The World Health Organization says that Japan is the country in the world in which people live the longest (83.7 on average between men and women), and it is not only due to diet. A study by two Spaniards, Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, on Okinawa, the Japanese town with the largest population of centenarians in the world, concludes by interviewing its inhabitants who all claimed that they had an ikigai, a vital motivation, a mission, something that gave them strength to get out of bed in the morning.
10,917 kilometers from Okinawa, in a gym or dojo, the New Millennium, ikigai inspires every day the first woman to achieve the fifth dan of the karate black belt in Avilés, and one of the four women with the high degree in Asturias . It is Leticia Marinero, the first sensei teacher in the region who many years ago gave herself up to karate as a philosophy of life that caught her in her youth to the point of changing her lawyer’s toga for the karategui, which she puts on “every day”. se the week, except Sundays» to continue improving at 46 years of age.
Together with her inseparable teacher and ‘alma mater’ of the Avilesian dojo, Manuel Enjuto, Leticia has barely made her fifth dan and is already thinking about her sixth, which will take six years. It’s almost like starting a cycle that culminates in a tough test to prove her evolution before a court that doesn’t make it easy. «The exam is held in Oviedo on dates set by the national karate federation and then you have to defend a thesis, which I based on the ‘Shu-ha-ri’ or evolution of learning through kata ‘ Heian Shodan’”, explains the karate fighter, “which is the first thing you learn when you start and the one that makes you most excited”, adds Enjuto.
Despite the effort and sacrifice of these years, which the athlete from Aviles has combined with her work as a national arbitrator and training karate fighters from 4 to 78 years of age alongside Enjuto, she confesses that she already has “the desire to go to for the sixth dan. This is a way of life.”
Leticia Marinero is one of the four women who have the fifth dan in Asturias. “Being a woman, it is very difficult to reach high degrees,” she says, despite the advantages that she considers karate to have from a female point of view and also from a self-defense point of view. «It is a completely unknown sport, martial arts are first related to judo. Karate is an elegant and effective sport. A woman, without having much strength, thanks to karate you can get rid of a guy who weighs twice as much as you », she explains.
This athlete from Aviles has not only had to overcome barriers to reach the fifth dan. She has also managed to be the only national referee in Asturias and the only woman in the history of Asturian karate to be part of the Arbitration Commission of FAKYDA (Asturian Federation of Karate and Associated Sports). Her next appointment will be in La Rioja at the end of this month of March.
Sometimes, those obstacles are at home, without leaving Avilés, where the institutional recognition criteria leave athletes like Leticia out. “What counts many times are the medals. Bring me medals, is what they tell you. I already competed, what I do now is a personal work of preparation and continuous evolution, and the City Council does not value it, ”laments the karate fighter.
While this anomaly is corrected, she and her teacher strive to make ikigai direct their lives every day and to transmit to the students the ancient knowledge of karate in the New Millennium dojo. “Martial arts enrich you in many ways, they change your behavior and character,” Manuel Enjuto points out.
