Story and photos by ALEXIS PERNO

On a Sunday at 2 p.m. in downtown Salt Lake City, I was held at knifepoint in a Walgreens. 

A week later, I was learning how to escape the very move I had been assaulted with.

I walked into Mushin Self Defense nervous. Martial arts wasn’t something I had experience with, unless watching my little brother earn his taekwondo black belt counts. But still, co-founder and instructor Brian Yamasaki had encouraged me to come, promising in an introductory phone call that I would control the boundaries of our interaction. 

That call was my first inkling that the culture of Mushin Self Defense was unlike anything else I had experienced. And as I continued to learn about the school’s story, that continued to be proved correct.

That first night, I put on a facade of cheeriness in the car ride to North Salt Lake. 

“As long as it’s not chokeholds, I’ll be fine,” I said to the friend who accompanied me. 

We walk in. It’s chokeholds. 

It only took a moment of knowing eye contact with my friend before I burst into tears. I almost asked to leave, sure that coming was a mistake despite Yamasaki’s encouragement. I wasn’t ready. 

But the instructors quickly assured me that nothing was expected of me. My training partner for the night, Ruby Talataina, hugged me tight, saying it was enough just to walk through those doors. She had been there too, she said. 

Talataina and my friend began to spar. I watched, and wanted in.  

It was at that moment, with someone else’s arm around my neck and tears down my face, I knew I had made the right choice in coming to Mushin. 

“I just keep thinking, I wish I had found Mushin 20 years ago,” Talataina said in a phone interview. “From my perspective, for a trauma survivor, you go in there and you work through a trigger in one hour that a lot of people spend years working through.”

Talataina’s journey to Mushin Self Defense unfortunately is similar to mine — she had started working through her healing process and thought a self-defense class would help. Her first class ended in tears too, and she told Yamasaki she wouldn’t be returning. 

“He was so respectful and he said, ‘Yes, we are here any time,’” Talataina said. “Then the very next day, I went to bed and I was like, ‘Man, you’re just going to let this fear conquer you for the rest of your life, or are you gonna do something about it?’”

Talataina went back to the next class.

“Honestly, what made the difference were the coaches, Sir Kiser and Sir Yamasaki,” Talataina said. 

Brandon Kiser is Yamasaki’s business partner and the instructor of the Monday night women-only self-defense class I attend. Together, the two have been running Mushin Self Defense since 2000. But the culture that exists today wasn’t always the one Mushin cultivated. 

Stepping onto the mat

Flash back to the ’80s: Kiser and Yamasaki are both enthralled by the likes of “The Karate Kid” and Bruce Lee. But as Kiser says, “The flashy kicks was just the hook.”

That hook was literal: Kiser’s journey started with a friendly rival showing off a fancy taekwondo kick. The resulting bout of jealousy inspired him to start taking classes. But looking beyond the movie-star moves, there was a different draw, rooted in a chaotic childhood. 

“At the time, I didn’t make that connection, but now in hindsight as a 42-year-old, I’m like ‘Oh, well I was probably just really insecure and thought that [martial arts] was going to fix some part of me that I was missing,” Kiser said in a phone interview. “And it did.” 

Once he found martial arts, Kiser never looked back. 

“The martial arts just really grounded me and gave me direction in life,” he said. 

I understand the appeal. The first time I slammed someone into the mat, I immediately asked if they were all right. It was easier than I thought — a lot easier, in fact. 

I walked away feeling powerful, like something had finally slotted into place. 

For Yamasaki, there were several draws to martial arts — bullying, for one. Growing up in Davis County, Utah, Yamasaki said he could probably count the number of Asians, not just Japanese Americans, on one hand. 

“I just think, maybe, deep down inside, it felt good to have an Asian hero,” Yamasaki said about Bruce Lee in a phone interview.

The appeal he’s most certain of, though, came from an existing connection: Yamasaki’s father and grandfather both hold black belts in judo.

“That probably was one of the other big driving factors in my interest in the martial arts,” he said. “Trying to understand these people that I love from doing what they did and going on the journeys that they went on.”

The reckoning: “We were white belts on the business side of things.” 

In the ’90s, mixed martial arts was practically unheard of. Separate schools taught separate sports, and loyalty to the sport one originally learned was emphasized and expected. Utah, meanwhile, was establishing a name for itself in the jiujitsu world. 

Kiser, who was training in taekwondo, was rebuked harshly by his then coach for expressing an interest in jiujitsu. When he found William Bernales of the Bernales Institute of Martial Arts, Kiser knew he had found the change he was looking for. 

“It wasn’t a hard transition,” Kiser said. “Once I had heard about him and validated the things that I had heard, I was all in.”

Kiser began taking private lessons in 1998, paying for them with almost his entire paycheck from Walmart. Brian Yamasaki walked into the gym the following year. Right off the bat, he could tell what he needed to know about Kiser.

“He was there, finishing up his private [lesson],” Yamasaki said. “I was able to watch a move and I could tell that he was really serious about training.” 

