Students From This Simi Valley Dojo Turned 104 Karate Movements Into A Large Donation for Charity

Simi Valley Dojo Raises over $3,000 for The Samaritan Center — A Lesson About What It Means to Serve

(CLAIR | Simi Valley, CA) — They weren’t fighting opponents. They were fighting hunger and homelessness.

Students at Simi Shotokan Karate presented a $3,400 check to the Samaritan Center — money raised over three months through a physical challenge rooted in one of the oldest traditions in martial arts. Samaritan Center Executive Director Annika Sumby accepted the donation at the dojo during a brief ceremony held between evening classes.

The man behind the effort was Bruce Kanegai, the dojo’s founder and head instructor. He has been teaching Shotokan Karate in Simi Valley for more than six decades, and community service has long been woven into how he runs his school. But to understand why he pushed his students through this particular challenge — and why he chose this particular organization — you have to understand something about Kanegai himself.

He is not easy to summarize.

Kanegai spent 34 years teaching art at Simi Valley High School, where he earned Teacher of the Year honors six times. He holds a 5th-degree black belt and has trained in countries around the world. In 1967, he was part of the first American karate team ever to visit Japan. He appeared on the CBS reality show Survivor: Panama, where, during one stretch, a storm with 60 mph winds left him without shelter — so he performed karate movements for six straight hours to generate enough body heat to survive. Back home in Simi Valley, he was bitten by a rattlesnake at Simi Hills golf course, an incident later featured on three national television programs.

His wife has counted 52 emergency room visits since they met.

“I should have died so many times,” Kanegai said. “I feel blessed to be alive.”

When it came time to choose a community partner for the dojo’s fundraiser, Kanegai turned to an old friend, Dan Rosen. Rosen, an active Rotary Club service member, pointed him toward the Samaritan Center and its executive director.

“Annika does a fabulous job,” Rosen told him. “Not many people know what they do.”

Kanegai listened. He designed a fundraiser around one of the most demanding drills in his curriculum — the 100-kata challenge. A kata is an ancient sequence of fighting movements, anywhere from 26 to 60 techniques per set, performed at full intensity while the practitioner visualizes real opponents attacking from every direction. Completing 100 in a row without stopping means executing roughly 3,000 individual movements. It is the same drill that black belt candidates must survive during the school’s grueling four-day training camp. Kanegai told his students they were going to do it for the Samaritan Center — and then find sponsors willing to pay for every kata they completed.

The fundraiser ran from September through November. Twenty of his 65 students took the challenge. The youngest was 10 years old.

“People pass out on it,” Kanegai said. “And several young kids stepped up when some adults were afraid to do it.”

The $3,400 total raised came from two sources: the kata sponsors, and donations from fans of Kanegai’s Survivor appearance — some of whom had never met him in person but gave to the cause anyway.

The Samaritan Center has been operating in Simi Valley for more than 30 years, yet many residents still don’t know it exists. The organization helps people experiencing housing and food insecurity rebuild their lives, connecting them to case workers, job training, rental assistance, and resources through the Ventura County support system. In 2024, the Center processed 153 client intakes, with case workers meeting clients weekly or monthly to help them navigate the path toward stable housing. It is slow, difficult work — made harder by a fact that most residents don’t know: Simi Valley has no overnight shelter. With local rents as high as they are, finding affordable housing for clients is the organization’s most persistent challenge.

This $3,000 donation from a karate school doesn’t completely solve that problem but it helps — a lot. It moves the work forward, and it came from somewhere genuine — students who earned it through discipline, and a teacher who has spent a lifetime proving that surviving is only worth something if you use it to serve others.

“I give credit to my students,” Kanegai said.

The dojo plans to continue its monthly challenges and its community partnerships. For the residents the Samaritan Center serves, the support arrived right on time.