Masutatsu (Mas) Oyama - Martial Arts Master

During the 50's Mas Oyama started to demonstrate his ability and strength fighting bulls. He fought 52 bulls in total. He killed 3 on the spot and chopped off the horns of 49 others with only one chop with the side of his hand. This doesn't mean it was a piece of cake.
In 1957, when he was 34 years old, a bull fight almost resulted in his death when the bull caught him in his back and tore it open almost completely. This bull fight cost him 6 months to recuperate from an almost lethal wound.
In April 1952 Mas Oyama traveled to the United States where he stayed for one year demonstrating his karate live on national television. He fought against professional boxers, wrestlers and everybody who wanted to challenge him.

In 1948 Mas Oyama, taking with him only his books and the basic necessities for cooking, began an arduous training regimen atop Mt. Minobu in Chiba Prefecture.
Mt. Minobu is the same place where the famous seventeenth century samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, received inspiration for Nito Ryu, his celebrated double sword system.
To Oyama, this was the ideal place to train and be inspired in the same tradition as his idol, Musashi. Of the books Oyama took with him on this journey, none were more important than the collection on Musashi, by Yoshikawa.
For eighteen months, isolated in the mountains, Oyama tested himself against nature's elements with such scenarios as training and meditating under icy waterfalls, performing countless jumps over bushes and boulders and using trees and rocks as makiwaras to condition his hands, feet and legs.

He would begin training at five in the morning, running up the steep slopes. Using large rocks as weights, he would lift them hundreds of times to increase his strength. In addition, he performed kata a minimum of one hundred times each day as well as hundreds upon thousands of repetitions of kihons (basic techniques), continuously pushing himself to the limits of human endurance.
At the conclusion of his daily training, he would read various Buddhist writings and sit in zazen and meditate.
It was also at this time that Oyama began to contemplate the idea of the circle and point for his karate. He also began visualizing himself defeating a bull with his bare hands. If he could get strong enough and powerful enough that he was able to defeat a bull with his karate, he would become famous. But it wasn't fame he was after. The fame, he thought, would be a tool. If he could attract interest from others, he could enlighten them on the strengths and virtues of karate and he would succeed not only in his goal of mastering karate, but of instructing others in the way of karate as well.

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