2006 Kanagawa Friendship Meet

March 2006

It’s been a busy cou­ple of weeks. Last week­end, I was in Australia for the sec­ond Asia Pacific Games. This past week­end, I joined the Yokohama team at the sec­ond annual Kanagawa friend­ship meet. As planned, it was a lot of fun, and we all enjoyed get­ting the chance to play with peo­ple we aren’t able to meet so often. This year’s event was a lit­tle larger than the first one, but every­thing still ran very smoothly. Here are my impressions:

Background

The tour­na­ment is called the Kanagawa Prefectural Taido Association Friendship Meet. The name is both telling and mis­lead­ing. Telling because it isn’t about win­ning medals but rather hav­ing fun together and deep­en­ing our friend­ships with other dojo. Misleading because the par­tic­i­pants are not all mem­bers of Kanagawa Taido — they are mem­bers of dojo his­tor­i­cally con­nected to Kanagawa Taido. It’s a tour­na­ment for our cir­cle of friends, for the pur­pose of deep­en­ing that friend­ship. Kind of cool, if you ask me.

Actually, kana­gawa Taido is only two groups: Yokohama Taido and Tokai Uni Taido. This meet includes our friends from Shizuoka as well. Basically, it’s Negishi’s Taido fam­ily reunion. His cur­rent dojo, his uni­ver­sity club, his sen­seis’ dojo, and his friends were in atten­dance. Negishi has an abil­ity to bring great peo­ple to him (how do you think he and I got to be friends?), and the qual­ity of this meet reminded me just how many peo­ple hold him in high esteem.

Of course, this isn’t to imply that this event was just “the Negishi show”. That’s not what it was about at all. In fact, most of this year’s plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of the event was done by mem­bers of the Yokohama dojo and the stu­dents at Tokai. Negishi’s style of get­ting things done is pretty hands-off. He tends to more often play the role of facil­i­ta­tor than that of project man­ager. Though this event was the result of a lot of people’s work and effort, it would not have hap­pened with­out the Negishi magic.

The Tourney

“I was robbed!” just kid­ding. Yeah, I lost most of my matches. One match in par­tic­u­lar, I kept hit­ting the guy with all kinds of kicks and punches, but I couldn’t seem to con­vince the judges that I deserved a point. I wouldn’t even bother to men­tion any of this if it weren’t for the the fact that later on, sev­eral peo­ple came up to me and told me that they thought I should have scored ippon at least twice dur­ing that match. Apparently, the every judge saw my points except the ones who were actu­ally on the court.

Part of the prob­lem appar­ently, is that I didn’t “appeal” to the judges with my tech­niques. Now I thought it was enough to sim­ply hit the guy, but it seems that I have to actu­ally hit him and then say “Look at me! I hit him!” in order to score. I under­stand what this advice means — I do tend to get on a roll with com­bi­na­tions of smaller attacks. I under­stand that, in tour­na­ment fight­ing, it’s a good idea to try and score with “big” tech­niques that are easy to see and “look like hits”. But damn, I would have thought that a clean manji to the chest, a straight shui­hei to the belly, an ashigarami, and a punch clear to the back would have been obvi­ous enough. Taido is about more than obvi­ous hits, and this just serves to remind me that I really need to work on my gen­tai in jissen.

Actually, i’m really happy that my jis­sen is improv­ing. It’s never been my strong point by a long shot, but I’m start­ing to find a groove that works for me. Part of it might be related to being in Japan, but that’s mostly because I get more chances to prac­tice jis­sen here. When you are try­ing to teach jis­sen to begin­ners (as I was when I was spend­ing most of my Taido time at Georgia Tech), you don’t get a lot of real prac­tice. I’m also able to learn a lot by expo­sure to dif­fer­ent play­ers, includ­ing sev­eral cham­pi­ons. Not to say that I am “turn­ing Japanese” in my Taido — I don’t see that hap­pen­ing — but I am learn­ing and grow­ing, and the change of envi­ron­ment has been a cat­alytic factor.

As for hokei. No, that wasn’t my best per­for­mance at all. I was all over the place. I started out try­ing to think of all the great advice I’d got­ten on my Taido in the pre­vi­ous cou­ple of weeks, but with­out spend­ing time to work it in a prac­tice envi­ron­ment, I wasn’t able to put it to use. About half-way through, I just gave up and fin­ished. I don’t mean that to sound defeatist; I still did a good hokei. My hokei do not suck, but there are plenty of things I real­ize I need to spend some time fix­ing. In maybe about a year (spring 2007 — call me on it), I believe i’ll have def­i­nitely taken my hokei and jis­sen both to new levels.

My team ended up get­ting third in the team jis­sen though (and I did win that match). Of course, there were only four teams, and our oppo­nents were the other Yokohama jis­sen team. It was kind of a farce, and we all knew it, so we decided before­hand to just have fun. Oe had asked me to win by bakuchugeri, and I tried, but the mojo was not with me. We were all get­ting tired, so I fin­ished the game with a cheap punch and called it a day.

Brief Aside

Now the rea­son I say all of this isn’t to abate my own poor per­for­mance (I actu­ally am pretty proud of the fact that, even when I lose, I man­age to look pretty good doing it). No, that’s not it at all. It’s not as if I could have won this tour­ney any­way. I’m not that good — not remotely good enough to beat peo­ple who are con­sis­tently prac­tic­ing for this kind of thing. Actually, I’m glad I didn’t win any events at the Kanagawa tour­na­ment because there is no rea­son why I should have.

