2008 Tottori Training Camp

This past week­end, my dojo joined Taido stu­dents form sev­eral other pre­fec­tures in Tottori for some train­ing and play.

Tottori is a small costal city. It’s known for fish­ing, hot springs, and the sakyu (about which, more later). The local Taido scene is a small, loose-knit group held together by a guy named Uchiyama. Uchiyama is a neu­rol­o­gist and moved to Tottori about five years ago. Before that, he stud­ied and taught Taido at Chiba University. He’s a sen­pai to a few of my friends.

This year’s atten­dees included six of us from Osaka, a few from Tokyo (includ­ing one stu­dent who is orig­i­nally from Denmark), Hiroshima, Ryuku University on Okinawa, and the group in Tottori. All together, there were almost thirty participants.

Arrival

When our bus dropped us off at Tottori Station, I must have seen some­thing that reminded me of My Neighbor, Tottoro, because I began singing “Tottori, Tottori” to the tune of the Tottoro music over and over. I couldn’t get the tune out of my head, and it even­tu­ally became a kind of sound­track for most of the week­end, thought I was gen­er­ous enough not to share my tor­ture with too many other people.

After a few min­utes wan­der­ing around on the North side of the sta­tion, we found Uchiyama and a few oth­ers wait­ing for us on the South side. The Osaka group was the last to arrive, so every­one else was already wait­ing at the dojo.

Session One

After a short ride, we were there too, and prac­tice began about ten min­utes later. The first ses­sion was in three parts.

After the warmup, Uchiyama led the train­ing for the first seg­ment. The focus was pos­ture, dis­tance, and jump tim­ing. We did some step­ping line work, for­wards and back­wards, then again with part­ners. After a while, we added step­ping kicks and pro­gressed to jumps. Finally, we worked on step­ping up into jump­ing kicks. In the last exer­cise, we worked on tim­ing the ini­ti­a­tion of the kick at the apex of the jump.

The next seg­ment was a short one, led by Izumi, one of Uchiyama’s kohai from Chiba. The basic premise was that most peo­ple don’t strike with any power in jis­sen. I couldn’t agree more. We paired off and were told to hit each other with var­i­ous strikes to var­i­ous tar­gets. While a good prac­tice in the­ory, there was no dis­cus­sion on grad­u­ally increas­ing the power to learn­ing how to effec­tively absorb the impact. In the end, nobody wanted to hit any­one “too hard,” so the exer­cise didn’t accom­plish very much.

My friend, Takeo Suzuki led the last bit. The idea here was in try­ing to use the force of grav­ity for punches. We prac­ticed drop­ping into punches from var­i­ous posi­tions, then we did it again with part­ners. There was also some prac­tice on tobikomi ejizuki, work­ing on retrans­lat­ing the force from drop­ping to a lower level into a hor­i­zon­tal slide. A lot of peo­ple ended up scrap­ing the skin off their knees and feet on this one.

Sakyu = Big Fucking Sand Dune

After about two hours in the dojo, we all jumped in the cars and rode to Tottori’s famous giant sand dune for a lit­tle more workout.

Most of us didn’t really know what to expect. I think some peo­ple thought we were going to a desert, and in fact, some­body had imported camels and was lead­ing tours. Our group went in on foot.

The sakyu is really fuck­ing big. I’m ter­ri­ble at approx­i­mat­ing mea­sures of such things, but I think you can get a sense of it from the pho­tos. Of course, being the sane and mature peo­ple we are, the first thought most of us had upon see­ing a ginor­mous mound of sand was to run up it as fast as we could. We soon dis­cov­ered that “fast” was not an accu­rate description.

From the top of the dune, we cold see the ocean reach out to the hori­zon. You can’t just look at a beach with­out want­ing to go out and play on it, so we did. Coming down the dune was a lot eas­ier than climb­ing up, and the sand was very soft. It was almost like ski­ing (and peo­ple do sand­board there).

