2006 Asia Pacific Games

Ok, so first off, I want to say that this was one hell of a good trip. It was packed full of prac­tice and play, and there wasn’t a lot of down-time to spend digest­ing all that was going on. My mem­ory of cer­tain events may be slightly inac­cu­rate, but I want to give you the gist of this year’s meet. A lot of good things went down, and a lot of good things will come from hav­ing more of this kind of event in the future.

Of course, there is always a good bit of the “what hap­pens in Vegas stays in Vegas” feel­ing on a trip like this, but even while cen­sor­ing por­tions of the debauch­ery, I hope this report may con­vince more peo­ple to take an inter­est in inter­na­tional Taido–related events, or at least think about attend­ing the next Asia Pacific Games.

The Tourney

Though the Tokyo International Uni team went down a day early for some shop­ping, most of us from Japan arrived on a Friday morn­ing in Sydney. We got checked in at the hotel, and then it was time to go set up for the tournament.

I’m not going to post the event results here, because the Aussie Taido group has their own web­site that includes such info. I do want to write a few words about is this: com­peti­tors don’t have to be oppo­nents.

The thing that made this tour­na­ment great was that every­one was there to sup­port the other play­ers. There was a wide range of expe­ri­ence and belt lev­els among com­peti­tors from sev­eral coun­tries and dojos. However, on the courts and off, every­one was in the mood to offer friendly advice and cheer the events in progress. It was really cool when we were all doing our final prac­tices before the “Taido no Hokei” event (in which we each cre­ated our own orig­i­nal rou­tines), and every­one was trad­ing ideas and help­ing each other make last-second alter­ations and improvements.

Speaking of the Taido no Hokei event, it was the first time that gen­eral com­peti­tors have been able to com­pete with a cre­ative form. Previously, there was a cre­ative divi­sion at the instruc­tors’ com­pe­ti­tion (the han­shi, kyoshi, ren­shi tour­ney every January), but this year’s APG had stu­dents with less than a year of Taido train­ing think­ing and attempt­ing to cre­ate their own forms. It was very inter­est­ing to see what they came up with, but in the end, the awards went to the three highest-ranked play­ers. Unfortunately, idol no hokei was not pre­sented (“idol” is what the Japanese call sexy female models).

The other events were fun and excit­ing too. I think every­one was just happy to get a chance to play with new and dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Even though there were only about 30-something com­peti­tors, the event went on for about seven hours of really great coop­er­a­tive competition.

The Training

Days two and three were devoted to train­ing. After all, it’s not every­day that the Australian Taido team (let alone those of us who live in Japan) have access to two mem­bers of the han­shikai to learn from and ask ques­tions of. It was also great that we had Alvar around to trans­late what they were say­ing. Talking about body-mechanics and energy flow in a for­eign lan­guage is not an easy task, and Alvar’s facil­i­ta­tion helped many more peo­ple get much more out of this train­ing than could have been the case.

Day One

Saturday morn­ing began with a shinsa for seven mem­bers of Australian Taido. Saito and Shima tested these stu­dents for a cou­ple of hours with Alvar assist­ing. I didn’t get to see this, but I hear that Fredrik’s ten­sei is too fast…

While all that was going down, I was in the other room, help­ing Masaki go through some move­ment and bal­ance games and drills with every­one. Masaki is a fit­ness trainer and really funny, so every­one enjoyed her ideas on ways to move the body for Taido. Of course, I’ve been think­ing about ways to train this stuff lately myself, so it was good see­ing her ideas on it, and get­ting to chat with her about it later.

We did some push­ing and pulling games with part­ners, and added in some Taido move­ments as well. We worked on jumps and turns and other move­ments to build coor­di­na­tion. After that, we part­nered up again and built increas­ingly longer com­bi­na­tions of con­tin­u­ous tech­niques, try­ing to avoid inter­rupt­ing the flow. Then we ate some lunch.

In the after­noon ses­sion, every­one got together to see what Saito and Shima had to share with us. First, we worked on seimei no hokei. As it turned out, only a very few of us actu­ally knew the hokei, so Shima pro­ceeded to give instruc­tion on the basics of seimei for the first hour or so. As always, even those of us who have done the hokei for years were able to get some­thing out of the practice.