Look at it this way — some of the guys who par­tic­i­pated in this com­pe­ti­tion train sev­eral times each week. They are seri­ous about doing things well and improv­ing their skills. They deserve to win the medals. Most of the win­ners and plac­ers are peo­ple who spend a good deal of their free time prac­tic­ing Taido. That com­mit­ment brings the skill nec­es­sary to per­form well at tour­na­ment events. While some of them may not have the expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge that I have, they do have an edge on me when I comes to competitions.

In con­trast to the “play­ers”, I prac­tice maybe three times a month. I work out at home to stay in shape, but the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands prin­ci­ple says that there will be lit­tle car­ry­over from my daily work­outs to my Taido sport per­for­mance. There are ways to train that increase this car­ry­over, but with­out a prop­erly designed train­ing pro­gres­sion, my prac­tices and my work­outs are basi­cally unrelated.

In fact, when I per­form in tour­na­ments, I am really just doing the Taido I used to prac­tice sev­eral years ago when I was more seri­ous about my tech­ni­cal skills. Oddly, I’m bet­ter at Taido now, but I can still only per­form skills as well as I have prac­ticed them. Since I have improved my attrib­utes (strength, sta­mina, coor­di­na­tion, etc.), I am bet­ter able to exe­cute the skills (hokei, tech­niques, flips, etc.) that I used to work on, but the skills them­selves don’t improve with­out spe­cific prac­tice. It’s kind of a tricky dis­tinc­tion, but an impor­tant one to understand.

I think it’s com­ing time to go through another skill-practice phase, but I’ll need to be able to increase my train­ing fre­quency. In other words, it’ll prob­a­bly have to wait until I get back to America. Anyway…

... And - we're back!

So, any­way, the tour­na­ment went really well. We had a spe­cial “demon­stra­tion com­pe­ti­tion” for small chil­dren that aren’t able to do a com­plete hokei on their own. It was hell on the judges, but the kids were led through some basics for a numer­i­cal score. We also had the stan­dard events.

Overall the hokei level was higher than the jis­sen level. Again, this goes back to the thing about prac­tice — once you’ve prac­ticed to a cer­tain level in hokei, you have it. Jissen doesn’t work the same as hokei because there are a lot of other fac­tors involved. Jissen isn’t so much a skill as it is a set of com­pe­ten­cies. Besides that, I’ve recently reeval­u­ated my notion of what con­sti­tutes high-level jis­sen in light of my expe­ri­ences in Australia.

I’m not going to go into details about the tour­na­ment results because I don’t really think they mat­ter too much. Most of the play­ers did a really good job and tried hard while hav­ing a good time. I can’t help but see that as a recipe for suc­cess all around.

The Party

When all of the events were fin­ished and we had cleaned up, every­one walked across the cam­pus (this year’s meet was hosted by the Tokai club) to the uni com­mons for some food and drink, empha­sis on drink. There were a few speeches, but among friends, they were the kind you enjoy lis­ten­ing to. There was none of the crap and filler — just lots of good com­ments about work­ing together and keep­ing our Taido fam­ily strong. Akiyama Sensei always has a good way of phras­ing things, and I think every­one appre­ci­ated his per­spec­tives on how we can make the most of our expe­ri­ence with Taido.

I always enjoy these things, because it gives me a chance to talk to peo­ple that I don’t meet very often, and also to meet peo­ple that I may have seen around and not been able to talk to. This was no excep­tion, and I was lucky to receive sev­eral invi­ta­tions to prac­tice at var­i­ous loca­tions in the future. It was also good to see Masaki and talk about the trip to Australia for a bit.

After a cou­ple of hours of talk­ing and drink­ing and laugh­ing, it was time to close up. Chiba and I spot­ted a cou­ple of full bot­tles of beer and had a final kam­pai before head­ing “home”.

The Second Party

Since I live the far­thest out (four hours) I’m always the first per­son who has to leave from par­ties. Usually, I would have just taken the next day off work and crashed out at Negishi’s place, but my third-year junior high stu­dents were grad­u­at­ing, so I couldn’t miss it. After the first party was over, I decided I would just hop on the train and head home a lit­tle early.

By the time we neared the end of our walk from the uni com­mons, I had been con­vinced to have “just one beer” with every­one at the iza­kaya near the sta­tion before hop­ping the last train back to Gunma. And that is just what I did. I’m sure there was plenty of crazi­ness and good times after I left, but i’m not to per­son to ask about all that…

The Lonely Ride Home

Then I sat on the train and promptly fell asleep, wak­ing up only at trans­fer sta­tions, as if by magic. I wish I could say some­thing like “these long train rides always give me a chance to reflect on the day’s events and…”, but not this time. I was tired, and I slept.

I’ve recov­ered now (sort of), and I’ve had the time to reflect a bit, so I want to end this report with some­thing I told the group before I headed out for the station:

We call this a friend­ship meet. It looks like a tour­na­ment, but it feels dif­fer­ent. It feels like fun. If we can turn our oppo­nents into friends, we are doing some­thing very spe­cial. When we play Taido as friends, we have the free­dom the try new things and make Taido bet­ter. If our friend­ship meet looks exactly like a tour­na­ment, what’s to stop us from turn­ing all of our tour­na­ments into meet­ings of friends? Nothing at all. When we bring that atti­tude of cama­raderie even into com­pe­ti­tion, then we are build­ing a Taido friend­ship that will last indefinitely.

Well, my Japanese isn’t so great, but that’s what I think I said.