2006 Sakura Matsuri Taikai

I love Hirosaki. It’s the place where I first thought to myself “you know, I should live in Japan some­day”, and it’s also the place where I met pos­si­bly the great­est love of my life so far. Besides that, it’s just a beau­ti­ful town, and they have plenty of Taido going on.

In fact, this year is the 30^th anniver­sary of Taido in Aomori Prefecture, and this year’s Sakura Matsuri Taikai (cherry blos­som fes­ti­val tour­na­ment) was the 28^th such event. That’s a long time, and it’s always a great tourney.

I’ve been able to watch the Sakura Taikai three times, but never com­peted for var­i­ous rea­sons. I had hoped to actu­ally make it onto the mats this year, but hav­ing bro­ken my fin­ger two weeks before the event, luck was not on my side. Even as a spec­ta­tor, I’ve always enjoyed see­ing every­one come together with friendly atti­tudes and great skills for this event that per­fectly sets off the All-Japan champs, held every November. The Sakura Taikai is prob­a­bly the largest non-national tour­na­ment in Japan and is a two-day event. Players come from all over the coun­try and some­times from other countries.

As is my pat­tern, I’m going to omit most of the details form the actual tour­na­ment and focus on the gen­eral feel­ings I got form being there and inter­act­ing with other Taidoka.

The Double Dutch Bus

Being a week­end tour­na­ment, every­one who doesn’t live near Hirosaki has to find some way to get there and back. The overnight bus is the cheap­est method for most of us. My bus left Tokyo at about 10pm Friday night and arrived in Hirosaki at 6-something Saturday morn­ing. As expected, I rec­og­nized a few faces around the bus ter­mi­nal but nobody I knew very well. When I got on, the first thing I saw was Masaki and Funase sit­ting right up front. Even though we slept for basi­cally the entire trip, it’s nice rid­ing with some­one you know and like.

When all the buses arrived in Hirosaki, team after team of Taido stu­dents began to pour out onto the side­walk, and I started get­ting a really nos­tal­gic feel­ing. I’ve spent a lot of time in Hirosaki (a lot more time than most peo­ple know), and I’ve always trav­eled there by bus. I started get­ting really excited look­ing around at all the places I used to hang out. Since it was still early, my dojo­mates and I decided to head to Gusto for some breakfast.

At the restau­rant, which was one of a very few places in the vicin­ity open that early, almost every table was full of Taido stu­dents from uni­ver­si­ties and dojo all over the coun­try. We all made our rounds, say­ing hello to peo­ple we hadn’t seen in a while, and I spent a few min­utes chat­ting up this really cute girl form Kitasato Uni before sit­ting down to my first of about 15 cups of cof­fee. At 8:30, Chiba said “OK, time to pick up the car”. Huh?

Chiba is a genius. We are about the only group that had a car, and we are about the only group that had no trou­ble get­ting any­where. The car ended up cost­ing less than we would have spent on taxis, and we got to use it at our own leisure. Plus it had a navi, which made find­ing our way around between the onsen, budokan, party, and hotel much eas­ier. We still had a cou­ple of hours to kill after get­ting the car, so we headed to an some ran­dom hot spring to relax.

It felt really nice to clean up and soak for a bit after the eight-hour bus ride, and it felt even bet­ter to have a beer after­ward, know­ing that I didn’t have to com­pete. We ran into Nakano and Kaneko there and talked with them for a bit before every­one fell asleep watch­ing Matsui and the Yankees get their asses handed to them on TV. Then, it was back in the car to the Prefectural Martial Arts Hall.

Tourney Day One

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that tour­na­ments are really just a social event. That’s a good thing. Japan is a small coun­try, but trans­porta­tion is really expen­sive, so nobody trav­els unless they have a good excuse. Frequent tour­na­ments allow every­one to get together and talk about Taido and other things with peo­ple we can’t see too often. I think the inde­pen­dence of var­i­ous clubs in Japan cou­pled with the fre­quent tour­na­ments is one of the things that keeps Japanese Taido strong.

