BENCHWARMER

Igorot karateka captures second world title
Ramon S. Dacawi

The “Kleine Philippino”(small Filipino). That’s how his world tournament rivals and his karate students in Germany call Julian Chees, the diminutive shotokan martial arts master from Maligcong, Bontoc,Mt. Province .

The qualifier “the” has been stressed again as part of the fond sobriquet. Chees, at 47, captured the individual kata (formal exercise) in the seniors’ division of the World Championships of the World Karate Confederation on June 22-24 in Bergamo,Italy .

It was his second world title, coming 14 years after he topped the open event in the 1993 World Shotokan Championships in Saarbrucken , Germany as member of the German national team.
Chees entered the point-system championship with his execution of empi (flying swallow) and then bagged the event with his flawless performance of gojushihosho (54 steps), one of the longest and most demanding of the advanced katas.

The victory was no less prestigious than his first, given the quality of the katas performed and the entry of the masters in the tournament that drew 380 players from 32 federations and 26 countries.

Sensei Franjo Horn of Slovenia also executed the same kata for second, while sensei Angelo La Paglia of host Italy finished third with his gankaku (crane on a rock). His win triggered immediate celebration among students of the 50 schools he supervises in Germany as head of Soshin (The Beginner’s Mind), the school he founded under the traditional shotokan (knife-hand) style developed by Shihan (Master) Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of modern karate.

“Getting to 50 is not always easy but I am always trying to look at everything through soshin,
the eye and mind of a beginner, fresh with wonder,” Chees said. That’s how he also feels about an error in a coverage news item on his winning in Bergamo . The item mistakenly identified him as from Wurzburg , instead of his adopted city of Kleinrinderfeld , some 18kilometers away.

Kleinrinderfeld, led by its mayor, held a banquet in his honor after he arrived home from his triumph in the 1993 world championships. The city presented to him its highest medal of honor, the third to receive the award, after two veteran soldiers.

The fourth dan blackbelt came home to Baguio and Maligcong two weeks before the tournament, to prime up and taper off to his fighting form at the YMCA gym, under fourth dan Edgar Kapawen, his former teacher, and head of the Northern Luzon Headquarters of the Japan Karate Association.

Aside from two world titles, Chees was fourth in the 997 World Championships in Las Vegas and ruled the kata event in various international meets in Europe . Since he won in Saarsbrucken, no other member of the German national team ever topped the kata event in world championships.

This prompted Master Hideo Ochi, eighth dan chief of JKA Germany, to line him up for the Bergamo competitions. The trust paid off, as it did in 1993 when he chose unsu (cloud hands or parting of the clouds) for his winning kata. Unsu is as exacting as gojushiho, requiring advanced skills that it is seldom performed by practitioners below third or fourth degreeblackbelts.

Chees is being tapped for a series of kata clinics in various parts of Europe . Last April, he paid tribute to his former teacher, Shihan Kunio Sasaki, the JKA’s permanent representative to the Philippines , by inviting him to Germany to do a month-long series of seminars.

In-between teaching, Chees manages with his students the Soshin Foundation, a humanitarian group that annually reaches out to medical patients in the Cordillera. The “kleine Philippino” has the distinction of being the only non-German by birth to be in the German national karate team.