Daughter Reina is the safest happy girl in Atlantic City between friends Chuck Zito (see him on “Entourage” with Dennis Hopper?) and Dan Severn (see him win the UFC TV cagefight championship?), our neighbors on the Action Martial Arts Hall of Fame celebrity table aisle

A business friend recently asked how my family was doing, and I told him we had a reunion with both our east coast daughters at the Action Martial Arts convention in Atlantic City.

He was surprised. “Martial arts convention?! Over 1,000 cage fighters, fung-fu wizards, kendo swordsmen, MMA pounders, jujutsu wrestlers, karate champs, movie star action heroes, and well, yes, some ninja too, all in one spot? I can imagine all those tough guys with huge champion egos must have made for the most dangerous place to be on the east coast that weekend.”

Interesting how many of my non-martial friends have this belief about the connection between toughness and fighting prowess and ego.

From my perspective, I find just the opposite to be true. Get a bunch of hardcore total commitment to excellence fighting champions together and you’ve got one of the best parties imaginable. That’s been my experience.

If you know you are a winner because you have proven yourself for years, being tough in everyone’s eyes is no longer the point of life. You are looking for friends and allies with whom to celebrate further advancement and success.

On the other hand, if you seriously doubt your ability to command the space when a possible threat confronts you, you will constantly be posing as an angry tough guy in hopes of bluffing others into balking at a face-off. I’ve known some sad characters like that.

Daughter Marissa with our friend Michael Jai White (see him in “Batman; the Dark Knight”?) our other neighbor on the Action Martial Arts Hall of Fame celebrity table aisle

Event sponsor Alan Goldberg, himself a Wing Chun Kung-fu master teacher, told me this event and banquet brought in record-breaking numbers of martial artists, even in the midsts of the economic hardships so many face in America today. Positive martial artists want to spend time around others who inspire them and make them proud of their commitment to the warrior arts.

Strong aspirations seeking out strong inspirations. How noble is that spirit!

One associate of mine (cannot honestly call him a “friend”) thought our dojo holiday classes were “unnecessarily frivolous”. The ninja martial art is a serious thing, he scolded. I chided back that we were indeed so very serious and our techniques so scaldingly deadly that we did not have to go around acting serious and deadly; only those who doubted their authenticity needed to maintain a grim and righteous look.

A friend once asked me in light of all my work with Tibetan Buddhist monks and Japanese yamabushi priests if I was offended by receiving Christmas cards.

Astonished, I replied, “No! Not at all!”

My family loves the Christmas celebration. We have two Christmas trees in two different living rooms in our house, both with haloed angles at the top. Rumiko loves to have pine boughs and red satin ribbons everywhere. When the girls were tiny, we used to go to a living Bethlehem manger display, complete with live donkeys, wisepersons, and baby Jesus. We get into the season.

In elementary school, my daughters brought home year-end dreidels that their Jewish friends had given them.

And early December is a Japanese celebration of Buddha enlightenment day. We’ve got that in there too.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Joy, Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu, Tashi Delek, Solstice Brightness.

I never turn down an opportunity to join a celebration of anyone’s approach to brightness, warmth, family, and spiritual advancement.

Greetings of the appropriate season to you!

Here is my red suit photo. My teacher chose a red tux for his 60th in Japan to make a statement unique to the needs of the Japanese martial arts world of the early 1990s – more creativity, freshness, aliveness, and startling thinking.

At my 60th birthday party thrown by the students at the Dayton Quest Center dojo right before our 29th annual Festival, I chose a red gi and battle vest to show what I think we in late 2000s America need more of in our martial arts – more nobility, dignity, heroic presence, and pledge to ancient timeless ideals.

(That is my old “1980s barn dojo days” friend Bud Malmstrom next to me there with my family and friends; he drove in from Atlanta to celebrate our 32 years of friendship on our personal paths of warrior service.)

Here is a birthday greeting note from my teacher Masaaki Hatsumi:

Hayes-san, I hear this year is your Kanreki birthday.

A Kabuku actor considers 60 years old as the beginning for mastery of their art.
Zeami, famous Noh actor, says that you will return to the beginning at age 80.

Becoming old is wonderful.
You may lose your eyesight but your eyes will see the truth and authenticity.
I wish you health and long life.

A couple is like having eyes together.
Rumiko-san, enjoy the journey with Hayes-san, together.

Congratulation on your Kanreki birthday.

Heisei 21st Year September 9th.

Masaaki Hatsumi

Have you seen my niece Sabrina on the Tuesday night Fox network Hell’s Kitchen television reality competition hosted by London super chef Gordon Ramsey?

Three episodes into the intensely high-pressure series, and Sabrina is holding her own. None of us – not even close family members like this loving uncle who blessed her vows in wedding nephew Kyle – know how she will place by the end of the shows.

I am enjoying (OK, “intrigued by” is a more appropriate word than “enjoying”) the responses and reactions of the young contestants in this pitched competition. Winner gets a quarter-million dollar stint as manager at a super restaurant near the Winter Olympics, not to mention priceless career-building publicity around the globe, along with protege status on the Gordon Ramsey team. That’s a lot to shoot for and one winner takes all.

