Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro had once graded his own katas the way a shrine carpenter grades joinery, to the fraction of a degree, and he carried that same merciless eye into the Dojo courtyard on the hottest afternoon of the year, fishing not for fish but for compliments, angling every idle bystander toward the subject of his flawless footwork. He set his sandals aside with the reverence of a man laying down a ceremonial blade, certain the world would pause to admire him before he needed them again. The world did not pause. Somewhere between his third humble brag and his fifth, the sandals vanished into the heat shimmer, and Junichiro, who could recite the proper distance between a man's stance and his honor, could not recall where he'd set his own shoes. He measured every disciple in the yard for the theft, found them all wanting, and was still measuring when the elders measured him and found the Dojo better off without a barefoot perfectionist scoring everyone's applause but his own. He walks now half convinced discipline is a debt he can still collect on, quietly furious that the harshest score he's ever handed out was the one he never let himself see coming.