2006 Tama Taikai

The annual Tama Taikai is a regional tour­na­ment held in Higashi-Kurume. Participants include much of West Tokyo and parts of Saitama, Kanagawa, and Yamanashi Prefectures. It’s one of the larger “local” events, and con­sid­ered kind of a warm-up for more more seri­ous events at the end of sum­mer which deter­mine the teams for the four national events held each fall. This year, the Tama took place on 25 June — one day after my birthday.

This was my sec­ond year rep­re­sent­ing the Yokohama dojo at the Tama Taikai, and I was deter­mined to do bet­ter than I did my first time around.

Why I wasn't so happy about my first Tama

Because I did the wrong damn hokei. In Japanese tour­na­ments, there is usu­ally a stip­u­la­tion in indi­vid­ual hokei that com­peti­tors must per­form a spe­cific form for the first round or two. Last year I had bad infor­ma­tion. I was told that the first and sec­ond rounds were going to be sen­tai. My sen­tai is pretty good, and I won the first round eas­ily. I also got to see the guy I would per­form against in the sec­ond round — a guy named Mori who hap­pens to be very good, but his sen­tai was mediocre. I was pretty con­fi­dent that I would advance to the next round and lose ten­tai for lack of nenchu.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Mori and I started our hokei, and it wasn’t long before every­one was look­ing around won­der­ing what was going on. Actually, we were the first match of the sec­ond round, so nobody could be sure who was right and who was going to lose, but I was doing sen­tai, and mori was doing ten­tai. Mori’s ten­tai is damn good (good enough to place in last year’s all-Japan). At that point, I just relaxed, know­ing that per­for­mance would not be a fac­tor in vic­tory or loss — it would sim­ply be a mat­ter of who was doing the right hokei.

As it turns out, the tour­ney com­mit­tee and judges had decided ear­lier in the day to make sen­tai com­pul­sory for only the first round. They had not both­ered to tell but a few of the com­peti­tors. I lost because sen­tai just does not look too impres­sive next to a clean ten­tai. I was a lit­tle bummed about it.

My other event that day was team jis­sen. I won my match, but was alas the only per­son on my team to win a match. We lost, and so I fin­ished the Tama Taikai slightly dis­ap­pointed with my out­come. What can I say? It’s more fun to place highly than to lose in the early rounds.

This Year

When we arrived at the venue, one of the first peo­ple I saw was a very dis­ori­ented Sakamoto Takumi, whose girl­friend I acci­dently hit on in Australia (well, it wasn’t an acci­dent, but I didn’t know they were together… Anyway, he and I made up, and now we’re friends). He had come with the team from Yamanashi, which means that he had prob­a­bly been in a car for three or four hours. We made the rounds, play­ing stu­pid pranks on every­one until it was time for the first events.

Yokohama had a larger team than we did last year, and I haven’t been prac­tic­ing much, so I decided that I would just com­pete in the team jis­sen since each dojo only gets a cer­tain num­ber of open­ings. My team this year was look­ing much stronger than the year before, and I got tagged with sengi (prob­a­bly my strongest tech­nique) rather than hengi (prob­a­bly my weak­est tech­nique). I was feel­ing much more con­fi­dent this time, though I knew we faced some stiff com­pe­ti­tion from the Yamanashi and Higashi-Murayama teams.

My team won our first game against one of the teams form Takushoku Uni. I prob­a­bly could have done a lit­tle bet­ter — my match was a draw. I had some ideas I wanted to try, and as a result I ended up miss­ing a few oppor­tu­ni­ties to win. Knowing that we had more points gave me the chance to play a bit.

We lost our sec­ond game to the team that went on to win first place. We actu­ally had even points, but the judges gave the game to Yamanashi based on “con­tents,” which means that Yamanashi showed “bet­ter” Taido even though they couldn’t score. I lost my own match to a pretty strong oppo­nent, but it was a lot of fun. We were both try­ing some cre­ative things and basi­cally throw­ing our bod­ies around in every direction.

At that point our team was out of the run­ning, but the Yokohama dojo still did all right in the indi­vid­ual events. Daikuhara took sec­ond in men’s hokei. Sano won women’s hokei (despite a bit of screw up in the final match, she was obvi­ously bet­ter than her oppo­nent). Kota won the children’s hokei. Nakajo and Takatsuna started out strong in jis­sen, but ended up injur­ing them­selves in their sec­ond round matches. Oe played around with using sokuchu and gain­ers as unshin and looked really cool los­ing his jis­sen matches.

Finding Your Strengths

I real­ized at this event that our dojo just does not per­form our best in com­pe­ti­tion. I think this is some­what psy­cho­log­i­cal, but I’m sure that the fact that we are a shakai­jin dojo (mean­ing the major­ity of our stu­dents and instruc­tors are adults with jobs and prac­tice an aver­age of once a week or less) is also a con­tribut­ing fac­tor. Most of the com­peti­tors in this event (and indeed most of the Taido stu­dents in Japan) are col­lege stu­dents who prac­tice an aver­age of ten to fif­teen hours a week or more.

So what can you do? You have to fig­ure out what you’re good at. We at Yokohama Taido are good at drink­ing, so after the tour­na­ment ended, we headed to Shinjuku for some eats and bev (empha­sis on the latter).

Watanabe Sensei (who taught Chiba and Oe when they were stu­dents at Takushoku Uni) joined us as well. I always enjoy hang­ing and talk­ing about Taido with Watanabe because he and I have a lot in com­mon in our approaches to Taido, even though the results we get are usu­ally quite dif­fer­ent. We were also joined by sev­eral of our dojo­mates who haven’t been able to come to prac­tices lately, but came to watch the tour­na­ment. I used to have a bit of a crush on one of them, so it was nice get­ting to hang out…

… And then, as always, the long, lonely train ride back to the armpit of Japan, which I’m sure I will miss severely when I leave.

Anyway, this wasn’t the kind of event that sparked a new per­spec­tive on Taido, the uni­verse, and every­thing, but it was still fun. Our dojo didn’t win very many medals, but we did have a nice time and man­aged to look pretty good in the process. Even though I did bet­ter jis­sen on the prac­tice courts than I did dur­ing my matches, I gave two national team mem­bers a good run for their money. Best of all, I got to see a lot of peo­ple whom I really like end even share a few drinks with some of them.