Student of Bruce Lee to make rare public appearance in Lynnwood

Bruce Lee is widely acknowledged as the most influential martial arts practitioner of the 20th century.

At 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 14, the man who was his protege and best friend for years will make a rare public appearance in an hour-long talk at the Lynnwood Library titled “Bruce Lee: The Development of a Martial Artist and his Art.”

“I’m just an old fart,” said Taky Kimura, 83, of Woodinville. “I was around at the right time at the right place to have met Bruce. I don’t give myself any credit.”

Kimura, an American of Japanese descent, ran a grocery store on Seattle’s First Hill for half a century. That’s where he met Lee, an 18-year-old college student who worked as a busboy at a nearby Chinese restaurant, in 1959.

Today Kimura owns the Jun Fan (Lee’s Chinese name) Gung Fu Institute, a martial arts school Lee founded in 1960. His son, Andy Kimura, runs the school.

The goal behind the Lynnwood meeting is simple, the Kimuras say: to keep Lee’s flame alive.

Specifically, said Taky Kimura, the two men will focus on Lee’s philosophical underpinnings, an aspect of his life they say is often neglected.

“It’s basically just sort of his metamorphosis, his transformation,” said Andy Kimura. “We really wanted to focus on the philosophical aspects of his life.”

Lee, a Chinese-American who died at age 32 in 1973, developed his own form of martial arts, which he called Jeet Kune Do or the way of the intercepting fist. He’d studied philosophy at the University of Washington and married one of his students, Linda Caldwell.

The San Francisco-born Lee went on to stardom in Hollywood, first playing the role of Kato in the 1960s TV series “The Green Hornet” and later through a series of martial arts films produced in Hong Kong.

During that time, Taky Kimura, Lee’s highest ranking student, held the fort for Lee’s martial arts school back in Seattle.

The elder Kimura said Lee, who was 18 years his junior, had a huge impact on his life. Kimura’s father was a Japanese coolie laborer and Kimura said he grew up in an environment in which being of Asian descent meant you were a second-class citizen.

“Mentally and spiritually, I was just not a person,” he said. “I went through so much discrimination during the war years. Bruce was confronted with discrimination and he picked up right away that something was bothering me.”

Lee took Kimura on as a student and, over time, the elder student said he began to feel better about himself. Now, he said, he wants to share what he calls the heart of Lee’s teachings with others.

Many young martial arts practitioners are physically strong “but many of them are empty of heart,” he said. “We’re just humble people.”