Lineage & History

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Jerry Bestol

Cho Dan · Tang Soo Do

Head instructor of the American Karate School of Boulder, which was in fact a Tang Soo Do school. He had studied with Lt. Choi of the Moo Duk Kwan, at Shihan Goody's invitation.

He left for Arizona, and a student at that school remembers him as “our last Moo Duk Kwan black belt”.

Goody appointed Bob Jay in his place — which is how Bestol's name survives in the booklet at all, in the caption to somebody else's drawing.

Named in Goody's 1967 caption for Bob Jay as “Mr. J. Bestol”. Arizona and the Moo Duk Kwan line from Ron Small of the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society, who trained at the Boulder school. That the Boulder school taught Tang Soo Do is confirmed independently by Sensei Steve, September 2026, who calls it “an early Korean style” — two unconnected sources rather than one blog.

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George Brangoccio

Karate, sixth dan · Yawara Sword Kata

Sixth degree by 1983, and photographed that year in a free-for-all at the American Judo College alongside Dennis Warner and Steve McDanal. Shihan Goody had drawn him as a sankyu sixteen years earlier, which is the distance a serious student covers in a working lifetime at one school.

Settled, September 2026. Two spellings had been in play — Shihan Goody captioned his 1967 drawing Brangoccio, the frame on the dojo wall reads Brangioccio — and Astone’s ruling was that nothing could be decided without a third document. There is one. The American Judo College’s 1983 anniversary booklet captions a free-for-all photograph “George Brangoccio (sixth degree)”. Two of the school’s own papers, sixteen years apart, against one frame. This page keeps Brangoccio.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

The drawing and its caption are from Goody’s 1967 booklet. The 1983 grade and the spelling are from the American Judo College anniversary booklet; see research/ajc-archive.md.

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Lou Brigham

"Buddy" · Yawara, Godan

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

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Sifu Gene Chen

Chen Taijiquan

Our Tai Chi line, and the one master on this page whose place in it is written down. He is 陳進鴻, Chen Jin-hong, born in Shanghai in 1938 and a pioneer of Chinese martial arts in the United States.

He stands in the nineteenth generation of the Chen family on the Chen’s Tai Chi Chuan Association U.S.A. genealogy — the chart that hangs in this dojo, and the one he himself translated into English. A line on it runs back to 陳照奎 Chen Zhao-kui (1928–1981), youngest son of 陳發科 Chen Fa-ke (1888–1957). The chart is on this page.

He is also recorded as having studied under Feng Zhiqiang, and with Lei Muni, Tian Xiuchen, Hong Junsheng and Chen Yuxia — Chen Fa-ke’s own daughter. Every one of those names is on the same chart, in Chen Fa-ke’s list of disciples.

What the chart does not settle. It gives no date, and it does not say what the line from Chen Zhao-kui means. Every son printed on it carries a birth-order numeral and a count of his own sons; this entry carries neither, and it is lettered in a different hand from the printed names — so it reads as a teaching line added to the chart rather than a blood line printed in it. Someone who reads Chinese should check that before it hardens.

The dates are Wikipedia’s: born 1 August 1938 in Shanghai, died 5 June 2001 in San Francisco. It is a thin article — three references — and it never mentions Denver, this school or Shihan Goody, so it is worth saying why we are confident it is the same man. It agrees with the dojo’s own chart on four things independently: the name, the birth year, Shanghai, and Chen Zhao-kui and Feng Zhiqiang as his teachers. One coincidence is possible; four is not. It also gives him a second art this page does not cover, Chu Gar Southern Praying Mantis, and has him teaching in San Francisco — the Richmond District, Fort Mason and Golden Gate Park.

The genealogy chart on the dojo wall, which names him as one of its two translators and places him in the nineteenth generation. See research/chen-genealogy-chart.md. The teachers named in the third paragraph are from outside accounts of Chen Jin-hong and are not on the chart as his teachers.

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General Ching Chung Dou

China · the spear that became karate

Goody opens his booklet with him, and the reason is an argument about where the striking arts came from: a spear master who found his weapon kata worked just as well with empty hands.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

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Art Doris

Sixth dan · Judo, Jujitsu, Karate, Yawara, Tai Chi

Red's brother, and with him one of the two most senior people at this school until his passing a few years ago.

By 1983 he was a sixth degree black belt with twenty-seven years at the American Judo College — which puts him on that mat from about 1956, the year before the photograph below was taken. The same booklet shows him working a spear take-away and a gun take-away with a first-degree black belt named Mark Northdurft.

The photograph below puts him at the American Judo College in 1957, standing with Haruyoshi Ichijima — one of the three masters who taught Shihan Goody at the Old Kodokan. It is the earliest date the archive holds for him.

Art Doris, Judo San Dan, Yawara Sho Dan, Karate Sho Dan. Art has taught the Thornton Highlanders for several years. He is the expert on the "Getta Kata". He has helped the school on many occasions.Shihan Frank Goody, 1967

Goody spells the name Doris, with one r, as does the frame on the dojo wall. His 1967 quotation is from the page of his booklet that lists the black belts he had no room to draw. The 1957 photograph is in the dojo office; see research/office-wall-portraits.md.

