Early Life
Yaguchi was born on November 14, 1932, in Kure, a suburb of Hiroshima, Japan, on November 14, 1932 into a farming family. The youngest of five children, he had a carefree youth but was aware of the clouds of war. World War II impacted his life, at the end of the war, when he was assigned a job at a shipyard. On the morning of August 6, 1945, while he was waiting to enter the factory building at the shipyard, he saw the flash of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
After the war, Yutaka Yaguchi was able to resume his education, and was even able to go to university, unlike many of his former school mates. He went to Nihon University in Tokyo, and this is where he first started Shotokan karate. He also joined the JKA at that time. Training was very intense and heavily oriented to conditioning. Mr. Yaguchi graduated with a degree in Marine Biology, but was averse to sailing. After graduation, he found a job with a construction company.
One day in 1957, Sensei Masatoshi Nakayama asked Mr. Yaguchi to quit his job and join the JKA Instructor Training program full time. Yaguchi quit his job the very next day and enrolled. When he graduated from the program in 1959, he was the fourth graduate behind Hirokazu Kanazawa, Takayuki Mikami, and Eiji Takaura.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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