After that, we part­nered off and began to go through the doko5kai. Although we ran out of time, we got through most of the appli­ca­tions of the doko5kai for sen­tai and a bit of untai. Here again, many stu­dents had not been exposed to this kind of thing in actual prac­tice, so it was very ben­e­fi­cial to everyone.

Then we had a question/answer ses­sion. After all the seimei prac­tice, the first ques­tion that came up was “what is ki?” it was almost funny, because Alvar and I had actu­ally been dis­cussing on the air­plane how to explain ki in English with­out sound­ing as if we were in a kung fu movie. He had a hell of a time try­ing to trans­late what Shima and Saito were say­ing into intel­li­gi­ble English, but he did a much bet­ter job than I would have. I think most peo­ple were sat­is­fied with the expla­na­tions given, even if it’s still a very dif­fi­cult con­cept to grok. Saito led us through some phys­i­cal prac­tice to help every­one wrap their minds around the “mys­ti­cal energy force.”

Shima fin­ished with a dis­cus­sion of Taido’s taiki, doko, and seigyo as well as some appli­ca­tions of using Taido ideas in every­day life. He talked about effi­ciency, pro­duc­tiv­ity, and sys­tem­atic devel­op­ment. He also talked a lit­tle about self-sufficiency and the impor­tance of build­ing evolv­ing Taido out of the exist­ing the­o­ret­i­cal ground­work. During the break, there was also talk of the impor­tance of “updat­ing” this the­o­ret­i­cal foun­da­tion to incor­po­rate the last forty years’ worth of sci­en­tific and soci­o­log­i­cal change.

As the day of train­ing neared its close, Fredrik and Louise took the final hour to dis­cuss the Taido no Hokei event. Those of us who won medals were asked to explain our ideas, and we all got to dis­cuss and ask/answer ques­tions about everyone’s rou­tines. It was the end of the day, so we kept every­thing light and infor­mal, which lent to the atmos­phere of sharing.

We also had a chance to see Masaki’s “in (fem­i­nine)” ver­sion of chi­sei no hokei, which won the instruc­tors’ tour­ney last January. I won’t go into this too much here, but I will be learn­ing her ver­sion of this form and even­tu­ally teach­ing it along­side the stan­dard version.

Day Two

In the morn­ing, Saito and Shima took Alvar and the rain­bow belts and prac­ticed… I don’t know. I once again assisted and trans­lated for Masaki with the browns and blacks.

We started off by mov­ing con­tin­u­ally through the five tech­niques, cre­at­ing free com­bi­na­tions of sen, un, hen, nen, and ten. The idea was to move the body with­out try­ing to apply a spe­cific tech­nique. For exam­ple, after spin­ning, we were to sim­ply get air­borne. Then as we fell, we were to change the body-axis as we neared the ground. That change was to be fol­lowed by a twist which would lead to a tum­ble. The pur­pose of the exer­cise was to incor­po­rate strikes when appro­pri­ate as we moved freely.

We then used this same feel­ing in a few jis­sen games, one of which involved an umbrella. Then we did some 2 vs 5 jis­sen such that one of the two pro­tects the other. Finally, some prac­tices with a sin­gle player defend­ing against sev­eral attack­ers. Losers did push-ups. I did lots of hangetsu push-ups.

For the after­noon ses­sion, Alvar took a cou­ple of rep­re­sen­ta­tives from each team and worked on some basic breath­ing exer­cises and “ki” stuff, attempt­ing to make it as “user-friendly” as pos­si­ble. He also talked with them about the basics of breath­ing for hokei and how to train hokei cor­rectly. The idea was that they would take notes and share this infor­ma­tion with their teams later.

I was either assumed to already know this stuff, or they didn’t want me to find out, because I was asked to trans­late for Shima and Saito for the main group. We went over con­tin­u­ous com­bi­na­tions sim­i­larly to what we had prac­ticed with Masaki, this time with the empha­sis on mov­ing in 3-space and devel­op­ing new move­ments from that basis.

Then we worked on avoid­ing attacks. Shima dis­cussed the six geo­met­ric direc­tions from which we could receive an attack and dis­cussed appli­ca­tions to each of them. We prac­ticed solo, in pairs, in groups, and against a broom, doing lots of fukuteki and jumping.