When I first walked down onto the floor, I could already see through the win­dow to the judges’ room at the front of the gym­na­sium. Before I could make it halfway across the floor, Shima Sensei comes prac­ti­cally trot­ting out with a giant grin on his face and his hand stuck out in wel­come. He’s such a friendly guy, and it’s great to see some­body who has been doing Taido so long who still gets excited about the lit­tle things. After that, I ran into tons of other folks that I hadn’t seen since when­ever, and it was great to meet them all again.

It was espe­cially cool see­ing the Australian team. I’ve run into them in Japan before, and since vis­it­ing them ear­lier this year, we’ve really become good friends in Taido. Five stu­dents from Australia were at the tour­na­ment, and four of them were competing.

I also got meet some­body for the first time that I had heard I needed to. I recently sent out a sur­vey regard­ing Taido injuries, and I’m work­ing on writ­ing up an arti­cle about what I can find out. Denis (a French Taidoka who has “gone native” in Hirosaki) intro­duced me to a guy named Matsumoto. Matsumoto is a doc­tor, and for the past sev­eral years, he has been keep­ing stats on injuries in Taido tour­na­ments and prac­tices. He reports his find­ings to the Japan Taido office. I asked him a few ques­tions, and he agreed to share his find­ings with me. So the bad news is that my arti­cle will be delayed, but the good news is that I will have much more data from which to make analy­ses and suggestions.

Of course, it was a tour­na­ment, so the actual games were inter­est­ing and excit­ing too. Some of the hokei demon­strated were excel­lent. The women’s hokei in par­tic­u­lar was of a gen­er­ally higher qual­ity than what was pre­sented at last year’s All-Japan meet. Of course, it was no sur­prise to see Nakano doing amaz­ing tengi, but there were some really good per­for­mances by uni­ver­sity stu­dents as well, and I would be very remiss if I didn’t men­tion that Denis’s hokei has improved dra­mat­i­cally since I last saw him perform.

For the Yokohama team, there was lots of good stuff going on. Hiromi pulled out some great rengi in jis­sen, and Takatsuna made it into the hokei and jis­sen finals. Chiba scored an ippon in about ten sec­onds in one match. Then it came down to Yokohama ver­sus Yokohama between Chiba and Takatsuna. Surprisingly (and I say that, not to put down Takatsuna, but because Chiba is really great at jis­sen), Takatsuna won. I think Chiba was just exhausted by that point, but it was a really close and fun match nonetheless.

Bottoms Up

After the first day’s events, it was time for drinks. Everyone got together for food and bev­er­age and good times at a place near the hotel. I hung with the Aussies a bit, talked to Kaneko, met an American woman and her son who is doing Taido, drank so much I for­got all about the food, and then got talk­ing with Denis and Alvar about trans­lat­ing Taido texts into English. After a cou­ple more beers to build momen­tum, we seized the oppor­tu­nity to get an “offi­cial” per­spec­tive on some ideas.

We cor­nered Nakajima sen­sei (Japan Taido pres­i­dent) and Yoriko Kudo (one of Shukumine’s daugh­ters) and got to talk­ing about what would be required to pro­fes­sion­ally trans­late the Gairon (most impor­tantly) and the Kyohan into English. Apparently, Alvar has already got fund­ing for the project almost nailed down from some “anony­mous” bene­fac­tors. Of course, the con­cern was raised that the Kyohan in par­tic­u­lar has numer­ous errors that would have to be addressed, but we are con­fi­dent that these can be ironed out in the translation/re-editing process. On the sub­ject of edit­ing, we were able to impress on them the impor­tance of good English edit­ing of the trans­lated prod­uct, and I think I have been ten­ta­tively elected as the one the peo­ple to do that. At any rate, this was a poten­tially impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion in that it was agreed that we could go ahead. Now it just remains for them to actu­ally pro­vide Alvar with the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts so he can get price quotes for the trans­la­tion. I’m hold­ing my breath.

After that, I was out in the hall, about to enter into a really deep con­ver­sa­tion with … Somebody, when Hiromi told me it was time to go find the hotel. So we did.