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Red Doris

Ju Jitsu, San Dan

Known at this dojo as Red Dorris; a student of Goody's who trained under him names him in full as Walter F. Doris. Until his passing around 2005 he and his brother Art were the two most senior people at the school.

Red Doris, Ju Jitsu San Dan, Judo Ni Dan, Karate Sho Dan. Red is an outstanding teacher. He has conducted one of the finest Ju Jitsu classes in the world. He is a hard-worker and a loyal teacher.Shihan Frank Goody, 1967

Goody spells the name Doris, with one r. Quoted from the page of his 1967 booklet that lists the black belts he had no room to draw.

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Pat Ford

Judo Yon Dan · Rocky Mountain Judo Champion

Pat Ford, Judo Yon Dan, Yawara Sho Dan, Karate Nidan, Aikido Sho Dan, Ju Jitsu Ni Dan. Pat is the Rocky Mountain Judo Champion -- undefeated. He is a great contester and teacher. If you are in Pat's class, you had better be in good condition.Shihan Frank Goody, 1967

Goody's own words, from the page of the 1967 booklet that lists the black belts he had no room to draw: “I am sorry but, due to the shortness of time, many of our black belts and assistant teachers as well as students are not in this booklet. I would like to mention a few of these.”

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Forest Goody

Jujitsu · Shihan Goody’s father and first teacher

The line does not start with Shihan Goody. It starts with his father.

Forest Goody had studied the martial arts in the Orient, and so had his father and his father before him — three generations of Goodys in the same schools, under the same masters, before Frank was born. Holding to that, he began his son’s jujitsu training when the boy was three years old. Ten years later it was the family’s letters of introduction, prepared by Forest, that got a teenaged American through the door of the Old Kodokan.

And there is an answer to the obvious question — how a Denver family came to have contacts inside the martial schools of Asia at all. It is not a martial answer. Shihan Goody’s great-grandfather was a Prussian military advisor in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and his grandfather was in China at the same time as a liaison for the German government. Germany was one of the eight powers that put that rising down, between 1899 and 1901. Whatever those two men were doing there, they came home with people they knew — and the school’s own booklet is plain that it was those personal contacts, built by the great-grandfather, the grandfather and then Forest, that later let a teenaged American walk into the Old Kodokan.

He turns up once more, and it matters. When his son went to the war, Forest Goody kept the American Judo College open. A school founded in 1934 that has never closed owes that to him.

We have his name and little else. No dates, no photograph, and no account of where any of the three generations trained or with whom. The German connection to China is the one thread with a date on it, and a Prussian officer in China in 1900 ought to be traceable. If anyone in the family or the Yudanshakai can fill this in, it is the oldest thread the school has.

Tom Miller’s profile of Shihan Goody in American Karate, September 1986, for the three generations and the training at three years old. The Boxer Rebellion, the Prussian advisor and the German liaison are from the school’s own 49th anniversary booklet of 1983, which is the only document that says why the family was in China. Both are in the American Judo College papers; see research/ajc-archive.md. Retold here, not reproduced.

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Shihan Frank Goody

Denver · our teachers' teacher

His first teacher was his own father. Forest Goody started him in jujitsu at three years old, in a family where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all studied in the Orient. Ten years later he went west to the Seattle–Tacoma shipyards as a ship fitter lead man and crossed the Pacific for the first time, carrying letters of introduction his family had prepared — which put him into the same schools, under the same masters, as the Goodys before him. Those letters had been forty years in the making, and they started with a Prussian officer in China. He taught his shipmates on deck on the way.

At the Old Kodokan he became one of the very few Westerners training there, under Mifune, Nagai and Ichijima. He came home a Kodokan nidan. He also learned something else there, and a 1986 profile puts it bluntly: he learned what it was to be taken for a “whiteface” and a barbarian, and got past it. His students in Denver were taught courtesy to everyone as hard as they were taught the arts.

He founded the American Judo College in 1934, and he founded it in a carriage house — at the back of a property, out of sight from the road. The school’s own information brochure puts that first carriage house at 909 Pearl Street and moves it to the Goody family’s home at 1007 Pennsylvania Street afterwards, a turreted Victorian mansion on Capitol Hill. It went on from there to Franklin Street, to Emerson Street, to the first hall anyone here built on purpose for judo and karate on Columbine Street, and at last to 1995 South Bannock. It kept its fiftieth anniversary in December 1984 and called itself, in its own booklet, the oldest martial arts school in the United States between New York City and San Francisco. It was renamed the American Budo College later. This dojo came out of it.

By the early 1960s that school had eight hundred members, two hundred of them active, and Goody signed its brochure as president. He was proud of one number in particular — how many Denver police officers belonged.

He was a Marine. He had been teaching in uniform before the war already — at the CMS Military Academy, the US cavalry school, and to the US Merchant Marine aboard ship — and the Corps worked out that its hard-fighting boxer ought to be teaching hand-to-hand combat. Sergeant Goody spent the war doing it, at several bases and in the Japanese Islands, against people he had trained among, which the 1986 profile says he felt. Afterwards he went back with a group of armed-forces martial artists to tour Japan giving exhibition judo, on the reasoning that sport could mend something the war had broken. His father kept the school open in Denver while he was gone.

