2008 Shakaijin Taikai

Every year, the Japan Taido Association hosts four national tour­na­ments, one each for chil­dren, stu­dents, and adults, and the all-Japan cham­pi­onship. The Shakaijin Taikai is a tour­na­ment for “mem­bers of soci­ety,” which can be taken to mean adults. Basically, it excludes chil­dren and under­grads, but any­one else is free to com­pete. This year’s event included men and women from their early twen­ties to late sixties.

The Other National Tournament

If the national cham­pi­onship is the most objec­tively impor­tant tour­na­ment, the shakai­jin has taken on a sub­jec­tive impor­tance as an unof­fi­cial warm-up for the all-Japan. Until a few years ago, the Shakaijin was a pretty relaxed affair, with a rel­a­tively small num­ber of par­tic­i­pants. Recently, it has grown in pop­u­lar­ity, and this year, over 150 peo­ple joined the com­pe­ti­tion. Black belt Men’s jis­sen was espe­cially com­pet­i­tive, with almost sev­enty entrants.

 

One rea­son for this growth is that there are no lim­its on the num­ber of com­peti­tors from each prefecture/dojo nor on the num­ber of events in which any one com­peti­tor can enter. The all-Japan has a lim­ited draw, and a lot of good peo­ple don’t man­age to make the cut. The shakai­jin is a good tour­ney for them, but in the past few years, peo­ple that usu­ally com­pete in the all-Japan have started to enter the shakai­jin as well. As a result, the over­all level of com­pe­ti­tion has increased.

Even though the shakai­jin is a lower pro­file event than the national cham­pi­onships, peo­ple have begun to take it much more seri­ously than before.

Results

Here are the win­ners of the var­i­ous events:

Beginners’ Hokei

1. Kazuyuki Sugimura
2. Manabu Kitami
3. Hiroaki Tanaka

Kyu-Level (Rainbow Belt) Hokei

1. Satomi Shigeno
2. Shiori Oi
3. Jason Maher

Kyu-Level -Mei Hokei

1. Yasuhiro Miyamoto
2. Mineko Komazawa
3. Tadashi Ichikawa

Men’s Black Belt Hokei

1. Tetsuji Nakano
2. Hiroyuki Miyashita
3. Tomokazu Kaneko

Women’s Black Belt Hokei

1. Yayoi Masaki
2. Aiko Hirayama
3. Akiko Sato

Black Belt -Mei Hokei

1. Noriyoshi Tone
2. Hiroshi Asaoka
3. Andy Fossett

Men’s Jissen

1. Tomokazu Kaneko
2. Kimio Tanno
3. Ryota Horigome

Women’s Jissen

1. Hiromi Chiba
2. Maho Yamagiwa
3. Tomo Ichihara

Dantai (Team) Hokei

1. Tanaka Taido School
2. Kanagawa Power
3. McNegishi

Dantai Jissen

1. Oe, Mashima, Tsukanaka, Doi, Iwase, Tabata
2. Horiuchi, Osaki, Brunet, Kaneko, Takahashi, Shimamiya

Surprise!

OK, so there actu­ally weren’t that many sur­prises in the win­ners this time around. Kaneko won jis­sen; so what? Nakano won hokei; again, so what? Well, it proves that nobody else is going to win by try­ing to outdo them; e.g. nobody is going to fea­si­bly do a Nakano-style hokei bet­ter than Nakano, and nobody is fea­si­bly going to beat Kaneko at jis­sen with­out mak­ing a care­ful study of what he does well and where he is weak.

Looking over the results from the last 17 shakai­jin taikai, one often sees the same names again and again. The same is true of the forty or so years of national cham­pi­onships. Kaneko won jis­sen at the all-Japan five times in a a row. That’s not a fluke. We get in ruts some­times with out prac­tice meth­ods and for­get to stop and ana­lyze our train­ing in light of our results and those of other competitors.

For exam­ple, every­one sees Nakano’s hokei and thinks the way to win is to do a really fast hokei with impres­sive flips. Well, that’s the way for Nakano to win, but he’s got an edge on any­one else who tries to use that tac­tic — he’s bet­ter at it because he’s been doing it longer. The way to beat Nakano is not by try­ing to be like Nakano.

Of course, these two guys are just the most obvi­ous exam­ples. There are lots of great com­peti­tors in sim­i­lar posi­tions. Every time I see the same peo­ple win­ning with the same tac­tics year after year, I get this feel­ing that things aren’t evolv­ing the way they should. I guess my point is that sim­ply prac­tic­ing to “get bet­ter” isn’t going to take Taido to higher lev­els. We have to actively ana­lyze our cur­rent results and apply cre­ative thought to improv­ing them.

