2006 US Taido Summer Camp

Unless there’s a damn good rea­son not to (like our 30^th Anniversary Tournament last year), American Taido hosts a yearly prac­tice excur­sion some­time dur­ing the sum­mer. We load up the cars, stock up on beer, and drive the entire school to the beach for three days of prac­tic­ing and par­ty­ing together. Year after year, sum­mer camp is one of the most excit­ing and fun events for American Taido teach­ers and stu­dents. I love sum­mer camp.

My fam­ily skipped camp for our first few years in Taido, but I have great mem­o­ries of each camp I attended. At my first sum­mer camp in 1988, Bryan and I fed potato chips to alli­ga­tors from the back porch. Later that evening, Mitsuaki and I had a joint birth­day party.

My black belt test date was announced at sum­mer camp in 1992. In 1994, I remem­ber being ner­vous head­ing to Shukumine Sensei’s room at five in the morn­ing to deliver his gi and break­fast. In 1998, Bryan and I took the first group of our own stu­dents from Georgia Tech. Bryan made his sur­prise return after three years in Colorado at sum­mer camp in 2003, and about a week before I moved to Japan, I demon­strated for my 4dan pro­mo­tion at sum­mer camp 2003. I could prob­a­bly write a few pages about every sum­mer camp I’ve attended, but I don’t want to bore you.

Why I Flew to America for the Weekend

I wasn’t able to make it to camp in 2004. I had a good excuse — liv­ing in another coun­try does make it dif­fi­cult, but I really wanted to be there. Besides the usual good times, Bryan tested for 3dan that year, and I felt ter­ri­ble that I couldn’t be there to sup­port him. I had planned on miss­ing this year’s camp too, but as it turned out, I couldn’t not be there.

As most read­ers of this site are aware, three of my stu­dents from Georgia Tech have been work­ing their way through the process of test­ing for shodan. That process con­cluded at sum­mer camp this year, and our club has now grad­u­ated our first three black belts. I’m more than a lit­tle proud of them, so I couldn’t jus­tify miss­ing sum­mer camp and not being there to watch their tests. So I took a few days off work, bought a plane ticket, packed my bags, and went.

Traveling Light

Since i’m mov­ing back to America within a cou­ple of months, one of the things I have to think about is how to get three years’ worth of accu­mu­lated pos­ses­sions out of my cur­rent home and across the ocean to my next home. One side ben­e­fit of this trip to Atlanta for sum­mer camp is that I was able to pack up a lot of books and videos and carry them home for stor­age now rather than pay­ing to ship them next month. I thought this was a great idea and gave myself a men­tal high five for think­ing of it. That is, until was lug­ging two (exactly) 23 kilo suit­cases and one 14 kilo “car­ryon” from train to bus to train to check-in. My com­bined bag­gage actu­ally weighed very nearly as much as I do. With every step of effort, I told myself that at least I wouldn’t have to carry all that stuff in a few weeks.

Luckily for me, I was able to con­vince Bryan to pick me up at the air­port and help me lug every­thing to the house. I was actu­ally a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that I wasn’t stopped at cus­toms, because I wanted to joke about hav­ing a bag full of chi­nese babies for sale, but per­haps it’s bet­ter that I didn’t (though I have found that cus­toms agents on the whole have much bet­ter senses of humor than do immi­gra­tions offi­cers). After (almost exactly) 24 hours of tran­sit, I was quite happy to sit back in Bryan’s Jetta and allow some­one else to be in con­trol of my plans.

My Plans

Bryan is prob­a­bly the rea­son I went to Atlanta. I wanted to, but Bryan con­vinced me that I needed to. I told him that, should I be able to make it, I was going to leave every­thing up to him as far as plan­ning and logis­tics. And I must say that Bryan knows me well — the first plan on the docket was a trip to the Royal Oak Pub (at which I prac­ti­cally lived for quite a while before mov­ing to Japan) for some food and drink. However, since we were work­ing on short time, we decided to stop by Tech to check out the last prac­tice ses­sion before camp, which was sched­uled to be an infor­mal, free review session.