He could fight, and there is a number on it. In California after the war he won twenty-two consecutive amateur boxing matches, nineteen by knockout.

He was the first instructor to teach karate in the Rocky Mountain region, and is credited with teaching nearly all the other karate pioneers in Colorado. He ran yawara tournaments at his Denver judo school between 1945 and 1951.

By 1966 he was a fourth dan in the United States Karate Association and its district director for the Rocky Mountains, both of which he set down beside his name on his own stance chart.

He also served eighteen years with the Denver Police Department as its hand-to-hand and self-defence instructor. (Eighteen is the figure in two of the school’s own documents, his 1967 booklet and the 1986 profile; an outside account says nineteen.) In 1961 that department was broken open: a ring of serving officers had been burgling the city, casing jobs from their patrol cars and coming back at night while colleagues listened to the police radio. More than fifty were implicated. Around forty went to prison — close to seven per cent of the force.

The account handed down in this dojo is that Goody resigned over it, and that he set out his reasons in a book he published himself. No copy of that book has surfaced. But his own booklet of 1967 writes the police career up as a finished thing — eighteen years of it, spoken of in the past tense, under a photograph of one of his police classes. Eighteen years ending where the dojo's account ends them is not proof of why he left, and the rest still reaches us from the men he taught rather than from the public record. But the shape of it is now in his own paper.

He went back to Japan in 1965. Photographs from that trip put him at Ichi Jima Sensei's dojo in Meguro-ku, Tokyo, and standing beside Nagai Sensei — in a gi lettered AJC, for his own American Judo College. The captions give his grades as Kodokan nidan in judo and rokudan in jujitsu, which is exactly what his student in Maine remembered independently sixty years later.

Who taught him is a longer list than this page has ever carried, and the school set it out itself in the booklet below. Besides Ting Yang and Professor Matsuyama — both hereditary masters, and both, by marriage, descendants of the Forty-Seven Ronin — it names Morihei Ueshiba, founder of aikido, “a master of Kenjitsu, and the former Kenjitsu Instructor for the Japanese Imperial Navy”; Nagai Sensei, eighth degree in both jujitsu and Kodokan judo; Mifune, tenth degree; Mr Wu, former Royal Guard to the Empress of China, a kung fu master and a Taoist priest; Sophia Delza, tai chi chuan, “studied ten years in Peking”; Chen Shen Shung of Shanghai, kung fu and the five animal styles; and Yang Shen Shung, kung fu and a Buddhist priest.

The facing page adds Dr Hotsumi, hereditary master of Koga ninjitsu; Dr Chen Man Ching of Taiwan and Mr Lee, both tai chi chuan; and names his Kodokan instructors as Otaki, eighth degree, Hosakawa, seventh, and Ichijima, sixth. “And many others.”

It then keeps a second list, of instructors he worked with rather than studied under, and the distinction is the booklet’s own: Anton Geesink, the Dutchman who was Olympic, European, All-Japan and world judo champion; Yamaguchi, tenth degree of Go Ju Ryu, and Oyama of Kyokushin — registered at both their schools, taking private lessons from each; and Major Fairbairn, whose system our fourth kata is drawn from.

Two things he said, both worth keeping. To students who thought they were there to learn to fight: “Do you think I’m teaching you how to fight? I’m teaching you to overcome yourselves.” And on why this school still works the way it does: “In the kata lie the secret of the arts.”

He was also an artist. Every drawing in this section is his, from the booklet he wrote and self-published in 1967.

And in Denver he was on television. Not as a martial artist — as Officer Goody, teaching road safety to children, on Sheriff Scotty, Blinkey’s Fun Club, Mary Martin, Fred & Fey, Dick Lewis, and a programme of his own: Officer Goody and His Friends, on Channel 9.

Two names on that list want checking before anyone repeats them. The booklet says Sophia Delza “studied ten years in Peking”; the American tai chi pioneer of that name studied Wu style in Shanghai, under Ma Yueliang, for about three years. Same name, different account — and she is not on the Chen chart in the Tai Chi section, which is expected, because that chart follows the Chen family and the Wu line leaves it generations earlier. And Dr Hotsumi, “hereditary master of Koga Ninjitsu”, is almost certainly Masaaki Hatsumi. The booklet is the school’s own and is trusted about the school; it is demonstrably loose with outsiders’ names and details, so these are printed as it wrote them and not as established fact.

Two accounts of the founding do not fit each other. This page has him founding the American Judo College in 1934, which is the school’s own brochure. Ron Small — who joined in 1963 and ran with the senior black belts — writes that Goody met Matsuyama after the war, became his Ichi Ban, and partnered with him to found the college. Both cannot stand: a school founded in 1934 cannot have been founded with a man met after 1945. Either a date is wrong or “founded” is doing loose work for a later refounding, and the dojo can probably say which.

