Memorial Wall
Honoring Our Small Circle Jujitsu™ Family
End of One Era; Beginning of Another
In December 1941, Bernice and Wally Jay (who would go on to found the art of Small Circle Jujitsu) watched in shock as the smoke from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor filled the skies to the West of them. Together, they lived through such monumental events as the Second World War, the space race, the computer revolution, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was different time. An age of giants. And an era which faded a little further into the pages of history with Bernice’s passing on February 7, 2026, at the age of one hundred and three.
Bernice Jay
Wally Jay’s international reputation as a world-class martial artist, the founder of Small Circle Jujitsu, and a consummate gentleman, is widely known and very well documented. What is less widely publicized, however, is Bernice’s role in the Jay family legacy.
As a child, Bernice excelled in many sports, including volleyball, softball, and basketball. After meeting and marrying Wally in 1941, she took up Judo as well, eventually earning a third dan under Professor Henry Okazaki in an age when such achievements were extraordinarily rare. In fact, Bernice was the last living Okazaki black belt before her passing. But just as impressive as her martial prowess—maybe even more so—was her skill in the associated art of restorative massage.
The House of Pain
The Seifukujutsu method is a type of restorative massage that aims to break down and rebuild muscle tissue over time, while also stimulating the body’s energy channels. The energetic aspects of the art are similar to acupuncture or shiatsu. The deep tissue massage is performed using a rocking, ironing, or pulsing movement with the forearm or elbow, and also employs many other parts of the body, including the hands and even feet in the form of back-walking. It is greatly assisted by the application of a special liniment formulated by Master Okazaki known as, “satsuzai” (or more colloquially, “bug juice”), the recipe of which is a closely-guarded family secret.
Bernice’s powerful deep tissue massage, combined with the usual training bumps and bruises that required such treatment, caused the Jay dojo to become known as, “The House of Pain.” In an interview, she once remarked that, “The healing arts went hand in hand with the martial arts” in both the Okazaki dojo and the Jay household. Over the years she successfully treated many of the Professor’s friends and students, including a mechanic who was unable to return to work after an arm injury, and a young boy with polio who lived on Professor Wally’s mail route.
Current Small Circle Jujitsu Headmaster Leon Jay loves to tell the story about his mother—well into her eighties at the time—standing on a kitchen counter in order to reach the ceiling while doing a bit of spring cleaning when she suddenly lost her footing. Rather than tumbling to the floor in an injured heap as might be expected of anyone even approaching such advanced years, Bernice executed a perfect break fall, caught her cleaning cloth, popped right back up, and continued on about her business!
Will Higginbotham
Less than six months before the final honbu class, the Small Circle family lost another senior leader: Will Higginbotham. A loyal student and senior instructor of Headmaster Leon Jay (and his father before him), few, if any practitioners ever managed to fuse the principles of the Small Circle system with the power of pressure points to such an elegant and elevated degree.
Right around the time of his passing, Will was being interviewed for a martial arts book, and shared the following:
- What’s the first move you do in kata? Salutation. And it’s all right there: Amount of force, target, angle, direction…
- I don’t study martial arts for me, I study them for you. I already have a pretty long reach and a pretty solid punch. Martial arts are a way for me to learn to subdue an attacker without having to pummel him into the ground.
- At the highest level, martial arts are not about what the art can do for you; it’s about what you can do for the art. We all have something we’re really good at. What do you bring to the table?
Ed Lake
A third luminary of the Small Circle world taken from this world too soon was Ed Lake. Described by Leon Jay as, “my brother,” the current Small Circle Jujitsu Headmaster went on to add: “We were good friends. He was the one who suggested that we should do seminars together when I moved to England in 1990s. He and I worked together for years in order to find ways to better integrate Small Circle Jujutsu and Kyusho Jitsu.”
The Future
These three martial artists were giants of a former age. But with the passing of any era, a new one has also begun. Small Circle Jujitsu continues to grow and evolve (as its Founder intended): Six new Principles have been added to the traditional canon. The curriculum has been updated and refreshed. Membership continues to expand to many countries all around the world. And leadership has been entrusted to a Board of Directors with the intention that the organization will outlast any individual member.
