck at waist-high level on a wooden base.
“Then there’s pair training,” Matthews goes on, “where we practice each having a wooden sword so we can clank around and not actually cut each other’s arm off. So there’s more equipment than just one sword.”
Sword arts are a far cry from Tainui’s day job, though making mincemeat is one of the elements in baking savory pies, a specialty of his bakery, along with biscuits (cookies) and breads.
Among Tainui’s students at his New Zealand dojo are his two sons, now both green belts about to be tested for brown. They too are getting a workout this summer: Saturday they traveled to a Gainesville master and got a major workout of the gluteous maximus, Tainui explains; Cole winced limbering up for Sunday morning’s session.
“This isn’t a vacation, this is work,” Tainui says.
Nevertheless, he admits Vero has its charms, and the boys quickly second his opinion.
“We love it,” he says. “It’s a nice place and it’s warm. At home, we’ll go into the dojo and it’s zero degrees.”
That could be centigrade at least. Sunday, when the day dawned particularly warm and muggy in Vero, Bamboo Dojo was approaching hot-yoga temperatures when a group of martial arts students, dressed in baggy pants and kimonos, gathered at 9 a.m., among them the Tainuis, father and sons.
The men and boys lined up before Matthews, facing a mirrored wall. They each took practice swords and went through another round of moves, imagining enemies at Matthews’ command — on the left, then on the right.
Finally, they had at the soaked tatami, rolled up to approximate the size of a human limb or neck, the still-smiling Matthews pointed out. Cautiously the martial artists drew their swords. Blow by blow, they reduced the mats to stubs, as the stale air of the dojo filled with the scent of cut grass – the smell of summer for the Tainui boys.
