Training these past 8months...

Ok, first budo post so if you're not nutty enough to practice martial arts, look away now. I'll divide this into three sections for kendo, iaido and jodo.

Kendo

For the past couple of months, I've been training at the Sugao Elementary School Dojo (菅生小学校道場), run by Kubota sensei (久保田先生). I got in touch with Yanai sensei (矢内先生), whom I knew from Mumeishi, and, through him, was introduced to Sugao. The senseis outnumber the deshi by quite a margin (they regularly number around a dozen) and opportunities to practice with all of them are few and far between so I tend to focus on the three or four most senior: Kubota sensei (7dan Kyoshi), Yanai sensei (7dan Kyoshi), Saeki sensei (佐伯先生) and Yazawa sensei (矢澤先生). Practicing with them is incredibly invaluable and they all shower me with more points than I can possibly absorb in one keiko but I am working through them.

The points I've been working on so far are getting my footwork back to what kendo footwork should be (years of doing more iai/jo than kendo meant that I ended up with a very wide kamae), centring my cuts (a consequence of my overactive right hand) as well as solidifying them. It's quite reassuring that I can feel my kendo improve practice by practice but it's still a long way to yondan (especially since I'm grading in Kanagawa...I hear it's one of the tougher prefectures to grade in for kendo). I also made a point of getting a heavy shinai (660g) for regular keiko and a lighter one (531g) for taikai and shinsa and I'm planning on buying a suburi-ko so we'll see if that has any effect on my kendo.

Iaido

Given that I was working at Gaba full-time, I hadn't intended on practicing at all in the first couple of months but I attended the Osaka Iaido Taikai (大阪居合道大会)  in early Decembre and the Kita-Kyushu Iaido Taikai (北九州居合道大会) in March so I tried to train at least once or twice a week. More recently, as my professional situation solidified into more of an 8:00-16:00 arrangement, I've been turning up to almost every training available (I've had to give up the Tuesday practices because of Japanese lessons).

I don't put that much emphasis on competition as a mark of what I've achieved; in my mind, the primary purpose of taikai is to put the pressure on and test my self-control. Improving on technique in the dojo is all well and good but practicing and incorporating the myriad points when being scrutinised by three or four very senior practitioners is something else entirely. I think it's closest thing we'll ever get to actual combat and as such it's an immensely valuable experience that, no matter how hard you try, you just will not get in the dojo. If you can change the points you've been taught under that kind of pressure (regardless of the number of shiai you win), I think that's an excellent guide of how much your iai has changed for the better. There's also the added bonus of being seen by sensei you might not usually be exposed to and they will sometimes give you points to work on so it's an opportunity to learn new ways of doing things and of thinking about them.

39th Kita-Kyushu Iaido Taikai (第３９回北九州居合道大会)

The first taikai I attended was the Osaka Taikai and I went fully expecting to just have the one fight then spend the rest of the day browsing the selection of iaito, shinken and other goodies. As there were around a thousand participants, it was a three-way embu in front of four shinpan (three to give the initial decision and one standing by in case of a three-way draw) and the shitei-waza consisted of two koryu (I did Gyakuto and Ukigumo) and three seitei. Amazingly, I did get through the first round but lost the second so I was very chuffed to have had two goes. In such a huge event (I don't think any other country or continent could dream of those numbers), there's obviously a wide range of abilities so I got to see some iai that was verging on the divine and some that was nightmarish and I got to see a lot more ryuha than we get in Europe: all three of the main Hayashizaki lines were represented (Muso Shinden Jushin Ryu (夢想神傳重信流), Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu (無双直伝英信流) and Muso Shinden Ryu (夢想神伝流)) as were Tamiya Ryu (田宮流), Hoki Ryu (伯耆流), Shinkage Ryu (新陰流), Shinto Munen Ryu (神道無念流) and Mugai Ryu (無外流). All in all, it was a fantastic experience and wonderful to see such a range of ryuha. My second taikai was the Kita-Kyushu Taikai in Kokura, Fukuoka Prefecture (小倉市、福岡県), and, since the participants again numbered close to a thousand, the arrangements were the same. This time, I lost my first fight (but still somehow got Fighting Spirit (敢闘賞)) but found a new iaito. Up until then I had first used Fuku-Kancho's very nice shinken then one of the dojo iaito (which was quite heavy, horribly balanced and the tsuka was a bit too long) so I was quite desperate to find a new one. It's a 2.6 and roughly the same weight but the balance is much better; cutting with it is quite tricky, though, and I'm now finding it difficult to adjust my cutting for it. This new iaito doesn't quite fight me but nor does it help me cut so I'm still working out some of the kinks but it's good to have one that doesn't try to rip my shoulders out on every cut.

