Shihan Paul Arel a “Teacher of Teachers”

By Joe Duffy of the IKA
For 35 years, Master Paul Arel made the South Windsor Recreation Department the home base of his international martial arts association (IKA). For over three decades, he taught his Kokondo style jujitsu (Jukido) and Karate to legions of youngsters and adults. Whole families often signed on! This incomparable gentleman passed away January 2, 2009. Though in the vast empire of his students he was formally saluted as "Shihan" or "teacher-of-teachers," Sensei (teacher) was the name he loved best. Sensei Arel did honor to the martial arts craft and graced his students with uncanny kinetic ability and encyclopedic knowledge. Arel had actually won a prize for unbalancing a muzzled circus bear!

Mr. Arel's pioneering legacy remains an amalgam of martial arts excellence and strength of personal character. This work will now be carried on by 7th degree Black Belt, Master Greg Howard who is Shihan Arel’s chosen successor.

Predating his South Windsor experiences, Mr. Arel is a martial arts Hall-of-Famer, one of the first westerners ever to earn a black belt from an Asian master, the legendary Kyokushin Sensei Mas Oyama. At age 17, Arel joined the U.S. Marines and later became chief martial arts instructor. He trained in Japan and on Okinawa where his then Sensei of the Isshinryu style went undefeated on the latter island. While in Japan, Arel also gained entrance into an elite circle of native senseis’ after they watched the young Marine shatter 27 stacked roofing tiles with the guillotine speed of his open hand! Arel himself scored over 300 wins for the all Marine Judo-Karate team and after his honorable discharge continued to assist the Corps until recently.

Among other credits too numerous to list, he opened the first Connecticut martial arts school in Hartford. At a time when Karate was merely an exotic curiosity, he organized the first North American Martial Arts Tournament at the Bushnell Memorial for which he also drafted the contest rules. With his Sensei Mas Oyama present, Arel refereed the first North American Karate Championship at New York's Madison Square Garden. Arel's mounting reputation won him an appearance and demo on The Johnny Carson Show.

With absolute fidelity, Shihan Paul Arel devoted a total of 58 years to perpetuating the body and soul of the ancient masters. Without sacrificing purity of authentic technique, he simultaneously distilled for his students a realistic repertory of self-defense for the modern setting. His own life and career were guided by the timeless values of justice, courage, veracity, loyalty, honor, benevolence and politeness that comprise the traditional warrior Code of Bushido. He taught his students to avoid confrontations if possible because "real power has nothing to prove." At the end of a lesson, he would say, "Do something nice for somebody this week!? Love of family, community and country together with an abiding pride in the American Flag he served for so long were steadfast measures of this amazing man who could enjoy joking about his own shortness of stature!

He is remembered as a man of steel with a heart of gold and is still spoken of in the present tense by his instructors. Mr. Arel's prowess of personal character was regularly mirrored in a splendid concern for others. Over the years, he held many fund raisers for Muscular Dystrophy and recently for St. Jude's Hospital. Though a long-tested warrior and disciplined instructor who could break cinder blocks with his head, Mr. Arel was simultaneously a completely kind and humble human being who could teach vigor and virtue by unforgettable examples.

Once during a lesson, he bolted over to a newcomer, bent down and put a band-aid on an injured toe. It was a sight worthy of a then popular movie "The Karate Kid," except that Mr. Arel was the real-life "Mr. Miagi!" In his home town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, young Arel witnessed a memorable incident. When a loud mouth tried to muscle Arel's father in the family diner, a visiting Japanese customer sprung into action and in a seeming nano-second dispatched the bulky bully! "When I saw that happen," reminisced Mr. Arel over the years, "I knew I wanted to learn how to do that!" The rest became American martial arts history, alive wherever Kokondo is being taught and today still flourishing at South Windsor's Recreation Department.