No Rest for the Wicked

We had one room for four men, and both the ladies had their own rooms. Chiba’s sen­sei (Watanabe, who teaches at Takushoku Uni in Tokyo) appar­ently didn’t have a reser­va­tion. So Chiba mag­nan­i­mously gave up his futon and headed down the hall to sleep with his wife. And so it was that Takatsuna got some impromptu jis­sen coach­ing from Watanabe Sensei.

We didn’t tear up the tatami in the room too badly, but those lit­tle rooms were not built with the idea that semi-inebriated men would doing late-night jis­sen prac­tice in them. At least we didn’t kiai. I have to give tTakat­suna credit for his note tak­ing too, because the next day, I’ll be damned if he didn’t try every sin­gle sug­ges­tion Watanabe had made in at least one match. And even though he did even­tu­ally get beaten, he got style points in the process (and he def­i­nitely works hard for the style points).

Bright and early next morn­ing, we were treated to a break­fast of raw egg and natto. For those who don’t know, natto=disgusting. I had a few bowls of rice and a few cups of cof­fee and passed my natto to Miho, who appar­ently can’t get enough of it.

Of course, I always get grief from Japanese peo­ple for not eat­ing natto — they seem to take such national pride in gulp­ing down the slimy, smelly stuff. Every time I men­tion that I don’t eat natto, I get the same cho­rus: “It’s healthy!”. So? It won’t make up for all the beer I drank the night before. Besides, the last thing I need is diet advice from a cul­ture based on refined white rice. Please, let’s see some com­plex carbs, com­plete pro­teins, and less sodium before mak­ing claims of dietary supe­ri­or­ity. About the only things the tra­di­tional Japanese diet gets right is fish and veg­eta­bles. I could eas­ily go on a rant here, but I’ll spare you…

Tourney Day Two

The sec­ond day’s events included all of the children’s events, and con­trary to form, I actu­ally watched them. I usu­ally only watch kids’ events if I know some of the com­peti­tors, but this time I watched most of the games. The kids were good — no doubt about it. Kiddie karate isn’t my idea of a stim­u­lat­ing spec­ta­tor sport, but I’ll admit that about 10% of the kids I see doing Taido in Japan are actu­ally impressive.

Sadly, most of them will even­tu­ally quit. Not to be pes­simistic, but peo­ple stay­ing with Taido their entire lives are a real minor­ity. Only Bryan and Mitsuaki have been doing Taido as long as me in America — every­one else dropped off. In Japan too, guys like Kaneko and Fumi Suzuki are rar­i­ties. Funase told me later that she had done Taido since she was very young, but quit for most of her teens because of school pres­sure and such. That she came back to Taido prob­a­bly has a lot to do with her father.

So while I want to look at young kids doing Taido with opti­mism and enthu­si­asm, his­tory tells me that even the bright­est stars will burn out and fade away by col­lege, if not before. You can see it clearly in America in recent years, and you can also see it in Japan. However, here it’s some­what bal­anced by all the peo­ple who begin Taido at uni­ver­sity clubs. Of course, the vast major­ity of them quit upon grad­u­a­tion as well. Moving on…

The sec­ond day also held the finals for the adult events, and this was much more inter­est­ing. There were some really good jis­sen matches, and Takatsuna really held his own. The hokei were clean, but my favorite for women’s hokei ended up only mak­ing third place.

It was a good day for the Yokohama team. Takatsuna walked away with sil­ver in jis­sen, Chiba won the gold in old-timer hokei (please! He’s only 36!), Hiromi took gold in women’s jis­sen and best female over­all. Some other peo­ple from some other schools also got some awards, includ­ing Stephanie from Australia, who made a really strong show­ing in both hokei and jis­sen. The Austalians won the women’s team jis­sen as well.

Finally, there was also a spe­cial pre­sen­ta­tion of the kyoshi and ren­shi titles to Fredrik and Louise, respec­tively, which is super-good news for Aussie Taido. Louise was also awarded her cer­tifi­cate for, in Nakajima sensei’s ter­mi­nol­ogy “four-dan”. I even remem­bered to tell them both con­grat­u­la­tions like a good boy. Mom, if you’re read­ing this, be proud that your son has finally learned some man­ners. (I’ll leave out the other stuff I told them…)

Then every­one cleaned up and went their sep­a­rate ways.