As for how my iai is developing, with a fairly major grading coming up in under a year, I'm getting slightly paranoid as to how few points I'm being given around the dojo, and although I've had more over the past couple of weeks, I'm sure there's more wrong with my iai than that so to say I'm worried is a bit of an understatement. Additionally, although I have been told what I should be aiming for for my next grade, I remain uncertain as to whether or not my development is moving in the right direction, something which needs to be brought up with sensei in the next couple of weeks. My current training regime is to spend no more than five minutes on each form and to work my way through one set every evening. In the event that I finish the set with time to spare, I do the relevant to-rei and start over from the first form of that set. I find the time limit helps to focus and does wonders for my motivation to get it right (although this format goes out the window somewhat on the occasions when I do get points so I'll throw in an additional five minutes to work on that new point). I'd also noticed that my knowledge, ability and comfort with the higher forms, especially okuden, has suffered from lack of practice over the last two or three years so working through one set at a time should hopefully combat that. Because on Saturdays it is normal for people to work through the whole of seitei before moving on to koryu, I tend to practice seitei about twice as much as any of the koryu sets but this is definitely a good thing as seitei does tend to be more pedantic than koryu.

One specific habit I'm working on in all my forms is that every time I cut, my front leg doesn't quite maintain the same amount of tension as the back leg and as a result, my body bounces back ever so slightly after the cut. This, as well as an annoying little shoulder movement just before chiburi, can be clearly seen in this footage from the 2010 EIC in Paris (although that was over two and a half years ago but I have been picked up on this as recently as nine months ago), video courtesy of Joel Bergmark (I start around 3:40). To counter this, I'm focusing on freezing my whole body right after the final cut and trying to my make chiburi smoother (ie take the power out).

Jodo

My jodo practice since getting here has been rather frustrating in that I haven't been given many comments and although my technique's been feeling ok in general, this is usually a good sign that I'm not doing it right. I've been struggling with hikiotoshi for the past eighteen months or so (until then it hadn't felt too bad, then it all went down the drain) and again, considering that I have quite a serious grading coming up in April of next year, I'm starting to panic slightly.

Although there haven't been that many jodo events, I have turned up to a couple of koshukai (講習会, "seminar") including the central Kanagawa Prefecture seminar (when the local high grades pass on all the recent changes made to the seitei by the ZNKR technical committee) where we were fortunate enough to have seven out of Kanagawa's nine (I think) 8dans present. The jodo powers that be haven't actually changed anything to the katas themselves but they have clarified that, on Tachiotoshi, the initial small step back should only bring the toes of the right foot in line the with heel of the left and that the first step preparing for the first strike should be at an angle of 30 degrees. In addition to this, they have modified the way of holding weapons when not practicing and for gradings [again]; I did take a picture of Otake sensei demonstrating this but I won't put it up until I've had a chance to ask for his permission so I'll just describe it. Jo and bokuto should be held side-by-side on the right hip, with the bokuto on the inside and the jo on the outside. The bokuto should have the tsuka pointing forward, the ha pointing up and the tsukagashira and josaki should be level. With regards to the hands, the right hand should be holding them at the right hip and the left should be holding both the jo and tsuba with the thumb on the tsuba. Lastly, both weapons should be horizontal or with the forward ends angled slightly upwards (the logic being that the bokuto is theoretically in a saya and, although the thumb is holding on to the tsuba, the angle is an added measure against it falling out).

Well, there goes my first budo post. I doubt I'll write more than one post a month (I don't think my life, budo or otherwise, is interesting enough to warrant more than that), unless something earth-shattering happens. So, for now, that's all folks!

Post move...

Part II of my first 8 months here.

