Two Taido Jokes

So in Japanese, the word jodan means joke. It’s one of the first Japanese words I ever learned, but in a Taido con­text, I always thought of jodan as refer­ring to high kicks and punches. It’s also one of our three kamae.

A few years ago, I got inter­ested in jodan­ga­mae and began to prac­tice it pretty seri­ously. I worked on all kinds of inter­est­ing appli­ca­tions for var­i­ous tech­niques and other move­ments using jodan. Occasionally, I even find myself using it in jis­sen to change direc­tion or level. I espe­cially like using jodan with sen­tai movements.

So one time, at a spe­cial train­ing day for Tokai University’s Taido club, I was work­ing with about 40 pur­ple and green belt stu­dents on their sen­tai. We did all kinds of games and drills and other kinds of prac­tice, and I was telling a few stu­dents dur­ing a break that they should spend more time work­ing on their jodan­ga­mae. One of them replied “jodan desho?” which, in con­text, should have meant “you mean jodan, right?” So I con­firmed that I was sug­gest­ing he prac­tice jodan­ga­mae. Again, he said “jodan desho?” and I got it — he was say­ing “you’ve gotta be jok­ing.” Sadly for him, I was not, and the entire group went on to prac­tice jodan­ga­mae for about 45 minutes.

I learned two things from this expe­ri­ence: nobody but me likes to prac­tice jodan­ga­mae, and there is always more than one way to look at any sit­u­a­tion — one of which is usu­ally much fun­nier than the others.

And so any­way, you now know a Japanese Taido joke. Congrats.

Speaking of jokes, check this out:

爆笑レッドカーペット1 (6/4/08) by KonchuT

This guy has appeared on Japanese TV at least a cou­ple of times. For those of you who don’t get the J-talk, he’s basi­cally telling a story that makes a joke of some Taido tech­nique names. The punch lines of the two ver­sions I saw were “untai 2dangeri,” and “hen­tai man­jigeri.” One of them was sort of funny; one was sort of stu­pid. Apparently, he went to the Japan Taido Association guys and asked them if he could go on TV and make a joke of Taido. “It’ll be good pub­lic­ity,” he prob­a­bly told them. They said OK.

So, before, I would say that I prac­tice Taido, and peo­ple would say “I’ve never heard of it.” Now they just laugh at me. Great publicity.

People here con­stantly talk about try­ing to make Taido a major mar­tial art in Japan. Then they go and hold openly biased tour­na­ments and let this guy make Taido look like a joke on national TV. Brilliant strategizing.