Yamaguchi: the list heading is the only thing that disagrees. He sits in the booklet’s second list, of instructors Goody worked with rather than studied under — but the booklet’s own entry for him reads: “Tenth degree blackbelt in the Go Ju Ryu st[y]le of Karate. While registered at his school, Shihan Goody took private lessons.” Registered, and taking private lessons, is studying under him. Ron Small has the rank that came of it — Goju Karate, Sho Dan (Yamaguchi). So the two sources agree and it is the heading above the list that misleads.

When he died is not established. A date is in circulation on a personal website, but the dojo does not recognise its author and the claim behind it has changed under questioning, so it is not printed here. The reasoning is in research/mark-grove.md. A death certificate or an obituary would settle it.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

usadojo.com’s history of karate in America, the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society, and the dojo’s own documents. The father, the 1934 founding, the Marines and the list of teachers are from the American Judo College papers — the 1983 anniversary booklet and Tom Miller’s profile in American Karate, September 1986 — retold here rather than reproduced. See research/ajc-archive.md. The burglary ring is a matter of public record; his resignation over it is this school’s oral tradition, and is marked as such above.

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Herman Gorner

Strong-man · balance over bulk

Not a martial artist, and in the booklet anyway. Goody put him there as an argument about leverage: what a trained body can do with structure rather than size.

Goody spells him Gorner; the public record has him as Hermann Görner, born in Saxony in 1891, a circus strongman who lost an eye to shrapnel in the first war and turned professional in 1921. The elephant settles the identification — the published accounts give the same South African tour and the same weights, 700 pounds at the start and about 1,500 by the end.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

Goody’s caption, corroborated against the public record of Hermann Görner (1891–1956).

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Kent Hoffman

Shodan · the Chinese axe

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

Goody spells the name Hoffman on page 8 and Hofmann on pages 16 to 18. Which he used is not settled.

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Dan Huizinga

Breaking · five students cleared

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

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Haruyoshi Ichijima

Kodokan, sixth dan · his own dojo in Tokyo

One of the masters Shihan Goody trained under at the Old Kodokan, alongside Mifune and Nagai — and the one we knew least about until 2026. He is named Ichi Jima Sensei throughout Shihan Goody’s own papers.

He kept his own dojo in Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Shihan Goody was photographed there in 1965, in a group that includes Nagai Sensei and Ichi Jima's own young son. Whatever began at the Old Kodokan when Goody was a teenager was still going forty years later, and he travelled back for it.

He taught well beyond Denver. Thamby Rajah — the founding father of aikido in Malaysia, and the first Malaysian to hold black belts in both judo and yoshinkan aikido — sailed eleven days from Malaya in 1957 to seek training under Ichi Jima and Mifune. He is in the 1965 photograph too. Two foreign students, eight years and an ocean apart, crossed the world and named the same two teachers.

In our own paper he appears three times: Goody’s 1967 booklet has him praising Lou Brigham as “Ichi Jima Sensei 6th degree from Japan”; a photograph of him with Mr Goody is in the Ox kata booklet of the same year; and the photograph below, of him with Sensei Art Doris in 1957, hangs in the Yama Arashi office today.

There may be film of him. An “Ichijima” is among the Kodokan masters Hal Sharp filmed in the early 1950s for Classic Judo by the Masters. If anyone can confirm that is the same man, the dojo would like to know.

Named in the 1967 booklet, in the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society’s account of Goody’s Kodokan teachers, and in Sensei Steve’s letter of 2026. The Tokyo dojo and the 1965 visit are from the dojo’s own photograph; the given name is from the caption on the 1957 photograph in the office, and is corroborated by Thamby Rajah’s school, the Shudokan Institute of Aikido. See research/japan-1965.md.

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Bob Jay

Nidan · Ax and Knife Kata

He took over the Boulder classes when Jerry Bestol left for Arizona, which is the appointment Goody's caption below is describing.

He was still at the head of that school a year or so later: he ran it with Bob Webster through the sixties, and a photograph kept by one of his students there is captioned Bob Jay, Sensei, Bob Webster, Ron Small, Al Richardson / American Karate School of Boulder ca 1968.

He is the smallest man in that photograph. He was a gymnast, and he went into the Navy afterwards.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

The Boulder photograph and the account of Bestol's departure are from Ron Small of the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society, who is in the photograph. The gymnastics, the Navy and Bob Webster's part in running the school are from Sensei Steve, who was taught by Webster at the American Judo College, September 2026.

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Jigoro Kano

1860–1938 · Founder of Kodokan Judo

He learned his jujutsu from three men. Fukuda Hachinosuke of the Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū taught him first, in a nine-mat room with five students, and worked him hard at randori — free practice against a resisting partner. When Fukuda died in 1880 Kano was given the school's scrolls. He continued under Iso Masatomo of the same tradition, who cared more for kata and handed the randori teaching increasingly to Kano himself. Iso died in 1881, and Kano went to Iikubo Tsunetoshi of the Kitō-ryū, whose throwing he judged better than anything he had met.

In February 1882, aged twenty-two, he took nine students out of Iikubo's hall and opened his own dojo in a room at the Eishō-ji temple in Tokyo. It was a jujutsu school. The name Kōdōkan came about two years later, and Kano had not yet been granted his own certificate of mastery in Kitō-ryū. The shift from jujutsu to judo was gradual: there is no day on which what those nine men were learning stopped being one thing and started being the other.