The last train­ing ses­sion was con­ducted by Fredrik and Louise. Fredrik started off by say­ing “You are all doing unsoku wrong.” He didn’t mean it to sound so bad though. His point was that, after watch­ing the tour­na­ment from a judge’s per­spec­tive, he didn’t feel that enough peo­ple were really think­ing about how to use unsoku. Instead, he sug­gested that most peo­ple do unsoku in jis­sen because they know they are sup­posed to. The train­ing was pri­mar­ily about purpose-driven unsoku and how to apply foot­work more effec­tively in jissen.

Essentially, the idea is that kamae is defen­sively stronger than any tech­nique. According to doc­trine, the kamae has no weak­nesses, while each tech­nique has one. Therefore, if we want to be safe while we close the dis­tance gap to the oppo­nent, it’s bet­ter to do so in kamae. Fredrik told us that most of the tech­niques attempted in the tour­na­ment did not score because the play­ers were attempt­ing to close dis­tances with tech­niques and get­ting thwarted when their oppo­nents didn’t do as expected. He was right.

The solu­tion, he told us, is to use our unsoku to get “inside” the oppo­nent. He then went on to describe the for­ward pres­sure strat­egy and drill us on some unsoku that we can use to bully for advan­tage. Other uses of unsoku included lead­ing the oppo­nent into an attack.

We also worked on remov­ing the gaps between rengi. The exam­ple was a sweep fol­lowed by a kind of gedan senjogeri/hangetsuate. Basically, if you sweep, and the other guy jumps, you have no rea­son to con­tinue to sweep. The best course of action is to imme­di­ately tran­si­tion to the next tech­nique. From the other side, when you jump, it’s bet­ter to jump into or onto the opponent’s posi­tion than to jump in place and attempt to counter.

We talked along these lines about tim­ing a bit and then dis­cussed the fact that most “tricks” are sim­ple a mat­ter of tim­ing, usu­ally accom­pa­nied by a change of direction.

And then, it was all over. Shima and Saito gave their last remarks, and we all went back to the hotel to clean up.

The Party

 

After all the offi­cial events were out of the way, we could all get down to the real rea­son we had trav­eled to Sydney in the first place — the party. Nick fired up the grill and cooked all kinds of steak for us, and every­one got to try some “skippy” as well. Gifts were given; beer and wine flowed; bot­tles were bro­ken; some peo­ple laughed; some peo­ple cried; some peo­ple got naked; some peo­ple threw up; and some­one had to be taken home in a shop­ping cart.

I had promised ear­lier in the day to demon­strate some spe­cial black belt drink­ing tech­niques to a few of the Australian stu­dents, and they called me out. I showed them my per­sonal favorite appli­ca­tion of one-handed cart­wheels. Then sud­denly Ohashi and Sakamoto were there, and we gave a full-blown demo to the crowd. We espe­cially stressed the impor­tance of prac­tic­ing seimei no hokei drunk such that one can even­tu­ally feel the beer mov­ing from jo-tanden to chu-tanden to ge-tanden… and back again.

We gave some spe­cial musi­cal pre­sen­ta­tions that got mixed reviews, but in the end, all was for­given by a nice cho­rus of “I Love Taido,” the new three-chord, three-word anthem of our gen­er­a­tion. Then we sang the real Taido song — or at least tried to fol­low along with the tune.

I’m going to stop short of detail­ing the slight per­sonal drama (I swear I had no idea they were dat­ing…), threats of cop-calling, pranks gone slightly awry, roof-climbing, and toilet-papering, but I think you get the idea. It was a hell of an evening that very few peo­ple are going to for­get any­time soon. Well, at least not those of us who man­aged to avoid black­ing out…

The Playing

We spent the next two days sight­see­ing. We saw kan­ga­roos and koalas, some incred­i­ble views, and some interestingly-(semi-)dressed locals. We went to the beach (twice!). We taught the Japanese kids how to play bil­liards. We ate chicken and drank beer. We did too much stuff to men­tion, but we took plenty of pho­tos, so you can check out the Aussie Taido site and see for yourself.

