Bored as Fuck

Fuck. Why big post error? Here's the story again- thanks to Julia for telling me how to indent.

     Mr.Fujiyaki didn’t always reside in central Texas. His ever-present Japanese (research regional dialects in Japan) accent revealed that to most that knew him; but few people really knew the old man anyway. Even his martial arts students only had a formal relationship with him. His lack of friends and the fact that he was an ethnic minority earned him the status of being tied with Jim as the most mysterious person in town. Even the church didn’t bother him; the community had long given up conversion, as Mr.Fujiyaki, unlike Jim, simply took a silent and stoic attitude towards their evangelism. Being a very mellow person at heart, and already a Buddhist anyway, he preferred to remain within peaceful relations with his American neighbors.
     The only group of humans anywhere in the world that knew much about the old martial arts instructor lived across an ocean that only 60 percent of Centerville’s residents could spell the name of. The Pacific. The Fujiyaki family revolved around the martial arts. The sons and daughters of the family were trained to become world-renowned fighters, and eventually took their parents’ place as great teachers at the Fujiyaki School of Martial Arts in Japan. Being of better staff and funding than the old man’s shopping center gymnasium, the Fujiyakis’ school taught both Shotokan karate-do and kendo, the way of the sword. It was a highly respected dojo, and quite famous overseas, a fact the family took pleasure in taunting old Mr.Fujiyaki with.
     The reason Mr.Fujiyaki, a son of the family destined to become a great master, was not now a teacher at this school was mostly due to his own decision to refuse such a position.
     Mr.Fujiyaki was the youngest of three sons, and due to complications, his mother died while giving birth to him. When he was fifteen, his father also passed away due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare affliction of the brain and the human equivalent of mad cow disease. The family’s school had not been quite as prosperous at the time, but Mr.Fujiyaki’s brothers, the rightful new owners of the family’s dojo, saw to that. They filed a lawsuit with the beef processing company that sold their father the contaminated beef he contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob from, and won several million dollars.
     That was in 1958. Over the course of twenty years, Mr.Fujiyaki’s two brothers used their small fortune to rebuild the rundown dojo, hire some of Japan’s greatest teachers, and make the school among the most prestigious martial arts schools in all of Asia.
     During this time, Mr.Fujiyaki himself didn’t concern himself with running the family’s dojo. He preferred to simply be a pupil of the school, and while his brothers were shaking hands with Emperor Akihito, he was wringing the blood from his own hands, callusing from his endless training in both specialties of the dojo, karate and kendo. He didn’t care for fame- only self-mastery and tranquility.
     During all this time, the two Fujiyaki brothers lost more and more faith in the philosophies of their own art and Buddhist religion, and began to grow greedy and power-hungry. By the 1980s, they’d turned into money-grubbing powermongers that sought only to profit from the dojo’s students. They moved into a huge, Western-style house and began, as any American would want to, living large. They’d grown fat and lazy, not willing to take care of the usual duties of the dojo’s upkeep, and hired more workers to carry out their every task. They had servants in their house and chauffeurs to drive them around in their expensive European cars. Their lifestyle was any pig’s dream.
     But when Mr.Fujiyaki protested all this extravagance, pointed out the hundred pounds each the two men had gained, they were infuriated. They argued that the students of the dojo were nothing more than walking bags of money, that the fruits of their labor should be feasted upon as much as possible. After much verbal and physical violence (in which the two brothers lost a lot of fights, due to Mr.Fujiyaki’s superior athletic ability at the time), the two obese corporate whores the brothers had slowly transformed into exiled Mr.Fujiyaki from the dojo and from the family. Mr.Fujiyaki swore his revenge on the family, and vowed to start a dojo of his own to teach the true way of the martial artist, which was, in his mind, to be as self-sufficient as possible. To depend on material possessions was foolish, he thought. A true warrior should depend only on himself.
     Unfortunately, Mr.Fujiyaki’s funding wasn’t in spectacular condition. His brothers had strangled him of any real money whatsoever before he left the family, and he was forced to work washing dishes in a sushi bar for four years, living in a small apartment in Yokohama. Once he’d saved up about 20,000 dollars, he moved to America, and found the perfect location for his new karate dojo. Cheap real estate, cheap housing, a nice warm climate, and a great place to buy fresh produce were all he needed. He leased a small part of a shopping center, and with his remaining money, remodeled the building with its own gymnasium, and bought a tiny two-room, one story wooden cabin to live in.
     To get his dojo going, he was forced to work part-time as a cashier in a convenient store, but once the small goofy Texan crowd caught interest in that “new Chinese place next to Gunny’s Shack”, Mr.Fujiyaki gained several young students in 1991, and made enough money from their membership dues to the dojo to make a living. It wasn’t much, but after all, he was used to depending on himself, and had a fondness for growing his own food in the garden behind his cabin anyway.
     Jim was his first, and youngest student. He was eight at the time, and though he didn’t believe in Mr.Fujiyaki’s philosophy of a “true warrior”, he showed a remarkable love and talent for fighting. Not only that, he always brought nice wildflowers in to spruce up the small shopping center’s karate school. He grew to respect Mr.Fujiyaki as a mentor, or, at least his teacher. Mr.Fujiyaki also respected Jim, as he was the only student that didn’t poke fun at the old man behind his back after lessons. It comforted Mr.Fujiyaki to know that he had at least one friend in the world he could turn to, because no matter how much he meditated, no matter how he tried to clear his mind of troublesome thoughts, the memories of his family and his exile always plagued him. He could never be rid of the visions of his father, slowly growing weak and then dying, his brothers gradually withdrawing their faith from compassion, and depositing it in money, power, and the lust for both.
     Mr.Fujiyaki lived a relatively successful, but tormented life. He also knew he would hear from his family again- simply because he was familiar with how his two brothers had before loved to taunt him with their concept of their power and wealth. At the very least, they’d send someone to Texas to ridicule Mr.Fujiyaki and his tiny dojo.