Of course, I had been prac­ti­cally immo­bi­lized for most of my trip, so I couldn’t resist mov­ing around a bit and play­ing a lit­tle Taido. I got to meet a few new stu­dents and also got to see all of our black belt can­di­dates. I don’t remem­ber why it came up, but Chad and I got on the sub­ject of hokei, so I decided to make a new ver­sion of sen­tai no hokei. I doubt he’ll remem­ber it, but I do. I think that, with a few adjust­ments, it may be worth teach­ing as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the orig­i­nal ver­sion. The idea of hav­ing sev­eral dif­fi­culty lev­els of each hokei is some­thing that I’ve been play­ing with lately, so this may make it into the cur­ricu­lum at some point.

Anyway, we didn’t stay long at tech. There was a pint of Bass wait­ing for me at the pub, so we headed along. All of the the Tech group com­ing to sum­mer camp joined us, and I ate the biggest, greasi­est burger I had had in over a year. We talked about Taido and not-Taido, the past and the future, and how cool it was to be hang­ing out together after such a long time. And there was some giv­ing of gifts.

Once a few years ago, Uchida Sensei was really pissed at all the black belts. I don’t remem­ber who had done what, but he was basi­cally livid. He had us all sit­ting around in a cir­cle, chew­ing us about some­thing that must have had to do with one of us get­ting a lit­tle bit of a big head. He told us “I don’t care you have pink belt! Nobody spe­cial!” Now, I got over los­ing the feel­ing of being a “beau­ti­ful and unique snowflake,” but I never for­got about that pink belt. As my first two black belts have grad­u­ally dis­in­te­grated, and I have too much dig­nity to wear one with stripes on it, I’ve had to search high and low for suit­able replace­ments. Though I won’t be wear­ing it in classes, I now have a shiny new pink belt, cour­tesy of Tech Taido.

After all that, my only plan was to get a few hours of sleep in a real bed.

"6AM, Sharp"

That’s the time that Sensei claims we always leave the dojo for sum­mer camp. Actually, I can’t remem­ber ever leav­ing at just that time, but we’re usu­ally pretty close. I felt sur­pris­ingly chip­per con­sid­er­ing that Bolot had sub­verted my plans for sleep with a steady stream of beer and inter­est­ing ques­tions. However, the two hours of sleep I did get had to be about the most sat­is­fy­ing rest I’ve had in a very long time.

Summer camp is one of my things. I’m hard core about sum­mer camp. It’s one of the times that I really kick ass in Taido. Every year, par­ents tell me how much their kids loved prac­tic­ing with me. Adult stu­dents tell me that I’ve opened their eyes to parts of Taido they hadn’t seen before. I run my ass off, work­ing like a migrant farmer, but I have an incred­i­ble time. Summer camp is just part of my Taido genetic struc­ture, so when we showed up at the dojo to join the group, it was like read­ing my favorite book (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in case you were won­der­ing) or run­ning into my best friend from high school (Ed Kennedy, in case you were wondering).

Mitsuaki, Brendan, Dmag (a nick­name I had no idea would take off — it just seemed like there were too many Davids that night…), and of course Bryan were all there — the guys with whom I came of age in Taido. I don’t want to get sappy, but I really miss these guys when I don’t see them for a while, and it had been almost a year. There wasn’t much time to chat, but just see­ing each other felt good. After a few “nice to see you“s and a quick review of the sched­ule, we jumped in the cars and pulled out onto Spalding Drive. It was 6:02 AM.

I won’t give you the road-trip trav­elog, but rest assured, we ate water-proof donuts and drank insanely caf­feinated bev­er­ages. I ate my yearly McDonald’s sausage bis­cuit (sum­mer camp is the one time I con­de­scend to eat such filth), and before we knew it, we were in Panama City Beach, Florida, also known as the Redneck Riviera.

To the Beach!

Once at the resort, we checked in, ate lunch, passed out room keys, and intro­duced every­one. Then, we all went to our rooms and changed for prac­tice on the beach.