The word judo was not his invention, and not new in 1882. An older jujutsu school had been using 柔道 long before him. Kano took it deliberately: jujutsu had acquired a bad name by the 1880s — undisciplined schools, injured students, practitioners thought of as street toughs — and he wanted his own work kept clear of it. Jutsu is a technique; dō is a way. The choice was the argument.

The name took far longer to stick than the school did. He was using it from 1882, but the hall was not called the Kōdōkan for about another two years, and outside his own walls people went on calling it Kano's jiu-jitsu for years afterwards. What settled it was contest: once his students started winning against the established jujutsu schools in the mid-1880s, the name followed the results.

Judo is not a separate art from jujutsu. It is a style of jujutsu — Kano's, selected and reorganised out of the two schools he had trained in, with what he thought unsafe or unsound left out.

And he built it to be contested. Kano took out what could not be done at full speed — the techniques that only work if the other man cooperates, or that maim him if he does not — and what was left could be practised flat out against someone genuinely trying to stop you. That is randori, and it is the whole reason judo hits above its weight. A curriculum drilled only in kata is rehearsed; a judoka has done it for real, at speed, against resistance, several times a week for years. It is why the Kodokan won its reputation in contest, and it is the edge a judo player still carries into a room full of jujitsuka.

That was settled in public, in 1886. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police put the question to a tournament: ten men from the Kōdōkan against ten from the Totsuka branch of the Yōshin-ryū, by far the older and more prestigious school — some three thousand students against Kano's few dozen, and his school was four years old. The Kōdōkan won it. The traditional jujutsu schools never recovered their standing, and judo became the institution.

Our own throwing runs straight back to it: Kano to Mifune, Mifune to Shihan Goody, Goody to Yama Arashi.

The vertical characters beside his portrait on that brochure are the three arts the school led with: 柔道 jūdō, the gentle way; 柔術 jūjutsu, the gentle art; 空手 karate, empty hand.

Kano's teachers, the Eishō-ji founding, the naming and the 1886 police tournament are the documented record. One further point is contested — see research/kano-founding.md. The drawing is from the American Judo College brochure in the papers Jim Hansen sent the board on 2026-09-24; see research/ajc-archive.md.

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Frank Matsuyama

Matsuyama Yawarakai

Hereditary Grand Master of the Matsuyama Yawarakai. He learned yawara from his father. The family art was a samurai art, and yawara was one part of it — not a style of its own but the unarmed portion of a warrior’s whole training, which is why it was taught in only a few Hatamoto family schools and why it sits on our Wednesday schedule still.

He was born in Miyakonojo in 1886, and he came to the art the hard way. At eight a horse reared and fell on him and left him a cripple. Three years later his father — six foot two, and a yawara instructor — began working him with a large stone in place of a dumbbell until he could straighten up out of his jack-knife position and stand. That is when the teaching started. He grew to five foot three and a hundred and thirty pounds.

He came to America to learn English — “I arrived on the West Coast in 1903 and found that there was much more to learn about the American people than just their language” — washed dishes in a big restaurant because it trained his hands on hundreds of different sizes, and five years later went to work as personal servant to Jack London. That is the Rocky Mountain News’s account and almost certainly his own, and it is not corroborated anywhere else: London’s documented Japanese valets were Sekine and Yoshimatsu Nakata, who was with him eight years. What is documented is the correspondence, and it is with Charmian London, Jack’s widow — four letters from Matsuyama among her papers at Utah State University, dated 1922, 1928 and 1942, with one undated. Jack himself died in 1916.

What he taught police was disarming. The yawara answer to a gunman, done right, ends with the gunman looking at the muzzle of his own weapon, and he had done it twice for real — once in a stickup, once on a man threatening his wife during a domestic argument. He was blunt about the cost of it: yawara is “basically humane”, he said, “although the use of a small amount of force can result in fractured bones and other serious injuries.”

He was tested, and he kept the clipping. Five Berkeley detectives, two hundred pounds apiece, once decided between them to try him. A few moments later three of them were stretcher cases, and the newspaper report of it hung on the wall of his Denver gymnasium ever after. His own account of why: “Most of these detectives were skilled in Jiu-Jitsu and Judo but they were unable to defend themselves against Yawara.”

He drew the distinction himself, and it is the clearest thing anyone in this archive has said about what yawara is: “Before I began training American police departments, Yawara had only been shown to the Japanese ruling class. The difference between the two sciences can easily be seen in the average Jiu-Jitsu and Judo match which lasts a half hour while the longest Yawara contest I have ever seen lasted only seven minutes.”

He would not teach it. His relatives were still in Japan and he expected reprisals on them if he gave the art away; in his own words, “that is why in 1927, when I was the last one left of the family, I began teaching Yawara to some of my friends.” In 1931 he became full-time yawara instructor to the Berkeley Police Department, and trained classes in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Wichita. The 1931 date is his own, from the Rocky Mountain News profile. A Japanese history of 1940 has him at Berkeley earlier — chief August Vollmer calling him in during 1929, for about a year, from a gym at 566 Fulton Street in San Francisco. The two need not contradict: a year brought in by Vollmer in 1929, and the full-time post from 1931, read as one engagement and then the job. He trained FBI agents. He invented the yawara stick, a pocket-sized tube that closes inside the fist, because he detested the blackjack and the nightstick, and he patented it — US Patent 2,099,447, “Police Weapon”, 16 November 1937.