Logistics and Statistics

On the whole, the tour­na­ment ran really smoothly. Due to the large num­ber of com­peti­tors, the events had to be split up into two sep­a­rate dojo. The elim­i­na­tion rounds for the hokei divi­sions were held upstairs on a hard­wood floor. This didn’t turn out too badly, since the first two rounds of the –tai hokei required untai. The biggest dis­ad­van­tage was that it made it impos­si­ble to see one event if you were com­pet­ing in another. I didn’t get to see any of the women’s hokei elim­i­na­tions because I was com­pet­ing in jis­sen downstairs.

The judg­ing in this tour­na­ment was pretty excel­lent. I’ve been pretty out­spo­ken about the incon­sis­tent and often clearly biased judg­ing in some Japanese tour­na­ments, but I was pleas­antly sur­prised over­all with this event. Abe and Watanabe espe­cially showed clear judg­ment and excel­lent con­trol of the matches. There were lots of warn­ings given for unsoku, kamae, and poor tech­nique. Even bet­ter, I only saw a cou­ple of points given with­out good con­tact or for crap (unbal­anced, uncon­trolled, weak, or gen­er­ally stu­pid) tech­niques. Honestly, this is a big step in the right direc­tion, and I hope the trend con­tin­ues to the all-Japan and the World Championships next year.

This year was also the most inter­na­tional shakai­jin to date, with com­peti­tors from France and Australia. And some American guy too. Between Jason and I, we man­aged to dou­ble the total num­ber of for­eign­ers to win medals in indi­vid­ual events in the shakai­jin (Lars Larm and Alvar Hugosson have also taken bronzes home in the past). Someday, one of us is going to have to win an event outright.

Me, Me, Me

Since this is my web­site, yet get to read my totally biased account of the day’s events. Lucky you!

This was my first time to com­pete in the shakai­jin tour­na­ment, and I’d be an ass if I claimed not to be pleased over­all. There were things I could have done bet­ter (see below), but the results beat my expectations.

My first match started right at 9am, and I was a lit­tle ner­vous. I was the youngest com­peti­tor in the –mei (breath­ing) hokei divi­sion by a mar­gin of prob­a­bly twenty years. I fully expected that my age would pre­clude my win­ning any matches. I was wrong.

The thing with the –mei hokei is that they are designed for older peo­ple. Not nec­es­sar­ily really old peo­ple, but adults. I learned seimei no hokei (the required form for the first two rounds this year) when I was about eleven years old. I can’t say that I’ve plumbed its depths, but I have prac­ticed it for twenty years and believe that I have a fair under­stand­ing of what it does and how it works. Practicing Yoga and T’ai Chi off and on through the years hasn’t hurt in that respect. Still, I’m a young guy with a healthy and fairly strong body, so I tend to move by exert­ing force. Properly per­formed, the move­ments in the –mei hokei are accom­plished by direct­ing nat­ural energy — a fancy way to say that the inter­nal process of the move­ment is more impor­tant than its exter­nal appear­ance. Anyway, older peo­ple have an advan­tage in learn­ing to do this because, hav­ing less phys­i­cal strength with which to push, they can allow them­selves to flow.

So imag­ine my sur­prise when I won the first match. It was prob­a­bly a fluke, since I’m pretty sure that Takahashi screwed some­thing up (he’s been com­pet­ing in the –mei hokei divi­sion for lots of years and has won it more than once). I got a lit­tle excited and that ten­sion didn’t help me out in the sec­ond match. Still, I man­aged to find myself in the finals.

Since I had fully expected to lose, I hadn’t prac­ticed enmei or kat­sumei at all in the few weeks lead­ing up to the tour­na­ment. So I had no choice but to per­form seimei again in the finals. For some rea­son, I decided to do both the front and back halves, which I hadn’t done for at least a year. Nishi is a vet­eran –mei hokei com­peti­tor, I didn’t give myself good odds for beat­ing him, but I tried to clear my mind and do as good a hokei as pos­si­ble. Despite a slight loss of bal­ance at one point, I felt OK with my per­for­mance. After the final bow, I kind of zoned out while wait­ing for Nishi to fin­ish up, so I was some­what stunned when I noticed the flags going up in my favor. Third place.

Jissen didn’t work out quite so well. My first match was against an inex­pe­ri­enced oppo­nent, and I took it as a oppor­tu­nity to warm up. I scored the first wazaari and then just kind of hung out until time was called. The jis­sen style in Osaka is a lot more direct and aggres­sive than most dojo, so it took a while for me to get used to the flow of stan­dard jis­sen again. I won, but I didn’t feel that I was flow­ing the way I wanted to.

When my turn came back around, my oppo­nent was none other than Kimio Tanno. Tanno’s strong (he’s one of the few Japanese Taidoka with any appre­cia­ble mus­cle) and tricky — he changes his tac­tics in almost every match. The first time I ever saw him com­pete was when he beat Mitsuaki Uchida in the American 30^th anniver­sary tour­na­ment. In this tour­na­ment, he beat me (and a bunch of other people).