The Last Supper

Since we were guests (well, I was hang­ing with the guests…), the Aussies and I got to crash the din­ner that most of the Hanshikai, Yoriko, and the tour­na­ment organizers/Aomori Taido guys were hav­ing. There were lots good feel­ings going around, along with food and drink. Kondo sen­sei told me to hurry up and marry a Japanese girl so I won’t have to go back to America, but I per­suaded him to let me do my thing in the States for a while before I’m old enough to set­tle down.

It was really cool get­ting to talk to Yoriko again too — I think I was eight the only other time I had actu­ally met her. She’s very cool and really into get­ting Taido ready for the future. She and Alvar were talk­ing a lot about copy­rights and the logo design for the new World Taido Federation. I put in my two cents with some, uh, obser­va­tions and facts I had researched along those lines, then left to find more beer. Of course, logos are all well and good, but action is much more impor­tant in the long run. Anyway, she’s a really funny and approach­able lady (and very good at English), and I hope to meet her again.

The entire point of get­ting together and drink­ing is to free up the com­mu­nica­tive path­ways, and let me say that we were all feel­ing espe­cially glib. In fact, Tanaka Sensei and I had an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about the notion that drink­ing together is one of the best ways to get to know some­body. Dave and I talked about (what else?) stu­pid peo­ple. It was also funny chat­ting with Jason about study­ing physics. My stud­ies took me from a major in physics to math­e­mat­i­cal logic to lin­guis­tics to com­mu­ni­ca­tions the­ory to lit­er­a­ture to semi­otics to (finally) a degree in soci­ol­ogy. Jason’s exper­inc­ing a sim­i­lar exo­dus from the physics department.

And just when I thought it was safe to put down my glass, in walked Yumiko Sekiba. Now, every­one who knows Yumiko loves her, and she and Sekiba Sensei have done so much to help so many Taido stu­dents over the years that it’s impos­si­ble to say enough about how won­der­ful they are. I’ve spent lots of time liv­ing in their house and hang­ing with their fam­ily and friends. Though Yumiko is very, very shy, she is always thirsty for the spe­cial, Kirin-brand water. Getting to spend a few min­utes talk­ing with her was prob­a­bly the best finale for this trip I can imagine.

The Post-Last Supper (Reprise)

After mak­ing sure we hadn’t wasted any beer, Masaki, Funase, and I then said our see-you-laters and caught a cab for the bus ter­mi­nal. We bought some cheesy Aomori sou­venirs and headed to the Golden Arches to kill some time before the busses arrived. I ingested some poi­son, and we talked about all kinds of good Taido stuff. I told them to def­i­nitely visit the States some day, since we don’t have too many women reach­ing very high ranks (they are both 5dan), judg­ing, and actively teach­ing Taido, espe­cially under thirty years old. I think I may have con­vinced them to get their asses to Atlanta some­day (bribes).

Back on the Chain Gang

Now I am back in Gunma, typ­ing (with both hands!!!!) from my usual perch at the Misuta Donatsu in Tomioka, guz­zling cof­fee. I like it here, but I’ve won­dered more than a few times dur­ing my three years liv­ing in the armpit of Japan how things would have turned out if I had man­aged to find a school post­ing around Hirosaki. I would cer­tainly be doing more Taido, and well — there are some per­sonal things too, but I’m not going to get into that right now. Sekiba Sensei made me promise to visit again before I return to the States, so i’m shoot­ing for another trip up that way maybe in August.

At any rate, I always enjoy Hirosaki, and I got a lot out of being a part of this event, despite my inabil­ity to com­pete. I got to see a lot of qual­ity Taido and talk with a lot of qual­ity peo­ple about Taido — and other stuff. In two years, Aomori Taido will host their 30^th con­sec­u­tive Sakura Matsuri Taiki, and I’m not sure where I’ll be liv­ing or what I’ll be doing, but I have marked it on my cal­en­dar to attend.