He came to Denver because of the war. After Pearl Harbor, with Japanese residents being moved off the coast, Berkeley’s former chief August Vollmer suggested Denver and arranged it through the captain of detectives here. He arrived in March 1942 and opened his school at 1818 Stout Street, where he trained Denver police and more than a thousand auxiliary firemen and policemen.

Shihan Goody became his Ichi Ban — top student. On his passing in 1957 Matsuyama named Goody his successor.

The oldest photograph this school holds is of him: formal crested kimono, a sword with its tip on the floor, standing before a painted mokkō crest with his name and his art brushed on the drape behind him — 松山 on one side, 柔術 on the other. It is captioned “Yawara Jitsu — Teacher Prof. Matsuyama”, and beneath that: this picture was given to Frank Goody Sr. in 1944.

He turned people away. The newspaper says he refused hundreds of applicants “if they did not look like fit subjects to learn Yawara”, and would never train anyone he thought might use the art wrongly. That is worth knowing next to the line on our schedule page that yawara is by invitation only. It always was.

The life is from Edward Lehman II’s profile of him in the Rocky Mountain News, undated but after March 1942, in the American Judo College papers. That his teacher was his father, and that the family art was a samurai art of which yawara was one part, is also from Astone, 2026-09-24. The 1944 photograph and its captions are the dojo’s own — see research/japan-1965.md and research/ajc-archive.md.

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Kyuzo Mifune

Kodokan judo · tenth dan

Among the most technically refined judoka who ever taught, and widely called the god of judo. He stood about five feet tall and weighed under a hundred and fifty pounds, and spent his career being the smallest man in the room.

His reputation was that he could not be thrown. Not that he was hard to throw — that men who were bigger, younger and stronger simply could not put him down, into his seventies. His answer was never to meet force: he turned under it, took the balance first, and let the other man's own commitment finish the job.

He was a judo teacher — Kodokan judo, the whole of his career. Shihan Goody trained under him at the Old Kodokan, which is how he reaches us.

Shihan Goody was photographed with him. The print is below, and it places itself — Goody is wearing a judogi lettered 三船, Mifune. A visitor in a jacket with the master’s name on it is a visitor training in the master’s own room.

Public record. Until September 2026 this entry also said that yama arashi was Mifune's nickname and that the school is named for it. Both halves were wrong, and the correction came from the dojo's head jujitsu instructor: the throw is judo, and the name is Shihan Goody's — it is his books it is signed on. The photograph with Shihan Goody is from the American Judo College papers, 2026-09-24; see research/ajc-archive.md.

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Nagai Sensei

Nagai Ryu Jujitsu · Kodokan judo, eighth dan

Hereditary grand master of Nagai Ryu Jujitsu — the jujitsu this school teaches — and one of the masters Shihan Goody trained under at the Old Kodokan as a young man. Goody held Nagai Ryu at sixth dan.

Two things that are easy to run together, and should not be. He is the hereditary grand master of Nagai Ryu jujitsu, which is the art we practise. Separately he is an eighth dan of the Kodokan in judo — a 1965 caption gives him as “K.D.K., Hachidan, 8th Dan Judo”. A 1986 profile of Goody says the same thing independently, calling him an “eighth-degree black belt in both jujitsu and kodokan judo”.

He and Shihan Goody were photographed together in Japan on Goody's 1965 trip, and again the same year in a group outside Ichi Jima Sensei's dojo in Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Goody was not a boy on that visit; he had been teaching in Denver for twenty years.

His name is written Nagai here and Nagaei on the 1965 caption. Both are the dojo's own spellings and neither is wrong.

Named in our own lineage and in the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society's account of Goody's ranks. The Kodokan grade, the judo, and the 1965 photographs are from the dojo's own prints — see research/japan-1965.md.

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Jim Norland

Sandan · Okinawan kata

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

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Jerry K. Phelps

Judo & Karate, Sho Dan

Jerry K. Phelps, Judo Sho Dan and Karate Sho Dan (Black Belt). Jerry was an instructor for four years at The Highlander Headquarters and taught several classes at the Main School (American Judo College). Jerry has been a loyal and hard-working member. On many occasions he has helped by loaning the American Judo College the wonderful services of his personal secretary, Maxine Berland. In fact this booklet would not even be ready except for Jerry's and Maxine's help.Shihan Frank Goody, 1967

Goody's own words, from the page of the 1967 booklet that lists the black belts he had no room to draw: “I am sorry but, due to the shortness of time, many of our black belts and assistant teachers as well as students are not in this booklet. I would like to mention a few of these.”

