Daily Super High

Archaic and Aristocratic

메리 means Mary in English. In Japan, the Catholic Korean Maria Park made herself inconspicuous as Kanon Takeshi. She hid her faith and pretended to be Buddhist. Otherwise, Honoka Yukishiro Sensei would not have accepted her. The master came from a clan whose greatest pride was its kinship with the Tokugawa dynasty. After a series of suppressions of Christian uprisings in the 1630s, Shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu expelled the Catholic Portuguese from the country and closed Japan. Honoka Yukishiro Sensei was too noble to publish her prejudices. Nevertheless, she would not have accepted an avowed Korean Catholic. She taught Gōjū-Ryu karate in an alpine dōjō. To reach it you had to rappel down from a helicopter.

Maria was born in the Dangjin area of Chungcheongnam-do in the Korean southwest on the Yellow Sea. Her parents' house was not far from a church, a product of French missionary efforts. In Japan, Catholics were a minority. In Korea, Catholicism had no place at all. Persecution of Christians has long been a state goal and still is in North Korea. Until the 1950s, Pyongyang was the Korean center of Christianity

.Maria grew up on an isolated religious island. People there loved to tell each other martyr stories. French clergy had come to Korea to die. They had chosen the Passion Path to test their spirit.

The Hapdeok Church was built in 1929 in defiance of the persecution of Christians. It was a focal point of Korean Catholicism.

The Catholic mission only reached Korea in 1794 at the behest of Pope Pius VI. as a secret commando company. The Vatican's James Bond was Pierre Grammont. The bishop worked underground. That shaped the community. The believers felt both chosen and stigmatized. When they planted new gardens on ground that had never been dug up (in their generation), they sometimes damaged a bone with the first turn of the spade, signaling a killing field. Death had nothing to say.

Yoga Mummies

Maria's parents died before the girl was twelve. Maria was separated from her siblings and given to Buddhist relatives who protected the ward from the orphanage. Maria experienced the change as a deportation. In the new environment the people grew very old, but spent half of their lives in the ridiculous state of yoga mummies. TV crews from the capital constantly came to film centenarians doing cartwheels and splits. The ancients were not ashamed of their toothless laughter.

Longevity was considered a spiritual achievement. Old gymnastics gurus were revered. Maria had no idea that behind the fitness business there was often nothing more than an alliance of authoritarian scoundrels whose fathers and grandfathers had collaborated with the Japanese occupying forces.

"We may take it then that an army without its baggage-train is lost; without provisions it is lost; without bases of supply it is lost." Sun Tzu

Maria's foster family strengthened Kkangpae supply lines. Jo-Pok (조폭) or Jojik-Poklyeokbae (조직폭력배) or Kkangpae are what criminal organizations are called in Korea. Officially they don't exist. More than one government declared war on them, occasionally resorting to them.

Maria fell from the Catholic underground into a criminal underground.

Their breadwinners were traditional partisans of a syndicate that was founded as a street gang during the Japanese occupation. Its first leader, Kim Du-han, known as Uisong (1918 - 1972), was considered the country's best pugilist. After decades as a top criminal, he went into politics and died highly respected. His descendants are pillars of society.

Maria toured Japan as a Vatican agent, briefly associated with the Japanese Red Army, and then simultaneously appeared as Kanon Takeshi in Honoka Yukishiro Sensei's heavenly dōjō in the Hida Mountains. She disappeared from the radar of the services.

Honoka Yukishiro Sensei taught in a cloud theater. Nature didn't miss the chance to make a dramatic appearance. She overwhelmed the students in keeping with Honoka Yukishiro Sensei's charismatic appearance. Everything was fluid, mission, Zen - archaic and aristocratic. Kanon Takeshi transformed her inadequacy into karate and closeness to nature. She lost her poor self to the cosmos. She married the void and entered a good metabolic cycle.

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