Grandmaster Gary Bennett, 
							Founder of American Tejitsu
							
							
							 
			
			
			

			My Story
			
			I became fascinated with the arts when, as a child of about 6, I saw the first 
			black & white televised aikido demonstration by its founder, Prof. Morehei Uyeshiba.  
			This was about 1959, I think.  I began going to the public library and taking home 
			the only martial arts book available, which was on Ju-jitsu.  I don’t think anyone 
			else got to read that book for over a year.  I learned several techniques quite well 
			from that book, leaving me with a problem.  I now knew enough to be dangerous, but 
			not enough to control my techniques because I had no partner with whom to train.
			
			When I was about 9, a Judo class opened up at the local YMCA. I remember begging to be 
			allowed to sign up, but my father would have none of it.  He was a WWII vet and famous 
			for saying, “I had to deal with _ _ _ _ in the Army and I don’t want to have it/them or 
			whatever, around me now.”  Fill in the blank with martial arts, guns, whatever reminded 
			him of the war.
			
			My only recourse was to secretly study what I could from whoever I could until I was an 
			adult and could sign and pay for my own training. This included a little Boxing, Karate, 
			Judo, Wrestling and Yubi-waza.  I was fortunate enough in high school, to be friends 
			with a young man of Japanese descent who taught me his family’s style of Karate through 
			brown belt, as he had learned from his mother.  The first formal training I found was a 
			school offering Hung-Gar Kung-Fu, which closed 3 months later.  
			
			Finally in 1977, after I was married, I found a school teaching an eclectic style of Aikido and 
			studied there for 9 years.  By that point my instructors were all sadly under-ranked 
			having lost their Sensei just as I was coming in, and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding 
			with the head instructor, found myself black-balled from ever making black belt.  I was 
			the oldest living brown belt in the school’s history.  Black belt was attainable in 3 years 
			and I was a quick study, but spent 6 years at brown belt level.  This school too eventually 
			closed and I continued training with one of the instructors privately, finally earning my 
			long past due, black belt.  He and I began working on “Other Material” trying to improve on 
			what we had learned.  I took a very systematic approach, revising techniques here and there, 
			changing things around and adding ju-jitsu and judo type techniques until I had increased 
			my repertoire of techniques by 33%.
			
			After 3 years of work and analysis, I began to want to teach this new method and started a 
			search for how to document my new “way”.  I eventually found a martial arts organization, 
			which increased my base rank to 3rd degree in aikido, sanctioned my new system as 
			“Tejitsu Aikido” and since I had designed system requirements to go through 7 degrees of 
			black belt, named me the 8th Dan Soke of the new system in 1989.  Over the next few years 
			I doubled the size of the system I had initially learned, was promoted to 10th Dan Soke 
			in 1992 and have renamed my system simply, “Tejitsu”.
			





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Copyright 2011 Gary Bennett