Teach the teacher
The story of how Hiromi brought her T’ai Chi to Charlottesville is both typical and amazing. She met her husband, Martin Johnson, when he was teaching in Japan. Martin’s family lived in Madison County and he was interested in furthering his education. Hiromi had wanted to live abroad, so they decided to move to Charlottesville. They arrived in 1998 and Martin enrolled at the Curry School of Education.
Hiromi immediately began looking for a T’ai Chi teacher but said she couldn’t find anyone who taught the same form she had learned, which is, I think, her very polite way of saying there wasn’t really anyone qualified to be her teacher. Two years after she moved to town, she saw a sign for a World T’ai Chi Day demonstration organized by Little Mountain T’ai Chi Association, a nonprofit of loosely organized practitioners led by Susan Christmas. After the demonstration, the event organizers asked if anyone in the crowd knew any other forms of T’ai Chi they could demonstrate. Like many Japanese, Hiromi-san does not like to put herself forward, but she demonstrated a part of the long form and she immediately had a dozen or so people who wanted her to teach them.
She had no experience as an instructor of the art, except for her work as an assistant to Master Ueda. She had never taught American students, either.
“I made lots of mistakes, first three months maybe. I wanted to carry the tradition but it didn’t work,” Hiromi said. “Because people want immediate gratification and they want to have constant explanation in words and my English is not so good. That’s what people needed here, so I wrote down everything. How can I explain it? And I recorded it for myself and I practiced. So I had key phrases I could repeat.”
Master Hiromi Johnson moved to Charlottesville from Tokyo with her husband Martin in 1998. Over the past decade she has built a committed following of students employing a teaching style that melds strict discipline and a commitment to tradition with a compassionate, individualized approach to instruction. Photo: John Robinson
She credits Christmas with helping her understand how to teach Western students.
“She taught me a lot about how to teach. I owe her a lot. She is the person who connected me to the T’ai Chi community in Charlottesville.”
When you first meet Hiromi, she appears to be a small person. This is partly her manner, which is polite and demure in social interactions that require formality in any way. She speaks in a soft voice, moves very carefully, and considers her words. My first impressions of her were of both lightness and seriousness.
Kath Weston, an anthropology professor at UVA, was inducted as an indoor student at Hiromi T’ai Chi during Grandmaster Wang’s visit last weekend. To be invited is to be honored. To accept is to take on a share of the responsibility to pass the Cheng-Ming form on, which means learning to be a teacher. Learning the whys of things as well as the hows.
Weston, who moved to Charlottesville in 2008, first studied T’ai Chi in Phoenix at a local YMCA because she felt the long hours at work were hurting her health. She pursued the discipline in Boston with Bow Sim Mark, a noted practitioner of performance based T’ai Chi sword forms.
“This is not about stand in line and hope that you can get in. Or just keep at it until the teacher says you’ve proved you’re interested,” Weston said. “In America, people who are interested in all forms of exercise disciplines, the turnover and dropout rate is very high. So it would be hard to replicate things you see in some parts of Asia here.”
John McCullough, a website developer, is also an indoor student of Hiromi’s. A long time practitioner of the Korean martial art taekwondo, he took up T’ai Chi in Richmond in 1995.
“I noticed quickly that my taekwondo started to improve significantly at a much faster rate than it had been improving just practicing,” McCullough said. “That was intriguing, because T’ai Chi looks so innocuous and slow and taekwondo is a much more active and aggressive martial art.”
Injuries played a part in his decision to switch over to T’ai Chi as he moved around the country pursuing stage acting gigs. After moving to Charlottesville in 2008, he found Hiromi after driving past the studio.
He said Hiromi’s balance between discipline and compassion set her apart as a teacher.
“You want a teacher who is devoted to the tradition because you want to make sure you’re being taught the correct thing,” McCullough explained. “But you also want a teacher who is personable and sweet-natured and is a good communicator, because every person is different. A teacher who cannot accommodate that is going to be at best an unsatisfying teacher and at worst a destructive teacher.”
Hiromi estimates that 80 percent of her students come to T’ai Chi because they are trying to recover from a physical injury of some type. Some have sampled many martial arts, others none at all. Over the past 10 years, Hiromi’s practice has occupied no less than 15 spaces. She hopes to stay where she is. The studio is a block from City Hall, below street level in a softly lit, spacious studio with a floating bamboo floor and a large mirrored wall.
I spent four hours there last week during Grandmaster Wang’s T’ai Chi workshop, in which he demonstrated the 100 steps of the form in stages, fielding questions about the applications of movements, the specifics of positioning. The group was about evenly split between men and women, nearly everyone older than 40.
Watching Hiromi do T’ai Chi changes your sense of her size. She has strong legs, a low base, an elegant and solid posture. Wrong to think of her as small; compact and economical is more accurate.
Megan Sharp, another of Hiromi’s indoor students, came to T’ai Chi in 1999 after enduring a chronic neck pain from a childhood whiplash injury that, accentuated by stress, had worsened to the point that she had trouble getting out of bed. Like Weston, she started in Boston, learning a Wu style of T’ai Chi. A music director at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Sharp was one of five of Hiromi’s students who competed in T’ai Chi category alongside over 1,000 other students from Taiwan, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the U.S., and elsewhere in the International Cheng-Ming Martial Arts Competition, which is held every four years.
Sharp found Hiromi through a friend who had seen her demonstrating a Japanese tea ceremony. She said Hiromi’s compassion helped her make what was a painful transition from one form to another, one community to another.
“It was really hard to go from knowing a 99-step form to knowing nothing,” Sharp said. “It was a challenging process emotionally. I missed my friends. I missed the form that I had done. Hiromi is just a wonderfully patient and caring teacher and that helped me through the transition.”
Compassion, Hiromi would teach you, is part of the system. She teaches severely physically and mentally disabled children and returning veterans with traumatic brain injuries at no cost. She expects her students to give back, because it was expected of her. The choice to become an indoor student isn’t taken lightly.
“You make a real commitment to this particular lineage and this particular teacher,” Weston said. “That’s a big decision because you’re moving away from the American style approach where it’s all a buffet out there.”
The chance to learn a martial art as specific as Cheng-Ming is exactly what attracted McCullough.
Grandmaster Wang Fu-Iai jots down notes as he responds to questions about the Cheng Ming system, which he helped to create. Photo: John Robinson
“It’s not something like the more you learn the closer you’re getting to the end. The system continually opens up in levels of subtlety and delight,” he said. “There really is always more to learn. I think a big part of that is because it’s so intimately connected to Taiwan and the tradition from Taiwan. It’s very rare to find a martial art form developed in the United States that’s going to have the connection to those subtle levels.”
“There is this thing. Our goal is to keep the lineage straight. If I don’t practice enough, I start to change the form,” Hiromi told me. “Each posture works with certain meridians in the body. If I change the stance or the angle slightly then it’s not really connecting internally any more and we are not getting the health benefit. That’s why it’s very important to keep the lineage of the teaching straight.”