We warmed up together briefly and then broke up into groups for tech­ni­cal prac­tice. My group’s ages ranged from about five to nine years old. I really love work­ing with kids that age, and I love teach­ing begin­ners, but these kids were not begin­ners. The ros­ter I was given for plan­ning prac­tices included hen­tai no hokei and some pretty dif­fi­cult tech­niques such as sen­jogeri and ashigarami, but I told myself that these kids had to be good to make it so far at such young ages. I was cer­tain that we would have no problems.

I was wrong. Practicing on the beach is dif­fi­cult. There are a lot of dis­trac­tions, it’s (really, really) hot, the sand gets all over you and makes it dif­fi­cult to move well, the sun and SPF-laced sweat get in your eyes… My kids were not hav­ing it. They for­got every­thing. They couldn’t remem­ber untai no hokei. They couldn’t con­cen­trate for even a minute on Taido. To make mat­ters worse, they really didn’t under­stand most of the tech­niques I had been asked to work on with them.

I love kids, but I have a hard time deal­ing with peo­ple who can’t do the things I think they should be able to do. Luckily for all of us, I was being assisted by Laura from Tech, and she’s much nicer than I am. I over­heard one of my stu­dents say­ing later that Laura was a great teacher, but that I was no good at all. I had Laura basi­cally lead the group while I fixed mis­takes and tried to decide how we could best spend our time together.

We took them in the water to do some tech­niques and get cool. We also let them play a bit, hop­ing that it would give them a lit­tle moti­va­tion to try a lit­tle harder. Alas, the beach was too much for them, and we ended up spend­ing the last twenty min­utes or so of prac­tice sit­ting in the sand, talk­ing and playing.

I fully under­stand what it was like for these kids to wake up after a long car ride, rush to the beach, meat two teach­ers they don’t know, and be asked to per­form under such dif­fi­cult con­di­tions. I’ve been there, so it doesn’t upset me. I’m pretty good at surf­ing children’s atten­tion lev­els in teach­ing sit­u­a­tions. The thing that bugged me is that these kids were wear­ing pretty high belts but couldn’t do white-belt tech­niques and routines.

I asked them what tech­niques they were best at and what they liked. I heard answers like nengi (ashigarami) and suiehigeri. I decided to test them at their best and favorite move­ments. None of them could main­tain any bal­ance dur­ing sui­heigeri. That wouldn’t have been so bad (con­sid­er­ing the sur­face) except that none of them could kick straight either. When I checked their nengi, only one (out of nine) of them under­stood the mechan­ics of the move­ment well enough to per­form a weak, slow-motion scis­sor on my leg. The major­ity of them per­formed the tech­nique by sit­ting down and rolling over side­ways — usu­ally in the wrong direction.

Finally, we dis­missed, and I headed back to the room a lit­tle dis­heart­ened. I really wanted them to do well, and I wanted us to have fun together, but I knew that it was going take a lot of work to get them to per­form at a level at which I could be happy about allow­ing them to pass their tests.

The Black Belt Dinner

This is some­thing that started just a cou­ple of years ago, and I think it’s a really nice part of sum­mer camp. Uchida Sensei has a din­ner for all the black belts to show his appre­ci­a­tion for all the work they put in for mak­ing camp hap­pen. We all have some food and drink and talk in a relaxed atmosphere.

This was the largest group of black belts we’ve ever had at sum­mer camp, and pos­si­bly the youngest group as well. Eventually, Sensei asked if any­one had any­thing to say, and a few peo­ple spoke up. There was some good natured (if drunken and un-composed) talk about our Taido “fam­ily,” and Michael Goodroe brought a few of us near cry­ing with his earnest and totally non-cynical syn­op­sis of what Taido has meant for his own fam­ily. Mitsuaki also had a few things to say, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t sound sus­pi­ciously like a grown-up. I learned my les­son back in 1994 and now make sure that I speak either before Mitsuaki or not at all.

After that, my folks, the Popes, and I headed back to the room and had a cou­ple of mar­gar­i­tas before call­ing it a night.

"I love the smell of Tiger Balm in the morning."

Saturday morn­ing, every­body loves to act as if it’s some giant big deal to get up and be at the beach by 6am to work­out. Somehow, I usu­ally man­age to be one of the first peo­ple on the sand, prob­a­bly since I don’t sleep much. I think it was a lit­tle before 5 when I began my warmup of all the –mei and –sei hokei, plus taii-. I played tag with the surf for a while and did some tai-chi, and then a few other folks wear­ing white paja­mas started to appear near the dunes.