Once at the beach, we decided to do 1000 punches — you know, just for the hell of it. It was the first time for most peo­ple, but as is usu­ally the case, keep­ing count turned out to be the most dif­fi­cult part. After a lit­tle more than ten min­utes, we were done.

The Party

No Taido event is com­plete with­out a party. This was a good one. The food was not bad at all, and there was plenty of drink to go around. After din­ner, we all con­vened to the room most of us were sleep­ing in and con­tin­ued until the last of us had either passed out or fallen asleep in mid-conversation.

It was a good time all around. I got to spend a while talk­ing with Mori, who is involved in the arrange­ments for the World Championship and related events next year. They’re already get­ting things orga­nized — it’s a really big job, and they’re a small asso­ci­a­tion. After get­ting to know Mori, Kitamura, and the other mem­bers of their group, I’m even more excited to visit Hiroshima next August.

Session Two

Despite severe hang­over and extremely sore, sakyu-tortured legs, we began our morn­ing work­out at about ten o’clock, only about an hour and a half behind schedule.

This ses­sion con­sisted of two parts. First, Kitamura led a few drills for jis­sen. The first drill struc­ture was a vari­a­tion of my Broken-Record Drill, but with fewer iter­a­tions. We also prac­ticed some alter­nate responses to high-percentage tech­niques like man­jigeri. Of course, every­one knows how to use hien­zuki, be we also prac­ticed using a sort of sentai-fukuteki and a few other tac­tics. The final exer­cise was a stimulus/response exer­cise, sim­i­lar to some of the ones I pre­sented here.

In the sec­ond half, Okigawa from Tokyo showed up some exer­cises to build attrib­utes that will improve unshin. He learned these drills from a friend who in turn learned them at this year’s Asia Pacific Games in Australia. The Aussies learned them from an Olympic Gymnast.

The drills them­selves are all good. We did hand­stands, stiff-leg hops, rebound­ing donkey-kicks across the court, and log rolls with­out touch­ing the legs or arms on the floor. All of these drills can be excel­lent when inte­grated into spe­cific plan for jump and gym­nas­tic train­ing. On their own, they really just make you sore.

After all that, we fin­ished off the train­ing with some stretches and went to lunch.

We’re supposed to do what?

For lunch, we ate “mochi-shabu” which is sup­posed to be a ver­sion of shabu-shabu (thinly sliced, boiled meat) with var­i­ous fla­vors of sliced mochi (pounded rice) instead of meat. In prac­tice, it was more like a reg­u­lar nabe (pot-dish) with some strips of mochi thrown in. It wasn’t bad, but most of us would have been really happy to have a lit­tle more protein.

The printed sched­ule listed the afternoon’s main activ­ity as moun­tain climb­ing. Nobody’s legs were in any con­di­tion to climb a moun­tain. Luckily, it began rain­ing while we were eat­ing, and we were forced to decide on a Plan B. Plan B was going to a big fancy onsen — much nicer on the sore muscles.

Bye-Bye

After an hour of so relax­ing in the var­i­ous soak­ing tubs, it was almost time to start ship­ping out. I man­aged to find an open cafe and scarfed some curry and rice before we had to catch the bus. Everyone said good bye, but most of us will meet again next week at the Shakaijin Taikai in Tokyo.

As of Tuesday evening, Takeo’s legs were still sore enough that he was avoid­ing stairs. My legs were fine, but I ended up with some kind of mys­tery eye infec­tion that made me look like I’d been cry­ing for a month; it’s all cleared up now. This week, I’m tak­ing it easy so I can be in good shape for the all-Japan Workers’ Tournament on Sunday.

I had a really good time in Tottori, even if I do get that stu­pid song stuck in my head every time I think about it. I got to meet some new folks and see a few old friends. That’s always cool. I also got a chance to prac­tice and dis­cuss Taido and try out some dif­fer­ent ways to prac­tice. I’m look­ing for­ward to doing it again next year.