I'll start this post with our move down to our current flat in Kawasaki. Since our moving experiences in London had all been painstakingly lengthy searching process, we started looking for a flat in Kawasaki about a month before our planned move but as it turned out, we found a perfect flat almost immediately and then had to negotiate to delay the move itself. Given that Lucy's Japanese is near-fluent, she did most of the negotiating and dealing with the paperwork. It all happened very quickly and we arranged to move in mid-March (16th). Located in Oshima-itchoume, only a twenty minute walk away from both Kawasaki station and Ishido sensei's dojo (道場, "training hall") and with numerous konbinis and a decent supermarket within easy walking distance, the location is perfect. Inside, it's what's known as a "one room apartment," meaning that bedroom and living room are all one room with only a thin partition separating it from the kitchen.

Part of Via Cittadella, a street of cafés and restaurants

We'd already decided to rent a van to move everything and I investigated a couple of rental companies. One of the advantages of having passed my driving test in the UK is that I was able to obtain a Japanese driving licence without having to take the test (other than a short eye test) but even though I presented a Japanese driving licence, the first company I looked into (Nippon Rent-a-car) threw a bit of a wobbly and were reluctant to give me any straight answers; Toyota Rent-a-car, on the other hand, was incredibly easy and straightforward. We initially planned to move everything and raid Ikea for furniture before taking the van back in the evening but things didn't quite go as planned. As it stood, we had to take it back the following morning and we were both so knackered that we could barely be bothered to put the bed togetther before conking out on it. After the first three days of living there, we'd finally put everything together and registered at the Kawasaki Ward Office as residents of Kawasaki Ward, the central part of Kawasaki City.


Shortly before moving, I'd also managed to find a new job working as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in a junior high school, teaching kids aged 12-15. Working for an eikaiwa had its good sides: I could choose my working schedule; I could take a day off whenever I felt like it; I met some fantastic people, both coworkers and students; the atmosphere was relatively relaxed. The main issue was with the salary, as is sadly so often the case: I was being paid Y1,500/lesson (while the "clients" were paying around Y7,000) but if I didn't get any students, I wouldn't get paid, even if I spent the whole day there. There were some days when I started work at 10am and didn't get any students until about 5pm. Of course, I could work evenings but the whole reason I left event catering was that I wanted my evenings back so I started looking around and found a job with a company that provides ALTs to schools from elementary school to high school. I was lucky enough to be sent to schools in Kawasaki, only 50mins' commute away but, while both schools are public junior high schools, they are quite distinct.

The school I started in is slightly further away from home than the other and I started at the same time as three other new teachers (PE; Japanese; home economics) and we each had to introduce ourselves at Monday's assembly in front of some 500 kids; I was told, however, to speak only English, which made the whole thing much easier. We were also introduced by the headmaster to the rest of the teaching staff so I didn't have to speak a word of Japanese. The second school I went to was a rather interesting experience. I walked in the gate (the main school building was on my right with the playground on my left), while groups of half a dozen or so kids were practicing their baseball skills but I didn't really pay them any mind. After a few seconds, I noticed that there were repeated shouts of "Ohayou gozaimasu" (おはようございます, "good morning") and as I looked, I realised that, as I was walking past, each group would stop, face me, take their baseball caps off and bow as they greeted me. Unsure of the correct response, I nodded and replied with the same greeting. I then met the headmaster, had a chat with him and introduced myself (in Japanese) to the other teachers. The main difference in these schools, I felt, was that the latter was much more friendly than the latter: we had a nomikai (飲み会, lit. "drinking party"), at which all the new teachers had to give a short speech and I got to know everyone very well; all the staff are much more likely to stop and have a chat than in the first school; I was invited to the sports day.

As for teaching itself, I always knew working with kids is immensely challenging and I have a huge amount of respect for those who make it their career. The first-grade kids are fantastic and a pleasure to teach; I guess they're also closer to that stage of childhood where they'll be entertained with a cardboard box which, if you add it to their energy and friendliness, makes for a very entertaining experience. The second- and third-graders are more of a challenge as some of them are getting illusions that they're "too cool for school" but at least the second-graders are warming to me. We'll see how long the third-graders take...

"After using the toilet, let's be sure to flush."

Over the past coupld of months of teaching, one of the reactions I get almost daily from the kids is an expression of surprise that I have blue eyes (they don't seem so interested in my height as some of the kids are taller than me). At the moment, this still amuses me but I'm sure there will come a point when it'll be as annoying as being complimented on my use of chopsticks or the assumption that I can't write kanji (漢字; lit. "Chinese characters" used in Japanese and adopted in the 5th century of Han-dynasty China).

