Taido Holiday Wish List 2006

With Thanksgiving next week, the win­ter hol­i­day sea­son is fast upon us. Every year around this time, I’m forced to wres­tle with what I feel is a very stress­ful and dif­fi­cult aspect of social mem­ber­ship in America — the giv­ing of gifts.

I am ter­ri­ble at gift-giving, and if I thought I could get away with it, I would boy­cott the hol­i­days whole­sale. The sad real­ity is that escap­ing the hol­i­days is near-impossible; even in years when I’ve done my best to let friends and fam­ily know that I wasn’t plan­ning to par­tic­i­pate in the con­sump­tion frenzy, some­body always man­ages not to get the memo, and I’m stuck feel­ing guilty. The alter­na­tive, embrac­ing the mad­ness in the spirit of good­will, just serves to remind me that I have absolutely no skill at choos­ing qual­ity gifts for even my clos­est friends.

However, my mother is fab­u­lous at find­ing the right gifts for the right peo­ple. She seems to have a year-round list of peo­ple who need gifts for var­i­ous events, and she tends to find exactly the right thing for each per­son on that list. With me, she usu­ally asks me in advance if there’s any­thing spe­cial I would like, and this was the case last week. Most years, I have to spend a few days think­ing before I can answer this ques­tion, but this year, I actu­ally had a request — I want an alarm clock that will play music from my iPod.

When I’m try­ing to decide what kinds of things I want (and this goes equally for when I’m decid­ing what things to pur­chase for myself), I tend to think in terms of two main cat­e­gories: stuff for music (i.e. gui­tar strings, cables, amp parts) and stuff for Taido (i.e. uni­forms, train­ing equip­ment, books, videos). Since they occupy most of my time, these two con­sti­tute the major­ity of my mon­e­tary expen­di­tures every year, out­side of liv­ing expenses, such as food, clothes, and transportation.

This year, I’ve been look­ing around, and I’m real­iz­ing that I have almost every­thing I want. Maybe that’s why I was able to decide on a tan­gi­ble prod­uct to ask from my mother so eas­ily. However, a man can always dream, and though I have to say I am happy with what I’ve already got, I can always think of big­ger and bet­ter ideas for what I’d like to see hap­pen­ing around me. Since I assume that most of you are not inter­ested in my music or life-necessities wish lists, I’m going to share my Taido wish list below — all the things I’d like to have for Taido over the next year or so.

My Taido Xmas List

1. Of course, I am con­tin­u­ally wish­ing for an American-flag print, satin karate uni­form. Joe Lewis and Chuck Norris used to wear these back in the 80s, and I swear they used to be for sale in every mar­tial arts mag­a­zine I ever read. Nowadays, I can’t find one anywhere.
2. A DVD ref­er­ence video of every hokei in Taido. This doesn’t have to be a giant pro­duc­tion: just a cam­era and some­body doing the “clas­sic and accepted” ver­sions of each form. The hokei have already been can­on­ized in the Taido Kyohan, so I don’t see a big deal about pro­duc­ing a video of them. We could get Nakano and Miyashita to do the –tai forms and Konishi and Tabata to do the –in forms. It would take about three hours to record and less to edit, but it would be invalu­able to instruc­tors and stu­dents all over the world.
3. A video of my friend, Ohashi, win­ning jis­sen at the All-Japan tour­na­ment a cou­ple of weeks ago.
4. Some bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion of Saiko Shihan’s life: pho­tos, writ­ings, proof of any of the numer­ous sto­ries I’ve heard about him, videos or tran­scripts of sem­i­nars he taught, et cetera. Shukumine was a mar­tial arts genius, and I think Taidoka should be proud of what he accom­plished dur­ing his life­time. Unfortunately, very lit­tle evi­dence of his exis­tence is avail­able for pub­lic con­sump­tion. It’s not as if he lived in a cave — let’s get some good biog­ra­phy up on the web someplace.
5. An English trans­la­tion of Taido Gairon, which is the mas­ter text of Taido the­ory. I have a Japanese copy, and given the time, I can read through bits and pieces of it, but it would be won­der­ful to have this book avail­able as a ref­er­ence to those stu­dents who don’t know any Japanese at all. Last year, Alvar and I got the ver­bal OK from Yoriko Shukumine and Nakajima Sensei to have the book pro­fes­sion­ally trans­lated, but it can’t be done with­out some orga­ni­za­tional coop­er­a­tion as well.
6. Similarly, I’d even­tu­ally like to see a trans­la­tion of Shin Karatedo Kyohan, Shukumine’s book about karate. I’ve never even been able to get my hands on a copy of this one, but I’ve heard that it’s still rel­e­vant and poten­tially impor­tant for seri­ous Taido study.
7. A bet­ter floor. When Georgia Tech tore down the old stu­dent ath­letic facil­ity and built the new, state-of-the-art recre­ation cen­ter, the excel­lent com­bat­ives area floor­ing was moved to a much smaller space and reassem­bled by stu­dent vol­un­teers; sur­prise — they did a shitty job. Not to men­tion, the cov­er­ing is car­pet, which gets cleaned only about once a semes­ter. I’d love to have a big­ger place to prac­tice with bet­ter flooring.
8. A bet­ter uni­form sup­plier. Kamikaze was a good find for us back about seven years ago; they offered the high­est qual­ity for the price I could find, along with the abil­ity to do cus­tom embroi­dery with­out any major dif­fi­cul­ties. However, they’ve changed their uni­form cuts, and we’re tired of deal­ing with the insane ship­ping times. The medium-quality uni­forms sold by the honbu dojo are sim­ply too expen­sive to require for col­lege stu­dents, and real Taidogi, com­fort­able as they are, are not only expen­sive, but a seri­ous pain in the ass to acquire.
9. More stu­dents. More stu­dents at Tech means the we have more chance to find great stu­dents. Every semes­ter, about half of the new sign-ups drop out a lit­tle after midterms, and half of those who remain give up dur­ing their sec­ond semes­ters. Tech is a dif­fi­cult school, and Taido is a demand­ing art, so I’ve come to the posi­tion that we need to play a bit of a num­bers game. Our club cur­rently has no brown belts, two green belts, and one pur­ple belt. Everyone else? White or black. We need more new students.
10. And a par­tridge in a pear tree.

And really, that’s it. I promise that if all these wishes come to be some­time dur­ing 2007, I will absolutely not com­plain until 2008. At least not about any­thing related to Taido.