I don’t really know what hap­pened in this match. I’m not try­ing to make excuses, but for some rea­son, I just wasn’t able to keep my mind on what was going on around me — it was like I was some­where else. At least I didn’t make it easy on Tanno — he couldn’t score on me, and I lost by a warn­ing. We both landed a few glanc­ing blows, but noth­ing solid. I felt that we were both strug­gling to fig­ure out how to approach each other, and then time ran out. Tanno got his game together in sub­se­quent matches and went on to take the sil­ver medal.

The Osaka Team

Osaka doesn’t have the most dis­tin­guished tour­na­ment his­tory. A cou­ple of the guys have man­aged to place in one or two tour­na­ments a num­ber of years back, but they haven’t been able to repeat those per­for­mances since.

This time, only three of us advanced beyond the first jis­sen elim­i­na­tion, and one made it to the fourth round. As I alluded to ear­lier, I think the Osaka group has a much more lin­ear style of Taido and a focus on strong sin­gle attacks rather than con­tin­u­ous com­bi­na­tions. This is unfor­tu­nate, since the judges rarely give points for that sort of Taido any­more. Part of the issue is that Osaka is so far removed from the main­stream of Taido com­pe­ti­tion. People prac­tic­ing closer to Tokyo have a dis­tinct advan­tage in access to a greater num­ber of train­ing part­ners and competitions.

All of our men lost dur­ing the first round of –tai hokei, and Tamura fell just short of the finals in the kyu-level hokei. On the whole, Osaka isn’t very strong at hokei — most of my dojo-mates are more inter­ested in jis­sen. Tone Sensei is the excep­tion, usu­ally win­ning or plac­ing in the –mei and sonen hokei divi­sions. He took first place in –mei this year, and I give him a good deal of the credit for help­ing me do as well as I did.

Apparently, this year was par for the course as far as my dojo-mates are con­cerned. Maybe I can con­vince them to try some dif­fer­ent prac­tices in the hopes of fair­ing bet­ter next time. As Einstein famously pointed out, doing the same thing and expect­ing a dif­fer­ent result is insan­ity. I’m not sug­gest­ing that the Osaka dojo is doing any­thing nec­es­sar­ily wrong, but they’ve set­tled into a rou­tine that doesn’t allow them to improve at the kind of pace that would make them com­pet­i­tive. I really enjoy a lot of the train­ing we do cur­rently, but maybe this is a good time to con­sider mak­ing a few changes.

Me, Again

I seri­ously think that I need to alter my approach too. One thing I real­ized a cou­ple of days before the shakai­jin is that I don’t take my par­tic­i­pa­tion in tour­na­ments seri­ously enough. I want to work on chang­ing that.

Lately, I’ve been strug­gling to rec­on­cile my strong dis­like of “mar­tial sports” with my belief that mar­tial arts prac­tice requires com­pe­ti­tion to be of any real value besides sim­ple PE. Being a rel­a­tively inex­pe­ri­enced com­peti­tor (con­sid­er­ing how long I’ve been doing Taido), I think it’s impor­tant for me to enter as many tour­na­ments as I can while I have the chance. However, the idea of Sport Taido with­out an equal empha­sis on Taido as Budo is one I am very strongly against.

Perhaps I also have fear of fail­ure /fear of suc­cess issues with tour­na­ments that have pre­vented me from earnestly prepar­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the past. This isn’t the place for self-psychoanalysis. What I do know is that I want to take things more seri­ously when I com­pete in the future. In prepa­ra­tion for the shakai­jin, I prob­a­bly prac­ticed seimei no hokei about fif­teen times and did noth­ing spe­cial to prac­tice jissen.

I’ve noticed that this is my pat­tern: to do the absolute min­i­mum prepa­ra­tion for tour­na­ments with the mind­set that I won’t win any­way since tournament-style Taido isn’t my inter­est. That’s a really self-defeating atti­tude and a sure way to never win any­thing. It’s true that the Taido seen in tour­na­ments resem­bles a game more so than it does any­thing else, but win­ning that game can only improve my Taido and wouldn’t appre­cia­bly weaken my mar­tial instincts. I’ve decided to make an hon­est try against some stiff com­pe­ti­tion in the all-Japan.

So, this really was a warm-up.

Though tour­na­ment train­ing will never be the main focus of my prac­tice, I’m going to work harder on prepar­ing for the all-Japan. I’ll be com­pet­ing in the reg­u­lar hokei divi­sion and prob­a­bly some­thing else.

The shakai­jin tour­ney showed me what I need to work on between now and then. My untai is pretty good, but I’ll need to improve my ten­tai hokei to be com­pet­i­tive. I also have some ideas regard­ing train­ing for dan­tai jis­sen that I hope to put into prac­tice for our team. We have a lit­tle less than three months to apply what we learned in the shakai­jin taikai.