Sayonara Sydney

The last night in the hotel, Ohashi had this idea to make a thank you video for the Aussie team from all of us. We orga­nized every­one together in our room and got com­ments from every­one before join­ing together to sing “We love Australia” to the same tune we had sung “We love Taido” at the party. In the morn­ing we added the last cou­ple of peo­ple who had the nerve to be sleep­ing at 2am when we decided to film the main group. Just before sit­ting down to write this, I got an email form Dave say­ing how cool the whole thing turned out. Mission accomplished.

Then it was time for all of us to go. Well most of us. The Tokyo International Uni team stayed an extra day, and Ohashi is stay­ing for about a month, but a lit­tle more than half of the Japanese con­tin­gent left together Tuesday evening. We all gath­ered on the lawn in front of the hotel and hugged and exchanged con­tact info. Nobody was too cool to laugh and say thank you. There was a lot of good feel­ing going around, and there was a gen­eral sense that we wanted it to last as long as pos­si­ble. I have a feel­ing we’ll all be see­ing more of each other.

At the air­port, I real­ized I only had fif­teen dol­lars left with which to buy sou­venirs for my friends and cowork­ers. The urge for a sand­wich and a beer won out, and I came home with only my uni­form, clothes, and a heavy chunk of glass.

Back-Room Talk

It was inter­est­ing being “the American” at this event, even though I am offi­cially a mem­ber of Japan Taido at the moment. Alvar is the gen­eral sec­re­tary of of the World Taido Federation and Shima and Saito are two of the eight mem­bers of the han­shikai, which acts as the tech­ni­cal direc­tor­ship of Taido. Right now, they are try­ing to work out some mis­un­der­stand­ings and build a stronger world orga­ni­za­tion. I’m about as inter­na­tional as it gets, so they asked my opin­ions on a few matters.

I don’t want to dish any dirt, so I won’t go into details here. Shima and Saito are long-time friends with Uchida, so there is no prob­lem there. Although I did find myself feel­ing as if I had to defend my teacher and his ideas of Taido to cer­tain peo­ple at a cou­ple of points dur­ing the week­end, I think it’s best to sim­ply say that Japan Taido wants to have good rela­tions with American Taido. They want to get every­one (includ­ing America) learn­ing from each other in both direc­tions and help­ing to make Taido a truly global, evolv­ing art. That is why they (and I) trav­eled to Australia for this event.

"I'll Be Back"

Personally, I got some good advice from Saito about things I need to improve in my Taido. He also told me to go ahead and take my ren­shi cer­ti­fi­ca­tion this sum­mer so I will have inter­na­tional instruc­tor recog­ni­tion. I told him about some of my ideas and plans for expand­ing Taido oper­a­tions in America through more uni­ver­sity clubs, and he told me that he would help me out if I ever needed assis­tance from Japan.

In the end, I got a lot out of being able to hang with Shima and Saito, both. They gave me some great com­ments on Taido — tech­ni­cal and philo­soph­i­cal — that I know I can put to good use. It was also cool get­ting to chat with Alvar with­out the medi­a­tion of email. Being a for­eigner per­ma­nently in Japan, he has a unique way of see­ing things. He is also a hard­core stu­dent for Taido the­ory and actively inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how to teach it out­side of the Japanese culture-bubble.

Besides all that, it was fun. The Australian team has a great atti­tude, and they really made the whole event enjoy­able for all of us. Without all the work that they each put into show­ing us around and being friendly, this could have been just another tourney/camp from which we all returned home basi­cally unchanged. That wasn’t the case here. This was one of the bet­ter Taido events I’ve been able to attend — and this is com­ing from some­one who is usu­ally on the orga­niz­ing side of things.

The theme here was friend­ship — and that’s the biggest thing we all got out of this event. Friendship between all of the coun­tries where Taido is prac­ticed — between the play­ers first, then between the schools, then between the asso­ci­a­tions, then we can all join Pinky and the Brain in an effort to take over the world. Whatever our per­sonal goals for our own Taido prac­tice may be, we can accom­plish all of them through the sup­port of the friends we make in prac­tice and par­tic­i­pa­tion in events like this.

I think every­one of us who par­tic­i­pated made new friends, learned new things, and made new com­mit­ments to prac­tice bet­ter Taido. That’s a suc­cess­ful week­end, and I know sev­eral of us will be back next year.