OHANA MARTIAL ARTS ASSOCIATION
The Kenpo Journal
History of the Kenpo Journal
When I began my Kenpo journey in 1972, the Accumulative Journal, aka “Big Red” was the ultimate resource for the study of Ed Parker’s Kenpo.
Just like it sounds, Big Red was a big red binder that contained all the materials available at that time. Even though it contained everything, you didn’t get it all at once. As a white belt you got all the pages you needed to study for your yellow belt. At yellow you got everything you needed for orange, and so on.
Like most students I didn’t pay much attention to the book. After all, I had my teacher, Rich Callahan, and he’d teach me everything I needed to know, so why bother trying to read all those difficult to understand techniques, sets, and forms.
That worked well for about four years, then, in 1976, I moved back to Alaska, and I no longer had Mr. Callahan to teach me everything I needed to know.
This is when I started reading and reading the Accumulative Journal. It had become especially important to me in the late seventies, as that was when I first started studying directly with Mr. Parker. It was only a few times a year, as I was still living in Alaska, but I wanted to do the material exactly as Mr. Parker had written it, when I performed it in front of him.
In 1984, I again relocated to California and bought a school in the city of Ventura. I continued to rely on the Accumulative Journal, but was becoming more and more frustrated with how difficult it was to read and even more frustrated with how difficult it was to find specific information in it.
In 1990, the year Mr. Parker passed away, the Apple Macintosh Classic computer was born. Little did we know how that eight-inch screen would change the world we live in.
It was a year or two after Mr. Parker's passing that I reached out to the Parker family to see if I could purchase current manuals, but I never heard back from them. I reached out several times to no avail. That’s when I decided to type all the techniques into my computer. That way, I wouldn’t have to rely on anyone and could print my own materials as needed.
During this process, I realized how many typos were in the original text. Now, my goal was to not only type the material but also fix some typos and maybe even rewrite some of the text to make it easier to read. At the time, I worked diligently to not change a single technique. All I wanted to do was fix the most obvious mistakes, like where it said to grab your opponent with your left hand and then continue holding on to him with your right hand.
Eventually, I retyped all the techniques and could print them at will. Only something else was emerging from the back of my mind. Apple had introduced FileMaker Pro, a relational database program, and I had my very own bootlegged copy.
Then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a computer in the school, and instead of flipping back and forth through the pages of the Accumulative Journal, we could click ourselves around. I set to work, and after a good amount of work, I had the beginnings of the Kenpo Journal . . . but with no other information other than techniques in my database, it was not yet called the Kenpo Journal; instead, Version 1 was called Techniques.
In time, I added the forms, sets, and basics and thought it worthy of a better name, so I called it the Kenpo Journal. As the years went on, I added terminology and daily insights and even went through a version that had photos of Mr. Parker and lots of memorabilia. I eventually moved away from including images in the journal because it was growing by the gigabyte.
In the beginning, I tried to duplicate Ed Parker's work as accurately as possible. Even when I rewrote every technique and form, changing thousands of words, I kept the material as Ed Parker-like as possible.
That slowly started to change in 2011. Ed Parker Jr. and I were having a conversation at his home. During this conversation, he told me he had dedicated fifty years to his father’s legacy. At that time, Edmund was fifty years old, which meant he had dedicated his entire life to his father’s work. He told me he had done all he could for his dad, and from here forward, he was going to establish his own path and his own legacy. He suggested I do the same thing. He said, Rich, I know you have nothing but love and respect for my dad, but my dad is dead. It’s time you make his art your own. I left that meeting with a lot to think about. Of course, I had my ideas, but I also wanted to carry Ed Parker’s torch as far and wide as possible. Ultimately, I thought about what Edmund said about giving his dad fifty years of his life and did a little math.
I started Kenpo in 1972, it was now 2011. In a mere eleven years, I, too, will have given Ed Parker’s art fifty years of my life. It was then that I developed a new section in the Kenpo Journal, a section that was only seen and accessible to me. There were now two buttons on the top of each page. One said EPK, and the other RHK. When I thought a technique needed a little work to fit my personal needs, I’d click on RHK and go to work.
