Born: June 14, 1941 in San Diego, California.
Profession: Reference Librarian at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library at the University of Washington in Seattle. Psychology Selector for the UW Libraries 1970-2004.
Kendo 4th Dan (Nov. 16, 1991, Kendo Federation of the USA), and Iaido 5th Dan (July 14, 1997, All-US Kendo Federation).
Recording Secretary of the Pacific Northwest Kendo Federation, and Founder and Editor of Kenyu, the monthly newsletter of PNKF.
An assistant instructor at the Bellevue Kendo Club, the Everett Kendo and Iaido Club, and the Kendo Club at the University of Washington, and an Iai coach at the Tacoma Kendo and Iaido Club. All of these Dojo are in the State of Washington, and affiliates of the Pacific Northwest Kendo Federation and the All-US Kendo Federation.
"Whoever holds a shinai is a friend of mine." --Rod Nobuto Omoto
"Don't anticipate. Be cool." --Rod Nobuto Omoto
"In Kendo, you have to be wide awake." --Rod Nobuto Omoto
"The unexamined life is not worth living." --Socrates
"Never confuse motion with action." --Benjamin Franklin
"Three things in human life are important. The First is to be kind. The Second is to be kind. And the Third is to be kind." --Henry James.
"It is only with the heart that one can see; what is essential is invisible to the eye." --The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
"When it comes time for us to die, the only thing that will matter is the people we have loved, and who have loved us." -- O'Brien McCary, M.D.
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" --John Maynard Keynes
"We should be indifferent to good and evil, but, when we are indifferent, that is to say when we project the light of our attention equally on both, the good gains the day." --Simone Weil on "Attention and Will," Gravity and Grace
"Shall I show you the muscular training of a philosopher? A will undisappointed, evils avoided, powers daily exercised, careful resolutions, unerring decisions." --Epictetus
"The unexamined life is not worth living." --Socrates
"All is flux, nothing stays still... You could not step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you." --Heraclitus
"Nature has had regard in everything no less to the end than to the beginning and the continuance, just like the man who throws up a ball. What good is it then for the ball to be thrown up, or harm for it to come down, or even to have fallen?" --Marcus Aurelius
"Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind." --Epictetus
"Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go..." --Henry Austin Dobson
"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants to see us happy." --Benjamin Franklin
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall." --Thomas Paine
"I am a citizen of the world; the world is my village." --Thomas Paine
"Question with boldness even the existance of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." -- Thomas Jefferson
"There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity." --Douglas MacArthur
"Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but at the same time, as polished as your sword." --Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
"The crucial thing in my lectures on the Presocratics is that I begin neither with Thales nor with Homer, nor do I begin with the Greek language in the second century before Christ; I begin instead with Plato and Aristotle. This, in my judgment, is the sole philosophical access to an interpretation of the Presocratics. Everything else is historicism without philosophy." --Hans-Georg Gadamer
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." --Aristotle
"Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. Life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary person takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse." --Carlos Castaneda
"All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out from time to time. The difference between an average person and a warrior is awareness of this, and one of the tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when the cubic centimeter pops out he or she has the necessary speed and prowess to pick it up." --Carlos Castaneda
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." --George Santayana
"When Honor's sun declines and Wealth takes wings, Then Learning shines, the best of precious things." --Edward Crocker
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." --A. A. Milne
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -- Albert Einstein
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
"The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." -- Albert Einstein
"Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble." -- Albert Einstein
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man." -- Albert Einstein
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." -- Richard Feynman
"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." --Mother Teresa
"Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind." -- Henri Frederic Amiel
"'Why should a poet be sentenced to death simply for writing poems?' A reasonable question, no doubt... but as I listened to these young people, so sure of themselves as they repeated their slogans, I found myself thinking--yes, but isn't it more logical for a poet to be sentenced to death for writing poems than for doing anything else?" --Oe Kenzaburo
"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Our works fail us but the love with which we do them is eternally written in the heart of God." --Abbot Gerald Columban Hawkins OCSO
"Amid the ruins of a falling age, our spirit remains erect." --Cyprian
"Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in Death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured." --Diogenes of Oenoanda
"I think the Eureka moment is a bit of a myth. I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years." -- Sir Tim Berners-Lee
"I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it's not somehow just there by chance ... some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along -- it's a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it." --Sir Roger Penrose
"Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed this issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time which is eternity." --Alfred North Whitehead
Extended words of Noma Hisashi
My hero and main inspiration is Kendo Kyoshi 7th Dan Rod Nobuto Omoto.
