Mr. Miyagi

As we close out the first week of Inktober, we end it on the man that taught us all karate through household chores, Mr. Miyagi. However, today’s entry suffers from the same problem as yesterday’s Rocky piece, with the reference photo being too large and my capturing of him too small, and you can see the same attempt to crop the picture by coloring in the negative space I would normally leave around the subject. Again, as mentioned yesterday, it leaves the subject in the background, as if enveloped by a heavy black fog and interferes aesthetically with the subject. Nevertheless, being confident in myself, I think I captured Pat Morita’s iconic character pretty closely, even if the ink only pass gives him a derivative look. To keep gloating for a bit longer, his hand is the absolute highlight of the piece for me. I captured this in one take and I remember at the time how nervous I was painting the most complicated part of the reference photo. So, I took it slow and payed attention to each stroke and to my surprise, I couldn’t believe I captured it (me being shocked at my creations will be a running theme in these reflections). The hand, in my opinion, more than makes up for the forceful cropping, and the chopsticks he holds at the ready for that pesky fly are just the cherry on top.

As I examine this piece further while I write, Mr. Miyagi’s t-shirt is another thing I’m proud of. Capturing the wrinkles of his shirt using the heavy black of the ink and the highlights of ink wash, it makes the shirt look like his aged, janitorial wear from the film. His signature bandana was something that I didn’t spend too much time on, instead, opting for more loose brushstrokes adhering to the mantra that less is more.

Finally, rendering Pat Morita’s calm and aged face. With derivativeness being another major theme in these Inktober pieces (mainly because I avoid portraits and realism like the plague and the aforementioned ink only when I create these works) I’m proud of the job I did. I thickened the wisps of hair from his balding head so they would stand out a bit more and used the brush pen stippling technique from the Jack Torrance piece to capture his facial hair.

Overall, it’s another Inktober piece that I look back at with pride a year later and impress myself with my ability.

I love the ‘Karate Kid’. (I know, right? Sounding like a broken record already after a week.) And when I think about the film and the relationship between Daniel and Miyagi, it brings a smile to my face on how intricate it is between the lines. Daniel becomes a surrogate to the very thing that Miyagi has lost and vice versa. I know this revelation and the following ideas may not be the most profound and I’m sure with the themes can be seen just by watching the film with a brain, but indulge me in my giddy-ness. Miyagi meets Daniel at a very vulnerable time in his life. He had just moved to a new city leaving behind everything he had known for his entire life, and as someone who’s had this exact experience at a similar age, it’s painful. You feel alone, isolated, wishing and praying that you could go back to your hometown or anywhere with an air of familiarity.

The first few days in your new town (at least for me) feel like a dream, an uncomfortable nightmare, like presenting in class wearing only your underpants. It’s a feeling that I’m sure Daniel experienced the first few days after moving. The feeling of having to start all over again, it’s at this time where he meets Mr. Miyagi. There’s a difference between the two, however, and that’s while one person is leaving their hometown and metaphorically, their past, the other is still living in theirs.

Miyagi, by contrast, is living in his hometown of pain at the loss of his family. Yes, it’s been decades since they’ve passed, and he’s made a quiet living for himself, but it’s not a living that’s allowing him to move on. I’m not saying he needs to forget about his family and act as if they never existed. I’m saying that he’s choosing to live in a town that has moved on without him and unlike Daniel, he hasn’t moved out. The same aforementioned isolation and loneliness that Daniel feels is shared by Miyagi at the opposite end of the spectrum, where Daniel’s is one of change, Miyagi’s is one of stagnation. They’re both caught up in the familiar that they’re being forced to leave behind.

That’s the thing about familiarity, it’s comforting. No matter how detrimental it can be to us, if it’s a routine or it’s a habit that gives us a sense of comfort, we’ll stay attached to it accepting whatever consequences come along with the illusion of comfort.

As the two get to know each other and spend more time together the stagnation of Miyagi is chiseled away by the surrogate family he’s found in Daniel and Daniel’s isolation from the move is transformed into the familiar feeling of living in his old hometown. This is the illusion of familiarity. To reference an old adage, the more things change, the more things stay the same (I like my clichés). The familiarity in our lives and routines are things that we can change, and the illusion is that they are set in stone, but sometimes we need the right instigator to kick-start our change. In the case of Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi, it was each other. For you and myself, it could be a multitude of things. Whether it’s wanting to mature as a person or wanting to ease the suffering in your life, when we take the steps and choices to change our unknowns into the familiar, it’s scary, especially if we don’t have a Miyagi or a Daniel to help us. In my case, I have a loving fiancé that I am blessed to have as my Daniel-san to move me out of stagnation and an even more loving heavenly Father as my Miyagi to help me find peace through the unfamiliar. While I’m blessed enough to have this, others aren’t and I write this not to gloat over them, but rather, share my fortunate experience with you. To show that even someone like me (a creature of habit in the purest form and a person of weak emotional and mental stature) is able to make ways into the unknown, I hope that it gives you confidence to mark your own way.

In the end, we all have the power to make every uncomfortable unknown a comfortable familiar. I guess it just depends on how many times you’re willing to wax on and wax off.