The sat­ur­day morn­ing prac­tice was tra­di­tion­ally the killer work­out ses­sion on the beach. We used to do things like run for five miles and then return by oizuki and maegeri ido. The year before my black belt test, I swear that John Okochi, Jerry Johnson, and John Roberts we seri­ously con­spir­ing to kill me. However, American Taido now has more of a fam­ily focus, and very few stu­dents even remem­ber that kind of tor­ture. This year, we did some­thing that was unheard of ten years ago — we prac­ticed techniques.

Then the chil­dren arrived, and I went back to teach­ing my group of blue belts how to mimic the gross move­ments of the rou­tine known as hen­tai no hokei. I have to give them credit that they did much bet­ter than they had the pre­vi­ous after­noon. However, they were still mak­ing con­sis­tent mis­takes on untai and sen­tai hokei. Call me a fas­cist, but I really think that any­one about to test for green belt had bet­ter not screw up white belt techniques.

Does that make me old-school? Or hard­core? I can never keep straight which ver­sion of the word “dinosaur” peo­ple are label­ing me with, but let’s just get one thing straight: doing things right is not the road to extinc­tion. Maybe some US Taido instruc­tors’ mantra is “qual­ity can wait,” but I can’t call myself a teacher if I’m work­ing under such assump­tions. I believe it’s negligent.

Uchida Sensei is always work­ing to moti­vate the kids by telling them “Great job! Number one! OK!” So it shocked a few of them (and their par­ents) when I looked at their nengi and said “That was ter­ri­ble!” The thing is, that was just the kind of chal­lenge a few of them needed to really try to improve (and Sensei has always encour­aged us to be tough when he’s being sweet). When teach­ers do naught but praise, stu­dents have lit­tle incen­tive to work. Praising effort is the key to elic­it­ing improved per­for­mance it’s called pos­i­tive rein­force­ment, but it only works when used with some dis­crim­i­na­tion. It works won­ders when one instruc­tor crit­i­cizes until the other praises.

Anyway, we made it through, and by the end of prac­tice, I was sat­is­fied that all of my kids were ready to test for pur­ple belt. Then, it was time for one of the things I really wanted to see.

Tech Creative Hokei Presentation

Sensei didn’t want to make it seem like any­one test­ing for black belt was doing any more or less than any­one else, so we decided to have our three stu­dents present their rou­tines pri­vately to a small group. Bolot, Laura, and Shelley each did their rou­tines on the beach, and then we had a lit­tle chat.

As I told them then, the point of the assign­ment wasn’t about me giv­ing them any eval­u­a­tion — it was sim­ply an exer­cise for them to attempt. However, Corey did have a few remarks about what hokei is really about and what they needed to do to make their rou­tines hokei. In other words, they had cre­ated strings of tech­niques, but clever as they may have been, there was some­thing miss­ing. There wasn’t a lot of time to spend, so we talked a bit about what makes a hokei “real” and what makes a hokei per­for­mance “good” and dis­missed. There wasn’t much time until the tests, so we fig­ured we should leave it at that.

"Remember what we did an hour ago?"

That’s what I was ask­ing my stu­dents (the chil­dren I had taught on the beach) as I pre­pared to give them their test. I believe the cur­ricu­lum for chil­dren should focus less on mem­o­riza­tion of move­ments they don’t under­stand and more on build­ing phys­i­cal agility and spa­tial aware­ness. In a well designed cur­ricu­lum, every stu­dent can meet the require­ments. However, chil­dren are not mini-adults, so it’s unrea­son­able to expect them to per­form adult movements.

