Every year, the Japan Taido Association hosts four national tournaments, one each for children, students, and adults, and the all-Japan championship. The Shakaijin Taikai is a tournament for “members of society,” which can be taken to mean adults. Basically, it excludes children and undergrads, but anyone else is free to compete. This year’s event included men…
In America, there are basically just two types of martial arts schools: big ones that make money and small ones that don’t. There are a lot of stereotypes regarding which extreme is better, but as with all flat generalizations, the reality is not so simple. In converse to the prevailing trend, there exist very large dojo…
The annual Tama Taikai is a regional tournament held in Higashi-Kurume. Participants include much of West Tokyo and parts of Saitama, Kanagawa, and Yamanashi Prefectures. It’s one of the larger “local” events, and considered kind of a warm-up for more more serious events at the end of summer which determine the teams for the four national events…
well, it’s been a month or so since i posted the warm-up poll in the right sidebar of this site. unfortunately, there were not so many responses, but i’m guessing that this is because some people were not aware of the poll to begin with. at any rate, i’m going to try again with a brand spanking new…
Note: Some people didn’t understand this article the first time around and took parts of it as an attack on my teacher — a man whom I greatly admire. I have attempted to abate this somewhat by narrowing the focus of this article and dealing with tangential issues in separate posts. Some of the content originally included here has been…
