Lucky Junki

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His foghorn voice blasts forth from the kitchen, stopping shoppers in their tracks out in the store. Which, of course, is the point: Yoshida trained his voice, developed his schtick, and built his empire by grinding out thousands of supermarket demos around the nation. No matter how vast the warehouse store or tiny the grocery, no matter how sophisticated or benighted the customers, Mr. Yoshida always took over the room. He always sold his sauce.

"Kentucky Fried Derby!" he trumpets, as the steak strips sizzle, the cameras roll, and outside on the sidewalk pedestrians gape through the window in wonder. "I take first and second! I a lucky man! Lucky Junki!"

Six-day-old Kristina Yoshida had turned a sickly yellow during the night and by dawn she was too limp and weak to cry. Her mother, Linda, had a fever as well, and she was scared. She desperately wished that Junki were home with her in Seattle, but Kristina's father was hundreds of miles away, in Salem, Oreg., teaching members of the Oregon State Police self-defense techniques. It was Junki's big break, his first chance to rise above the station of a struggling young karate instructor.

Kristina wouldn't nurse. She barely moved. Linda called Junki, who immediately rushed to the Portland airport for a flight to Seattle. He arrived home and took mother and daughter to Children's Hospital, where the doctors rushed the infant into intensive care. The diagnosis was grim: Kristina had a runaway case of jaundice, a condition especially dangerous in babies of Asian descent. Her liver and kidneys were shutting down.

Junki's comatose baby daughter lay nearly buried beneath the tangle of tubes and monitors. The doctors would not look him in the eye. He sat vigil through the night. In the silent watches, to the pulse of the heart monitor, during breaks from his divine plea-bargaining -- God, take me, not her -- shards of his past came hurtling at him.

He remembered his bleak boyhood in Kyoto, in the section of the city below the central train station, far removed from the world-famous temples and cherry trees. His father was an accomplished but dreamy photographer and his mother a driven, embittered woman who launched a series of struggling enterprises to feed her seven children. Junki, the youngest child, turned to the gang-controlled streets for companionship.

Junki proved himself a consummate brawler, slashing and battling with a ferocity notable even by lower Kyoto's brutal standards. First he ran with a gang, then he ran his own. He picked up both a collection of knife scars and a nickname derived from the American tough-guy films he loved: One-Eyed-Jack Junki.

He had lost his right eye in an accident when he was three years old. A Buddhist priest had told him, "Junki-san, God has taken your eye and replaced it with his own. You will have a special insight into people."

But the only thing special about Yoshida's life seemed to be its difficulty. At 18 he failed the exam for entrance into the university system, the kiss of death for a young person in Japan. A life on the streets awaited Yoshida, a violent and likely brief career shaking down construction workers for the Yakuza, the Japanese version of Cosa Nostra. He decided instead to borrow money from his mother for a plane ticket to America, the land of second chances. He touched down in Seattle on a January day in 1968. The first thing he did was cash in his return ticket. He had resolved not to return home until he had achieved success.

For a long time it seemed he would never see Japan again. He spoke no English and possessed no work permit. That first rain-swept winter he lived in a junker car and used a public restroom in west Seattle as his bathroom. As an illegal alien, he worked gut-busting, low-paying jobs in restaurant kitchens and on landscaping crews.

But things started to improve. He acquired some rudimentary English and a student visa. He enrolled at Highline Community College, where he discovered that American students were as hungry for things Japanese -- from tempura to films to Zen -- as he'd once been for things American. Junki began to teach karate at Highline. His fire and charisma -- along with his fourth-degree black-belt mastery of the Ryobukai school of the martial art -- drew students in swarms. He met a fellow Highline student named Linda McPherren at a party and immediately announced that he was going to marry her. Two weeks later, the couple was engaged. Junki and Linda married in 1973, and the next year became parents. Lucky Junki.

Dear God, take me instead.

Grace and good medicine prevailed. Kristina was out of danger, breathing normally, her liver again filtering her blood. As life flooded back into their daughter, Linda and Junki went limp with relief. A day or two passed before Junki considered the fact that the family had no health insurance.

After five days in the hospital, Kristina was well enough to go home. The nurses and doctors were all grins, Junki and Linda were glowing. But a worm of despair was already turning in Junki's brain: My God, how do I begin to pay for all this?

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