My original and continuing Kendo teachers are Konno Tatsuhiko and David Sadao Yotsuuye. Other extremely important Kendo teachers include: Koike Shinichi, Haga Tadatoshi, Otsuka Mayumi, Inamura Konosuke, Kamei Kazuo, Taniuchi Tadanobu, Takenaka Hideko, Hiyoshi Junko, Asaoka Mitsuru, Kato Shozo, Arae Takahiko, Onuma Hiroshi, Daniel Ebihara, Kakehashi Masaharu, Murosako Yoshitsugu, Miyahara Maki, Yamaguchi Takeshi, Sato Hironobu, Matsunaga Masami, Hayashi Kunio, Oka Kenjiro, Kojima Masaru, Ota Masataka, Murayama Keisuke, Shioiri Hiroyuki, Sugo Satoru, Nakanishi Yasushi, Nakamura Taizaburo, Nakakura Kiyoshi, Yasui Kiyoshi, Nakabara Torataro, Tanabe Masao, Tanabe Yoshihiko, Oka James Shiuso, Higuchi Herbert, Asai Henry, Jeffrey Marsten, Murakami Arthur, Imai Saburo, Oda Katsuo, Kobayashi Tadao, Okushima Yoshio, Nishiyama Yasuhiro, and Tsurutani Sensei.
Other great teachers: Gertrude Boyd Crane, Alice and Nellie Cole, Bob Dyke, Paul James Lewis, George Williston, M. O. Skarsten, Joe Baird, Royal Collins, Bob Crowley, Omar Frank Bose, Elburn Cooper, Charles Dietz, Tom Grigsby, Richard Eilbott, Irving Story, Levering Reynolds, Jr., Claire Argow, Anna Berliner, George Guthrie, John Albin Broyer, Stan Tice, Alice Tice, Walter Gant, Hobart Hanson, Peter A. Boodberg, Edward Hetzel Schafer, Yuen Ren Chao, Shih Hsiang Chen, Cyril Birch, Kun Chang, Stanley Goertzen, Clarence Frank Shangraw, Shunji Forrest Nishi, Sister Lioba Catherine CT, Abbot Gerald Columban Hawkins OCSO, Carmel Edward Carroll, Sergeant-Major Blume, Elizabeth Findly, Bob Carter, Perry Morrison, LeRoy Charles Merritt, Claire Marston, Bernadette Gualtieri, Joyce Lillian Barnum, Ken Allen, R.D. Monroe, Bill Cadbury, John S.S. Leong, and countless more... the list is endless!
Dharma name: Ja Sahn ["Compassion Mountain"] Took the Five Precepts November 26, 1983 from Seung Sahn Sunim (born August 1, 1927 Seun Chun City North Korea - died November 30, 2004 Hwa Gye Sa South Korea)
Current Zen Master: Jack Duffy Roshi Seattle, Washington
B.A., philosophy, with high honors, and senior honors in Philosophy, Pacific University, June 1963. Classical Chinese, University of California, 1963-65. U.S. Army, Medical Corps, Eighth Army Support Command, 65th Medical Group: 43rd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, Camp Mosier; Camp Nabors next to Konkuk University; and Yongsan Garrison, Korea, 1965-67. M.L.S., University of Oregon, June 1968.
Please say hi and leave a message for Tom in his Guestbook!
Tom's old guestbook covering December 1997 to April 2006 may be viewed here.
If you'd rather, please send email to: Tom Bolling kendo@u.washington.edu