That said, I only had to remind a few of them how to do basic move­ments, and they all tried hard. In American edu­ca­tion, try­ing hard is the only thing you’re allowed to test for chil­dren. As long as they try, the teacher’s job is to pro­gres­sively lower stan­dards until every­one “passes.” In any case, all nine of my stu­dents passed their tests. Keep in mind, I never asked them to speak to me in Japanese, to per­form any ath­letic feats, or to do any­thing that I wasn’t doing by the time I was a yel­low belt (which, for those unfa­mil­iar with the children’s rank­ings in American Taido, is the belt below blue — these kids were all blue belts). They each per­formed three hokei and one tech­nique of their own choos­ing. Then, we were out of time, and the test ended.

That's a Lot of Black Belts

Then it was time for the black belt test hokei demon­stra­tion. The eigh­teen can­di­dates had already com­pleted a com­pre­hen­sive tech­ni­cal review and some spar­ring (three hours worth) a cou­ple of weeks prior, so all that remained was their hokei per­for­mances. As we were set­ting up, all the exist­ing black belts headed to the front of the room, and I counted about 25 of them. There were a cou­ple of guys there who had been present at my own shodan exam and a few peo­ple whom I can’t really claim I know all that well. It kind of made me feel like mid­dle management.

We watched all of the can­di­dates per­form their rou­tines, and I was pleased to note that, despite a few minor mis­takes, the three stu­dents from Tech looked pretty good. In fact, it seemed as if they had actu­ally been lis­ten­ing ear­lier in the day when Corey and I had been talk­ing about how to do a good hokei.

Uchida Sensei decided to make some­thing of a com­pe­ti­tion out of the deal, and each of the black belts was sup­posed to vote for which can­di­date per­formed the “best” hokei. I abstained since I thought it was silly, but Brenda Morales won over Shelley by just one vote — pretty close. All through the demon­stra­tions, Dmag and I were jok­ing about what the prize could be for the win­ner, and I had guessed that the win­ner would get to have din­ner with Sensei. In fact, Brenda and Shelley won lunch with Sensei. I hope he takes them some­place nice.

Finally, Some Free Time

After the tests, I needed a beer and a nap. I may not have expressed the severe time con­straints that most black belts have to work under at sum­mer camp, but we stay incred­i­bly busy. In addi­tion to my usual running-around-like-a-crazy-person, this year had me try­ing to make con­tact and have con­ver­sa­tions with a lot of peo­ple about var­i­ous projects and ideas I am prepar­ing for my return to Atlanta. And besides that, a lot of friendly catch­ing up. While it was nice, it was also exhaust­ing, and I was still on Japan time.

Luckily, Sensei antic­i­pates this (he’s learned from over twenty past sum­mer camps) and gives us a break in the mid­dle of Saturday after­noon. Some peo­ple go to the pool, some go out to eat, some sleep. I did a lit­tle of all three. The break was nice, but Bryan decided to cut it short by hav­ing a group of folks meet a half hour early on the beach for the used-to-be-traditional 1000 punches.

Last Beach Workout

Now of course, 1000 punches really isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Bryan and I used to pop off a thou­sand punches while we were wait­ing our stu­dents to arrive at class. It only takes a few min­utes, and the most dif­fi­cult part of the exer­cise is keep­ing an accu­rate count. We were joined mid­way through by a few extra folks, so we ended up with about ten or twelve peo­ple in our lit­tle cir­cle punch­ing. It was fun — I think it’s been a few years since I did that — and just to make sure I con­tin­ued to earn my “hard­core” label, I did 1000 good punches, instead of the I’m-pacing-myself punches most peo­ple were doing.

Just as we fin­ished up, the beach was begin­ning to fill up with stu­dents, and it was time to start prac­tice. The last prac­tice of sum­mer camp is always a lot of fun. We play games like tug-of-war and every­one is relaxed and happy. Then, we all line up in the surf and do punches and kicks in the water — of course, we do plenty of ebigeri.

Finally, we fin­ish up and Sensei dis­misses camp. That’s when the real fun begins, and the tra­di­tional dunk­ings get under­way. I don’t remem­ber how is started, but at one point it became a tra­di­tion for all the black belts to grab Sensei after camp, carry him into the ocean, and toss him in the water. Over the years, it has evolved. First, we also started try­ing to do the same to the likes of John Okochi and Negishi, and later when stu­dents began to dunk who­ever had taught them at camp. Now, grab­bing some­one and toss­ing them in that water after sum­mer camp is a sign of appre­ci­a­tion for work­ing together — it’s like a bond­ing ritual.