Life since then has consisted mostly of tackling my new job and getting to know the are we now live in. We visited Kawasaki Daishi (川崎大師), a large temple officially known as Heiken-ji (平間寺) serving as the headquarters for the Chizan sect (智山派) of Shingon Buddhism (真言宗) and had a proper nosey around the station for good, cheap restaurants and bars. We also made good use of the Kawasaki branch of Genki Sushi, a kaitenzushi (回転寿司, conveyor-belt sushi restaurant) place. The weather has also got much warmer and the temperature stays nicely in the mid-twenties. Roll on the summer!

Five months in...

Given that I've started this blog a good six months (almost seven) into my arrival in Japan, I guess I should start with a summary of what happened until my first relocation.

I arrived at Narita Airport on 27th Octobre 2013 and went through customs and immigration "comme une lettre à la poste" (lit. "like a letter through the post") as my dad would say. I still had to explain the various gifts of whisky and biscuits (as opposed to weapons) to the customs guy but I was still surprised at how smoothly I went through. I had heard, with no small measure of disappointment, that the old Alien Registration Cards (外国人登録, gaikokujin touroku) were being phased out in favour of the new Residence Card (在留カード, zairyuu kaado) and I was fully prepared for a long bureaucratic process but it took less than two minutes.

Lucy (my girlfriend) was thankfully waiting for me and helped me lug my bags, one of which she could comfortably have used as a three-bedroom house, out to Koenji (高円寺) on the other side of Tokyo from the airport. I had arranged to move into a share house on the day of my arrival and had arranged to meet Koda-san (幸田さん), the house manager, at the station. Surprisingly, he had a car and drove us to the house, although it was only a 10min walk away. I had previously stayed with a share house agency called Sakura House, I decided to go with an agency called Oakhouse, primarily because they were cheaper (my room in Koenji cost Y65,000) and had a room available in a convenient location but also because I could go straight to the house whereas, had I gone with Sakura House, I would've had to visit their offices in Shinjuku to sign the contract, pay the first month's rent and collect the key before I could go to the house itself. I'm not sure if share houses are specific to Japan but I suspect similar accommodation arrangements exist elsewhere purely because the convenience for medium-length stays (too long for a hotel, not long enough to bother renting a flat). One reason they might be specific to Japan is the reluctance many Japanese landlords feel about accepting foreign tenants and the many extra fees involved (deposit, key money, thank you money to name but a few), although these trends are slowly disappearing. The share house systems involves renting a room (furnished or non-furnished) in a house and sharing facilities such as the bathroom, toilet and kitchen with the other tenants.

Numbers vary but I ended up sharing with a total of fifteen other people, eleven guys and four girls, and despite there being two toilets for the guys and one for the girls, there was still only one shower for twelve of us. Over the course of the following couple weeks, I met the rest of my housemates, the majority of whom were Japanese with a sprinkling of Koreans and one each of Taiwanese, French, German and American. The first meetings were as varied as the nationalities represented, some taking the form of long conversations while others involved silently walking past each other on the way to or from the kitchen or shower. The former all proved to be very friendly and a very welcoming bunch. Most of the Asians did not speak much English which fortunately had the effect of scratching some of the rust from my Japanese. My room itself was tiny (only 4.95m2) and I could easily touch both walls without fully extending my arms but it was big enough for my purposes.

I later found out that Koenji is regarded as a very cool and trendy place and it was easy to see why. The walk to the station consisted of a small high street lined with quite a variety of shops, bars and restaurants, from the ubiquitous convenience stores (or "konbini" as they're called here) to liquor stores with a surprisingly decent stock of spirits to ramen and sushi restaurants to the best Italian restaurant I've been to in Japan. Quite a nice walk, if you ignore the pachinko parlour, seedy stairs leading down into establishments of questionable morality and the women with too much makeup offering "massaaji". After a few months, you get very good at ignoring those less-than-pleasant parts of the street and focus on the more enjoyable bars, restaurants and cafés (including an owl cafe with live owls!).

The work I'd found (from my previous home in London) was as a one-to-one English instructor with an eikaiwa (英会話; "English conversation school") called Gaba, one of the biggest and most well-known schools in Japan. In preparation for beginning work at this new company, I had to register at the Ward Office (the Japanese equivalent of the Town Hall), procure myself a mobile phone and bank account. The first task was, again, surprisingly simple and straightforward: I just turned up, filled out the relevant forms and submitted them, all within the space of 90mins or so. It was a relief to find out that my Japanese hadn't decayed quite as much as I'd previously thought and that I was able to understand and answer the majority of questions with little resort to international sign language or desperately looking words up on an electronic dictionary.

