Igorot world karate champ toasts promotion with charity work

By Ramon Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY -- Former world karate champion Julian Chees returned to Germany this week-end after marking his promotion to 5th dan blackbelt by coming home to pay tribute to his late mother, Camfili, and his former teachers and, as usual, reach out to the sick.

Here for a few days, the 49-year old Igorot martial artist brought in P105,000 that he and his martial arts students raised for indigent patients here and in his native village of Maligcong , Bontoc, Mt. Province

“Karate ne sente nashi (Karate has no offense),” Edgar Kapawen Sr., Chees’ white-to-brown belt instructor, observed when he learned his former student was again out there visiting the sick among the poor. .

Among the recipients were two cancer patients, a hospitalized victim of the recent typhoon landslide at Kias barangay and two toddlers their mother could not breast-feed because of her own anti-depressant medication He also set aside an amount to help a family get back to its bearings losing three kids in another landslide at Camp 8 barangay.

One of the first things he did after his arrival here was to see Rosana Divino, a 17-year old scoliosis patient who needed P17,000 for a body brace to prevent her spinal deformity from progressing.

“The fund came from what we pooled with my students in southern German through the Shoshin Kinderhelfe foundation that we put up together,” he said. “I grew up poor and I feel what it means.”

Holder of three world titles, including the kata crown in the 1996 World Shotokan Championships, Chees took his first dan blackbelt from Shihan Kunio Sasaki, the permanent representative of the Japan Karate Association to the Philippines.

After transferring to Germany as a civilian employee in a U.S. Army camp, Chees began topping tournaments until he caught the attention of the German national squad. The team drafted him for the distinction of being the first non-German by birth to joint the pool.

His diminutive figure prompted his focus on the kata event that he would consistently rule after months of training and self-training. He topped the Dutch International Open three times and the British International three times.

“Just go back to the basics,” he told lower belts who asked him how he trains when Kapawen handed him his own uniform and frayed blackbelt and ordered him to take over his class at the YMCA of Baguio gym.

“In order to move up, you have to go down,” Kapawen, who remains at fourth dan, added.
For the 1996 world championships in Saarbrucken , Chees went down to perfecting the basic kata forms of the shotokan (knife-hand) school, often by his lonesome deep in forest in deep winter.

Retiring from the German team same year, he established the Shoshin (Beginer’s Mind) School of martial arts. Since then, he has been consistently a member of the elite team of masters teaching thousands of students in the grueling annual Gasshuku mass training the karate.

A day after the training ended, he took up his promotional exams and passed, after nine years of wearing his fourth dan belt.

“I owe what I am to Sensei (Teacher) Kapawen and Shihan ( Master Sasaki),” he said.