I, of course, am way too mature and cool to par­tic­i­pate in such things. Yeah, right. I learned the Okochi tech­nique a few years ago, and pre­tend to resist just enough to make it look like I don’t really want to get wet, but they know I love it. Actually, the dunk­ings can go on for a long time, because there are just so many peo­ple that you want to say “hello” to after camp. My stu­dents, three of them wear­ing shiny new black belts, grabbed me and threw me under first. Then John Hinckley grabbed be from behind and did the same thing. When I came up for air, some­body said “Andy, where are your glasses?”

“Shit!” We were all feel­ing around with our feet. I thought I had them for a moment, but then the under­tow sucked them back away from me. I fig­ured they were lost. There I was think­ing about how a blind man was going to make it from Atlanta to Myogi when Russell pops up and says “Got it.” He had some­how man­aged to find my glasses in the surf — amaz­ing. I was so stoked, I kissed him, which was prob­a­bly the most action Russell had seen in a while.

By that time, I had totally for­got­ten what was going on. I was stand­ing around watch­ing every­one play and have fun, when I saw Gabriel look­ing in my direc­tion with a face that said “uh-oh.” Then I hear some splash­ing sounds com­ing up from behind, and sud­denly, every­thing was upside down. I held on to my glasses and held my breath. I opened my eyes a few moments later, spat out a quart of salt­wa­ter, and found that I was sit­ting on Dmag, who had a giant smile on his face. We laughed for bit and decided the that was a good note on which to head back for a shower and a beer.

Banquet

Each year, we have an awards ban­quet after the final prac­tice which marks the finale of the event. Sensei loves to make “big excite­ment,” but frankly, I tend to be bored by them. Yeah, it’s great that every­one takes tests and gets pro­moted. Congrats. But you know, an auto­matic pro­mo­tion for show­ing up isn’t such a big accom­plish­ment. So I tend to eat my food, drink my drink, and tell dirty jokes dur­ing this por­tion of sum­mer camp.

Cluster-Party

After the offi­cial party, there is always the offi­cial “unof­fi­cial” party in Sensei’s room and its offi­cial alter­na­tive unof­fi­cial party in Mitsuaki’s room. We were all a lit­tle tired, so a bunch of us went to Bryan’s room for a lit­tle warmup. We talked and drank and ate (and I really needed some­thing edi­ble after the stuff they served at the con­fer­ence cen­ter). It was nice tak­ing a break from every­one and just being together as a group for a while before head­ing off to join in the rein­deer games.

But then we did. I’ll spare you the details (rather, i’ll spare cer­tain indi­vid­u­als account­abil­ity for the details), but let it be known that American Taidoka know how to party. This was not an espe­cially wild event by our stan­dards (not even approach­ing the infa­mous 25^th anniver­sary after-after party), but we all had a nice time. I strolled back to my room at about five in the morn­ing feel­ing pretty damn happy, but really tired.

At about 8:30, I was up, pack­ing up my clothes prepar­ing to head home.

The Ride Home

This year, the Tech group man­aged to fit in two cars, and we all made the drive back to Atlanta together. Like all rides home, it was longer and slower than the ride down to Florida and lacked the excite­ment we felt on our way to camp. We drove and talked and ate some really greasy chicken at some­place that didn’t look any­thing like a restau­rant, and then we were in Atlanta, say­ing our see-you-laters.

Bryan dropped me off at my par­ents’ house, where I ate, packed, and slept. At five the next morn­ing, my mother and I were on the train to the airport.

It’s been a cou­ple of weeks since I got back to good ol’ Gunma-ken, but I’m still rid­ing a sort of wave of excite­ment from attend­ing sum­mer camp. It really is one of my favorite parts of American Taido, and it gave me a bit of a warmup for return­ing state­side next month. I’m really look­ing for­ward to get­ting to spend more than a week­end play­ing and prac­tic­ing with all my friends in Atlanta on a much more reg­u­lar basis. Though Japan has been good to me, and I’ve really enjoyed these three years, it’s always great to be home.