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Heinz Schlue

Ju Jitsu, Ni Dan · Kung Fu

Mr. Heinz Schlue, Judo Sho Dan, Ju Jitsu Ni Dan, Karate Sho Dan, and expert at Kung Fu. A great teacher in the Weapon Kata's of Kung Fu and an exceptionally hard-worker, the Black Belt meetings could not function without Heinz.Shihan Frank Goody, 1967

Goody's own words, from the page of the 1967 booklet that lists the black belts he had no room to draw: “I am sorry but, due to the shortness of time, many of our black belts and assistant teachers as well as students are not in this booklet. I would like to mention a few of these.”

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Morihei Ueshiba

Founder of Aikido · Goody’s teacher at the Hombu

O Sensei, the founder of Aikido. This entry rested for a year on one line in a student’s memoir, which listed “Aikido — Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba)” among Shihan Goody’s titles. It does not any more.

The dojo holds photographs of the two men together, and the mounts are captioned in the school’s own hand: “Rev. Frank J. Goody, Sr., D. D. With Master Ueisheba, 10th Dan at the Hombu (Main School) Tokyo, Japan 1956.” Ueisheba is the mount’s spelling, transcribed as typed and not corrected — the man is Morihei Ueshiba, and this page quotes the school’s own paper the way the school wrote it. One of them is not a handshake but a lesson — O Sensei, small and seventy-two, taking the wrist of a man a foot taller in a gi lettered AJC.

And it went further than training. Ueshiba gave him written authorisation to teach aikido in the United States. That certificate hung at the American Judo College reception desk, with these photographs beside it, for as long as the school stood.

One thing Goody used to pass on from him, and it is the sort of remark a teacher only makes to someone he is talking shop with: Ueshiba said that if there was any weakness in aikido, it was that he had never developed kata for it.

And he did not wait. The class below was photographed in Denver in the same year as the photographs above were taken in Tokyo — nine men in hakama, gi lettered AJC. Whatever Goody was given at the Hombu, he was teaching it at home inside twelve months.

The 1956 photographs and their captions are the dojo’s own. The written authorisation, the certificate at the reception desk and the remark about kata are from Tom Miller’s profile in American Karate, September 1986. The older attribution is from the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society. See research/ajc-archive.md.

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Hugh Don Walker

"Don" · Bando Knife Kata · Denver P.D.

He went by Don. His initials are on the ox: in Goody's booklet on The Form of the Ox Kata, the warrior rides an ox with HDW lettered on its rump. That kata is the one named in his entry below — Ni Tanto O Ushi Gata, the two-sword ox form.

He started judo about 1948 at the American Judo College on South Bannock Street, and competed at national level. He joined the Denver Police Department in January 1960 and taught beside Shihan Goody on the department's self-defence classes; he went on to teach other police and sheriff's departments, and the National Guard he served in. In 1965 he was named one of the men who would teach self-defence to the Denver force.

Goody dedicated the Ox booklet to him, as his student and his friend.

Drawn, captioned and self-published by Shihan Frank Goody, 1967. Click a page to open it full size.

Full name and the HDW detail from Sensei Steve, who knew him.

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Ting Yang

Founder of Shin Go Ju Ryu · eighth dan

Born Wang Yongdeng. Ting Yang was the name he took as a martial artist — his father had carried the same name before him, and he was the third generation of instructors in his family. Tian Ren’an is how Ting Yang reads in Mandarin; it is not another rendering of his birth name.

Hereditary master of Ting Yang Ryu Karate and a master of China's Southern Shaolin temple. The American Judo College brochure adds that through marriage he was a descendant of the Forty-Seven Ronin. He was Chinese with some Japanese ancestry, lived in Singapore and in Okinawa, and was said to know hundreds of kata — at least ten for each of the twelve Chinese animals. Of those kata, the note in our file says only: they are not flashy.

He taught Frank Goody in Okinawa. He presented Goody four certificates, two in 1954 signed with his birth name and two in 1956 signed Ting Yang, one of the latter naming Goody Shihan of Shingojuryu karate. All four are written in Japanese. Two of them used to hang on the back of the door between the front office and the little dojo.

On the portrait in the Ox kata booklet he is titled 会長, kaichō — president of the All-Orient Shin Go Ju Ryu Karate Association. The Ox kata itself he first set down in Singapore, in sketches Goody afterwards redrew.

His daughter and her husband died in a car accident in Hawaii. He took their children in, and in the 1960s moved to the People's Republic of China. Nobody in this country knows what became of him afterwards, or of his daughters.

One thing the 1967 booklet does tell us. Every time Goody writes his teacher's name in it — on the cover, the title page, both wall charts — he puts 故 in front of it, the character for the late. So by 1966 Goody believed him dead. That is what his student thought, written down at the time; it is not a record of his death, and it does not tell us where or when.

From the dojo's own Ting Yang research file, which gathers the American Judo College brochure and correspondence between Mike Hamel and James Schupp. The letters are private, so what they establish is retold here rather than reproduced.

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Dr. Maung Gyi

Bando · the knife system in the Ox kata

The Burmese art of bando reached this country through him. He began teaching it in Washington D.C. in the early 1960s and founded the American Bando Association in Athens, Ohio, in 1966; he was a professor at Ohio University, and an official of the United States Karate Association.