Watch the show and watch the fierce force directed at the flaws of the contestants by the king of the cookery. Kitchen of Hell indeed. I was the sole non-Japanese training in the home dojo of the grandmaster of the ninja, and I was the ninja forced upon the United States Department of State Dignitary Security Service protection team at the insistence of the Dalai Lama’s chief of staff, and my treatment by those few who resented my joining their crew from out of left field was nowhere near as searing and violent as the atmosphere in which my chef niece now finds herself preparing dinner.

Watch the show and see how the contestants respond to their treatment based on their performance. Did contestants know how brutal the competition would be? Did they know how roughly spoken their mentor would be? Did they know how flighty, unreliable, and abjectly unbalanced some of their competitor co-chefs would be? Since the show is now in season 6, one would have to surmise “Yes” to all those questions.

Watch for signs of those chef competitors who “get it” as to what chef Gordon Ramsey is up to with his fierce high standards and scathing rebukes to those who fail to operate effectively and efficiently. Lots of beeeep overlays blotting out the way-overused “f—-” describing each moment of anguish. Pans of slightly imperfect food, potential life-sustaining nutrition to the starving all over the world, flipped disdainfully into the trash bin. Roaring insults hurled at the inept and confused as they struggle to cover up or make up for time-killing team-killing blunders.

In the private off-camera observations of one contestant, it is clear that she does indeed get it. It’s a show. Shows thrive on increasing audiences. Audiences increase in response to what emotionally engages people. Nothing engages like controversy. Super chef roaring at nervous shrimp peelers or monster mauler flipping middle finger to a UFC audience from a cage, it makes no difference. The audience is enraged. The audience is engaged.

And you know for the real performer pros, there is nothing personal about it at all. It’s their job.

Some important lessons in there for anyone deep enough to presume to claim to understand the nin of ninja.

Watching Hell’s Kitchen you can learn a lot about the secrets for keeping your cool in the midsts of the flames.

Rumiko and Stephen K. Hayes with daughter Marissa and her Grandmother Carolyn on graduation day in front of Marissa’s senior project – the creation of a “Rumi” brand of women’s martial arts wear based in style, comfort, and inspiration

Let’s explore dreams and determination and the ninja will to win.

My daughter Marissa just graduated from a 5 year university program with a degree in Fashion Product Development. She has been heading towards this since she was a pre-schooler, so determined on a career using fashion as a means of increasing the impact of beauty, craftsmanship, self expression, and dignity in daily life. Marissa has always been focused on fashion, especially writing about it, even as she worked for years in the family dojo as a teen. As university student, she interned for New York City firms like Seventeen Magazine, Victoria’s Secret, Coach, Liz Claiborne and Stylesight. These internships were not the norm for her university program. She talked busy New York fashion professionals into listening to her and then allowing her to create internships with them where no such internships existed. She wanted that. It did not exist. So she made it happen.

She reminds me of me.

After university, I landed in Japan with an enormous optimism and absolutely no plan. I just knew that if the ninja tradition still existed in Japan, I had to be a part of that. All through my college days 40 years before my daughter Marissa got to her campus, I was doing my best to prepare. I studied the Japanese language. I studied the martial arts. I traveled internationally. I learned to ask for way too much as though it were requesting a small favor. I got used to people fearing for me in my one-pointed maniacal fixation on finding and restoring the authentic Japanese ninja warrior tradition in the Western world. I had no plan, but I went to Japan. I was counting on raw magic happening, and in many situations in Japan I really needed every bit of magic that I could recognize and grasp.

Our To-Shin Do training provides the power to move through life with determination and skill, accomplishing what we need while making the world a better place as a result of our success. I learned this truth by way of taking a big gamble and moving to Japan without knowing anyone there and having not the slightest clue as to whether the ninja arts I sought were even real. On the other hand, my daughters Marissa and Reina and all those growing up in the ninja martial arts since the early 1980s learned this truth by way of reading the books, attending classes in the dojo, and watching their seniors’ demonstrate warrior authenticity in daily life.

I had to hope. Everyone else gets to know.

My best advice to young friends and students as they set out on any great life adventure is to plan thoroughly… and leave room for magic. Have a clearly defined vision of your goal… and allow for the possibility that you may end up with something even better than your original goal. Talk to everyone you know who could help you… and be ready for some unimagined fortuitous connection with just the right person. Never never stop talking to potential allies about your dream and how you plan on putting your gift to work in the world. That’s what I did, and my reward now is a collection of countless stories of how people around the world improved their lives – sometimes in small ways and sometimes revolutionarily – as a result of what I was determined to seek and then share.

What’s your dream? Have you tried asking for advice and guidance from others in the world-wide To-Shin community? It has worked for many before you in furthering noble dreams.

So… Anybody out there know the editor of Vogue magazine well enough to tell her about this absolute stormer named Marissa who would be the best thing ever to hit the hallways of that office?