No, the fun came when I had to acquire a bank account and mobile phone. Now, to get a bank account with any major bank in Japan, you must have a phone number; but to get a mobile phone, you must have a bank account. It sounded like a simpler but no less impossible version of Astérix's eighth task in The Twelve Tasks of Astérix until I just made up a number that could pass for a phone number at the bank, guessing that it would be a while before they actually tried to use it to contact me and that I could always change it at a later date.

Then I had to attend the week of training before starting work in my assigned Learning Studio (LS) in Shinjuku and it was immediately clear to me that training or orientation weeks for any company are a pointless exercise in futility. It had been over seven years since my last such experience and whereas that had been very interesting and taught me all the skills I needed for the job (skills I still use to this day), we learned everything we needed to know about one-to-one teaching within the first couple of hours and the rest was just repetition. They also were presenting what they were teaching us as groundbreaking and radically new: that language learning solely through grammatical study and repetitive drills is not effective and the Path of True Language Teaching is to avoid all references to grammatical rules. While current language learning theory certainly agrees that repetition by rote and the study of linguistic syntax is not the only path to mastery of a language, there needs to be some awareness of syntax and the way words work with each other in a phrase. Furthermore, they were selling this approach not only as original but also as the sole product of the company. This entire process was repeated when I changed to an Assistant Language Teaching (ALT) joband had to undergo training for that but luckily, Korey (one of the other people I had to endure the initial Gaba training with) was there and were able to keep each other relatively sane.

Christmas Day came and went (Lucy and I both spent the day working but had a nice dinner in an English-style pub in Shibuya called The Hobgoblin) as did New Year's Day (we went to a club in Shibuya again for the count-down). A couple of days into January, we participated in a Japanese New Year's tradition: Hatsumode (初詣). The word literally means "the first visit to a temple" and that's exactly what it is. Whole families visit the family temple or shrine to pray for good fortune for the coming year. As with so many Japanese traditions, the religious dimension has been forgotten and for most people it is just a custom with little religious significance; only some people actually used the chozuya (手水舎, also called a "temizuya," this is the font where people wash hands and rinse out their mouth before making prayers). We joined Yoshimura sensei, a high graded (8dan kyoshi iaido, 7dan kyoshi jodo) budo (武道 "martial arts") teacher and his family for their Hatsumode. Lucy was lucky enough to be able to borrow a kimono from his daughter as they are roughly the same dimension but, since I am the opposite shape from Yoshimura sensei himself and both of his sons, I wore a suit. Given that we visited Meiji-jingu (明治神宮), the largest shrine in Tokyo, it was incredibly busy and we approached the shrine itself at snail's pace. It was surprising to see a police presence but then it was apparent that they were not there in any peace-keeping facility: they held signs which acted as a kind of traffic lights for humans, with one side bearing characters for "stop" in red and the other bearing those for "go" in green.

We then went to an izakaya (居酒屋, the Japanese equivalent of a pub) for dinner and I had my first taste of whale and fugu (the infamous poisonous puffer-fish). I know whale's a controversial subject but I'm just going to go with the Japanese excuse: it was research. I was researching the taste and here are my findings: it was nice enough, kind of like a very tender steak with a touch more iron. Nice, but nothing amazing. The fugu was rather similar...nice, unlike anything I had ever tasted before, but again, nothing fantastic. I'm not going to making a point of having whale or fugu again or hunting out places that sell it...

Lastly, there was my first experience of snow in Japan. January 13th, I went to bed with clear skies, although it was still absolutely freezing, even inside my room (insulation is absolutely terrible here, although this is again slowly changing). The next morning, I found the street outside absolutely covered in snow, a good couple of inches thick and within a couple of minutes of stepping outside the door, I was covered in snow that would have made any European ski resort proud! This amount of snow would have paralysed the London Tube but Japan Rail (JR) and the Tokyo Metro just shrugged it off with a few delays, Japanese style (max. 15mins)!

Wow, that post ended up being far longer than expected and while I haven't covered everything, I've mentioned and described the things that stuck most in my mind from my first five months in Tokyo...