Mas
Oyama
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"One Strike, Certain Death."
Mas Oyama is a martial arts master who became
famous for killing bulls by punching them in the face.
Now, I have previously argued that the
senseless killing of lesser species of animals in and of itself doesn't
necessarily automatically qualify you a badass, but this is some
seriously next-level shit. Any time you go up against a horned, clawed,
or otherwise bigger, badder, and more-naturally equipped to kick your
ass killing machine and pummel it retarded in hand-to-hand combat, it's
inevitable that some degree of badass credibility is going to come your
way. This is especially the case when you're a guy who can karate chop
horns off of bulls and punch them in the face with your bare hands until
they die from it.
Mas Oyama, the founder of the Kyokushinaki
style of full-contact, kick-you-in-the-scrote karate, started his
personal quest to become a one-man human abattoir while growing up in
Korea in the 1930s. Learning whatever he could from the Chinese workers
on his sister's farm, Mas developed many bizarre techniques for becoming
more awesome. For instance, his first teacher told him to plant a seed,
and then jump over it 100 times a day every day. By the time the seed
sprouted and grew into a relatively-large tree, Mas had some pretty
unbelievably mad leaping skills.
When Japan invaded mainland China in the early
stages of what we now know as World War II, Mas Oyama went back to
mainland Japan (his homeland, Korea, was under Imperial control at this
time) and began training to be a fighter pilot. When he wasn't flying
it into the closest approximation the Imperial Aviation School had to
the danger zone, Oyama started training in martial arts with the guy who
founded Shotokan Karate. Shotokan is, among other things, the style of
martial art used by Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter II, so
studying from the dude who invented the Hadouken is kind of one
of the most awesomest things I've ever heard. Oyama never saw combat in
the Pacific War, but he did dedicate his life to studying the art of
kicking ass, and by the time he was twenty he was already a
fourth-degree black belt. Bummed that me missed out on all the sweet
WWII action, and more than a little pissed about American pilots blowing
up his classmates, Mas Oyama spent the first few post-war years getting
arrested for beating the shit out of U.S. military occupation forces in
Japan.
Figuring that punching soldiers in the face
without warning or provocation, while kind of hardcore, wasn't really
the best way to hone his fighting prowess, Mas Oyama eventually decided
on taking on more drastic measures to improve his physical
conditioning. Not long after meeting the guy who wrote the famous
biography on super-mega-badass samurai Miyamoto Musashi, Mas Oyama
decided to climb the same mountain where Musashi compiled The Book of
Five Rings and train himself alone in the wilderness until he was
such a ridiculous face-crusher that peoples' heads imploded every time
he simply walked into a room. For eighteen months he punched trees, ran
through the wilderness, lived off the land in a homemade shack,
meditated while kneeling under freezing-cold waterfalls, and broke rocks
with his fists. In 1947 he came down the mountain to win the Japanese
National Martial Arts Championship, and then promptly went right back up
the mountain for another eighteen months.
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Oyama beating the shit out of a
tree.
Confident that he was the awesomest dude to
ever cause pain to an inanimate object with his forehead, Oyama came
down the mountain and, in 1953, founded a dojo to train n00bs in how to
stop sucking ass and being a bunch of pathetic wussbags. He implemented
a tough, grueling training program of full-contact martial arts, and
pretty much everyone who came through his school found themselves
injured at some point or another during their training. It's kind of
hard to get people to want to pay you money so that you can pummel them
senseless, though, so Mas Oyama went on the road with a series of
promotions across Japan to drum up support for his program.
Nowadays, martial arts school promotions
involve a lot of board-kicking and Jock Jams soundtracks, but Mas
Oyama's style of publicizing his art was just as borderline-psychotic as
he was. This guy would fight bulls with his bare hands. A lot. In
fifty-two separate battles with full-sized, pissed-off steers, this guy
killed three outright with one punch – a feat that earned him the
completely-awesome nickname "The Godhand", by the way – and defeated 49
more by either wrestling them to the turf or chopping off their horns
with a well-placed iron-plated judo chop. WTF, dudes.
Mas Oyama also enjoyed testing himself in
Kumite, which is the Japanese word for getting jumped by a hundred
dudes at once and beating them all into bloody stumps. Over the course
of three days, Oyama fought 300 sparring matches, one after the other,
and defeated all comers. He was so tough that even on the third day of
nearly non-stop fighting people who were blocking his punches were
ending up with broken arms. When it was all over, Oyama thought the
kumite was so awesome that he made a 100-man battle the requirement
for getting your fourth-degree black belt in Kyokushinaki Karate. To
this day, you need to fight a hundred full-contact matches in a row, win
over 50% of them, and not be knocked down for more than five seconds at
any time in the trial. This is insanity.
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Mas Oyama, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer in
1994 at the age of 70, but his legacy continues to live on. His famous
all-world karate tournaments, where masters of all styles could come
together and fight each other, serve as the basis for the plot of nearly
every fighting game ever, he was the main character in a couple of
utterly-terrible Sonny Chiba movies called Champion of Death and
Karate Bear Fighter Today his school now boasts over 10 million
enrolled members across 120 countries and is widely belived to be one of
the most hardcore fighting styles capable of human comprehension. If I
saw a guy kill a bull with his fists, I'd probably want to learn his
secrets as well.
"It is possible for even the smallest of accolades of
achievement to be truly worthwhile without tears and toil?"