Shihan Goody names him in the Ox kata booklet of 1967 as the foremost authority in the country on the bundo system, and as a member of the U.S.K.A.'s technique and research board. The knives that kata is performed with are bando knives, which is why the form Don Walker was known for comes down to us as the Bando Knife Kata.

The knowledge in that book reaches us through him, and that is why he is on this page.

Goody's booklet establishes that he knew of Dr. Gyi and credited him as the authority on the system. It does not say Dr. Gyi taught him. That the line runs through him is this dojo's reading of where the knowledge came from, not something the document states. Goody spells the name Manung Gyi.

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Bob Webster

American Judo College · the Boulder school

He ran the American Karate School of Boulder with Bob Jay through the sixties, and he taught at the American Judo College — Shihan Goody's own school — where he was Sensei Steve's teacher for a time. Teaching at Goody's school means he was one of Goody's own black belts.

He is in the 1968 photograph of the Boulder school, alongside Bob Jay, Ron Small and Al Richardson. Steve thinks he was in the Marines.

We need more on him. What did he teach, and what rank did he hold? Everything above rests on one sentence from Sensei Steve and a caption on a photograph. If you trained with him at AJC or in Boulder, the dojo would like to hear it.

Sensei Steve, September 2026, who was taught by him at the American Judo College. The 1968 photograph is from Ron Small of the Western Mountain Jujutsu Society, who is in it.

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Ron Marx

Karate · before George Donovan

He taught karate at this school before George Donovan, who has the Thursday class now.

He placed against Chuck Norris in tournament competition — Norris was a working tournament fighter through the sixties and into the seventies, before the films, and the Rocky Mountain circuit was part of that world.

Worth more than two lines. Which tournaments, which years, and where did he place? A result against a fighter that well known is the kind of thing this page should be able to state precisely, and right now it cannot.

Astone, 2026-09-19. The spelling is confirmed by the caption on his portrait in the dojo office.

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Maj. W. E. Fairbairn

Defendu · Shanghai Municipal Police

Defendu is an entire fighting system, invented by William Ewart Fairbairn for the Shanghai Municipal Police, which he joined in 1907. What this dojo teaches under that name is a single kata, fourth in our order — a subset of his system's movements, gathered into one form. Drawn from Defendu, not the whole of it.

He made it out of jujutsu and Chinese martial arts bent to the work of policing, after twenty years of street fighting in the course of his duties. He studied under Tsai Ching Tung, who had taught the retainers of the Dowager Empress at the Imperial Palace in Peking.

Then the war took it worldwide. Commissioned by the British secret service in 1940, he taught Defendu to SOE agents in Scotland, then at Camp X in Ontario to British, American, Canadian and Dutch commandos, to Army Rangers and to OSS operatives. He set the system down in All-In Fighting and Get Tough! in 1942, and those manuals were used across British and American training. He finished the war a lieutenant colonel with the American Legion of Merit, and he co-designed the Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife along the way.

He was at the Old Kodokan from 1918 to 1931 — first dan in February 1926, second dan in February 1931, his certificates signed by Jigoro Kano himself.

Which is the interesting part. Shihan Goody came out of the same institution at the same grade — Kodokan nidan — in an era when very few Westerners held it at all. Both were police officers. Both taught close combat to police. Defendu was built for precisely the work Goody did in Denver.

And in 2026 a document turned up that puts them in the same sentence. The school’s own 49th anniversary booklet of 1983 lists him among the well-known instructors Shihan Goody worked with, describing him as “Commisioner of Police at Shanghai” and “the inventor of the famed British Fairbairn knife”. It is the first thing in the archive to connect the two men at all.

And it was not just a name on a list. Two pages further into that same booklet, under the heading Jujutsu, the school photographed two of Goody’s first-degree black belts demonstrating what it captioned “a Fairbairn Jujutsu form”. So in 1983 this school was teaching material under his name and putting it in its own anniversary book. That is a long way from nothing, and it is the closest the archive has come to answering how his system reached this mat. The photograph itself is a kata and is not published.

How much weight will that booklet carry? It does two things — it lists him among instructors Goody worked with, and it photographs a form taught under his name. The second is the harder of the two to explain away. It is the school’s own, which is the best reason to take it seriously — and it is loose about outsiders, which is the reason not to lean on it. On the same two pages it makes Fairbairn a “body guard of the Emperor of Japan”, which is in no account of his life; it spells Geesink “Gesink”, Kyokushin “Kyoshinkai” and Hatsumi “Hotsumi”. So: the school says they worked together, and this page says the school says so. It still does not say when, where, or who carried Defendu into our fourth kata. Fairbairn’s Kodokan years close in 1931 and Shihan Goody’s birth year is still unknown, so the overlap question is open too. The likeliest route remains the war, when Fairbairn taught Defendu to Allied forces and printed it in manuals that went everywhere Allied troops did. If anyone knows how his system reached this school, the dojo would like to hear it.

Sensei Steve named him among Shihan Goody’s teachers, 2026-09-22, which is what sent us looking. The 1983 booklet listing is from the American Judo College papers, 2026-09-24. Fairbairn’s own history is public record and easily checked; the connection to this dojo rests on those two. See research/fairbairn.md and research/ajc-archive.md.