Yamasaki made it clear from the first day that he wanted to compete. But at a time with very little opportunities to do so, that ambition wasn’t taken well by existing members of the gym. 

“I just remember wanting to run him out of the gym, and him not letting that happen,” Kiser said.

Yamasaki’s perseverance proved his dedication to Kiser, and the two struck up a friendship. 

“There was just something about him that I connected to very quickly,” Kiser said. “It’s hard for me to see back through the eyes I had at that time, because now I could go on for hours about all the great things about Brian Yamasaki.” 

As training partners, it became clear they both shared similar visions about martial arts, from the discipline of the journey to the world of MMA. 

“Brandon and I were fighting, but we never saw ourselves as fighters,” Yamasaki said. “I think both of us would agree we’re both more interested in the art aspect [and] self-expression.” 

Yamasaki approached Kiser in 2000 with a business proposal that would center these core beliefs. One handshake later, Mushin Self Defense was born.

“We didn’t even have an agreement between each other more than our word, and I don’t think that works in most cases,” Kiser said. “You would have to find a Brian Yamasaki, and they don’t make a lot of those.”

It was no small amount of effort to ensure success. At one point, the pair put their houses on the line to keep the school afloat. 

“We were not really business savvy,” Yamasaki said. “We were white belts on the business side of things.” 

Their inexperience reflected in the clientele Mushin developed up until 2010. 

“Our gym was a very rough environment to get exposed to martial arts,” Kiser said. “We were just trying to run everybody out of there, and whoever was left was … who we wanted to train.”

With Kiser and Yamasaki’s growing reputations as instructors, the gym became a hotspot for those looking to fight — and to win. But many weren’t willing to put in the effort to succeed.

Nor were they willing to pay.

“Fighters don’t pay and they run out all the people who do pay the bills,” Kiser said. “So at the end of the day, you’re just left with a very broken business model.”

The business model wasn’t the only thing that was broken. Although the school was producing successful, winning fighters, Yamasaki knew something had to change when a fellow school owner called Mushin’s culture a disgrace.

“It was very hard to pivot and change directions,” Yamasaki said. “It was painful. Personally, it was hard to let go of a lot of what we had built.” 

At first, Kiser was resistant, finding himself sucked into the fighting world and its vices. But slowly, he came around. 

“I was determined — and I know Yamasaki was too — to make our business work,” he said. “I give Yamasaki all the credit for really changing course in the gym.”

While he’s proud of what’s been created, Kiser admits that Mushin’s old training methods probably gave people a bad impression of martial arts. But without the path Mushin took, Kiser doesn’t think the school would be where it is now. 

Yamasaki added,​ “We needed to find our people, the people that understand us and understand what we’re doing. And even now, we’re still really refining that process.” 

Training for life

The scariest part of my Walgreens experience wasn’t the knife in my face. It was the realization that I had no idea what to do. At Mushin Self Defense, mental preparation and empowerment are just as important as physical training.

“For a number of years you’re a puppy, and if things went bad, you just had to roll over and show your belly,” Yamasaki said. “Well, you’re not that anymore.” 

As he says, a lion never has to tell someone it’s a lion. And like a lion, boundaries are encouraged to be set, as gym member Ruby Talataina knows. The coping skills she had previously used to survive were discouraged within the gym. 

“I remember Yamasaki said to our class on the first day, ‘Do not suffer in silence,’” she said.

Now, over nine months since her first class, Talataina feels safe enough to roll with men twice her size, working through her trauma. 

“It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just had a 210-pound man over me who was trying to choke me, and guess what?’” she said. “I effing survived.”

Mushin Self Defense has also survived. It started with action movies and shared heroes, then a handshake and shared values. Now, 22 years later, the journey continues.

“When I made the shift to, ‘I wanna figure out how to teach jiujitsu in a way that people love it and stay with it,’ then that became my new passion,” Kiser said. “That’s still where I’m at now, years later.”

Yamasaki views the martial arts journey as a dynamic, ever-evolving thing. Over time, his journey became more introspective, grappling with how he may have contributed to negativity in the universe. 

“How have I been a bully?” Yamasaki said. “How have I not lived up to my expectations?”

He advises new students to follow where their own journey takes them. 

“Let it have time to take root and germinate and grow and evolve because the story, it just gets deeper and more interesting and more fulfilling as time goes on,” Yamasaki said.  

Kiser can’t even imagine what his life would be like without the influence of martial arts.

“All the good, all the bad, the whole journey for me is what’s kept my life on track,” he said. “I want to share that with as many people as possible.”

The future of the gym isn’t grandiose. For Kiser, it’s continuing exactly what Mushin has been doing: teaching quality classes to anybody who wants to learn. 

And for me, I learned more than just a jiujitsu move. Walking in that first night, I never expected what a bright blue mat and a chokehold would teach me in only one class. 

As they say in this world, it’s not the years, but the hours. 

“There are so many life lessons in there that I have learned from those classes, and that is why I go four days a week,” Talataina said. “That is what Mushin is for me — I am training for life.” 

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