I kept offering the journal I’d refined to that point to my students but kept the most modified copy to myself. In 2022 I reached my fifty years in the art and when I did, I archived the techniques of Ed Parker and kept working on my own. Now, I’m sure if most people read my version of American Kenpo they’d see little difference between me and Ed Parker. I never thought he was wrong in what he did, so I’ve never tried to change something just for the sake of change. On the other hand, if a very astute practitioner of the art were to read my material, they would see many little things that I'm doing a bit differently.
Of all my work in the Kenpo Journal, one section is my favorite. This is the Q & A with Ed Parker. I’ve always enjoyed reading articles by and about Mr. Parker. Yet, like so many others, it didn’t occur to me to buy all the magazines he was featured in while he was alive. Instead, I waited just long enough to purchase everything I could get my hands on at skyrocketing prices. Fortunately, eBay had the goods and I wanted them. Some magazines I got for six dollars and others at forty, but I got them all. I bought every magazine possible that contained the words “Ed Parker.”
Aside from magazines, I also found some good stuff in newspapers, especially Mr. Parker’s hometown newspaper, the Star. It had some of the best stories because that paper seemed to love its hometown hero. I didn’t stop there, though. I subscribed to as many newspaper archives as could tease me with the words Ed Parker. Not every Ed Parker was my Ed Parker, but little by little, I accumulated a plethora of articles featuring the one and only.
From there I typed every article into my database and started laying out the Q & A with Ed Parker section of the Kenpo Journal. For a little additional insight, you can trust that everything quoted by Ed Parker is an actual quote. The questions, on the other hand, are not. As you can imagine, not every article on Mr. Parker is question-and-answer-based. Many are articles in which Mr. Parker volunteered the information without being asked or elaborating on a topic he was asked about. Other articles are written by Mr. Parker himself. In this format, he obviously didn’t ask himself questions.
If Mr. Parker wasn’t answering a direct question, I made a question to fit his statements. For example, if Mr. Parker were to say something like, what I like about Professor Chow was . . ., I would ask the imaginary question, what did you like about Professor Chow? This enabled me to develop an interactive way of presenting Mr. Parker's statements, conversations, and quotes.
For several years, I made the Kenpo Journal available for purchase. This was until the Parker family sent an open letter requesting everyone to stop using anything associated with Ed Parker. The family had reorganized the IKKA, and only members of their association were allowed to say that they teach Ed Parker’s Kenpo. I enquired about membership, but after reading their membership requirements, I found that if you were a member of the IKKA, you were disallowed from belonging to any other Kenpo association. This meant I’d have to disband my own Ohana Kenpo Karate Association. Something I was unwilling to do.
I did keep the Kenpo Journal available to my students and a few select friends, all at no charge, but I never again sold a single copy. I’ve been asked to sell it under the table, but that was not and would never be an option.
So why now? Why am I offering the Kenpo Journal to the Kenpo Community free of charge and unlocked? By unlocked, I mean that until now, I was the only one who could change a word of text or a single letter. Not only that, but the previous versions all expired after one year. Not anymore; this latest version is free of charge, unlocked, and will never expire. This means owners can create their own Kenpo method within the database and not worry about the program ever expiring.
Along with this new format comes a new name. It's no longer called The Kenpo Journal, which was meant to contain the work and ideas of Ed Parker. It's now called My Kenpo Journal because it's designed to include the work and ideas of the individual using it.
People have been individualizing the art of American Kenpo for years; that’s nothing new. All I’m doing is offering a select number of people my Kenpo Journal database so they can access their work more efficiently. To be clear, I’m not offering everyone this open version of the Kenpo Journal. I’m offering it to some who I personally know to be knowledgeable practitioners of the art. I don’t know everyone, so I expect a few feathers to be ruffled when I don’t give it out freely. So goes life. After all, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
Rich Hale