2006 Tokaido Regional Meet

This past week­end, I par­tic­i­pated in the first ever Tokaido Regional Meet, and I had a great time (but I’m almost always hav­ing a great time). This tour­na­ment very much resem­bled the 2^nd Kanagawa Meet I wrote about in February in a num­ber of ways. First, it was held in the same loca­tion — the Tokai University Budokan. Second, the com­peti­tors, judges, staff, and spec­ta­tors looked sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar. In fact, it was almost the same com­pe­ti­tion all over again.

The Back-Story

To explain how this hap­pens, I should men­tion a few things to which I alluded in my report on the Kanagawa meet. Specifically, it comes down to the fact that Honshu (the largest island in Japan, and coin­ci­den­tally the one on which all but a hand­ful of Taido clubs are located) is small and moun­tain­ous. The result of Honshu’s geog­ra­phy is that there are sev­eral dis­tinct regions (each with its own sub­cul­ture) in close prox­im­ity. Tohoku, Kanto, Kansai, etc each have their own Japanese dialects and ways of think­ing. However, they are all crammed together on a piece of land about the size of California.

People who do Taido for longer than a few years are bound to run into the same folks again and again. They develop bonds through shared Taido expe­ri­ence as well as their unique geo­graph­i­cal quirks of Japaneseness. In Taido’s short forty years, fam­i­lies have devel­oped, and since most Japanese peo­ple don’t stray very far from their home­towns, these fam­i­lies remain extremely inte­gral. This is very appar­ent in the group of Taido asso­ci­a­tions around Shizuoka and Kanagawa.

The god­fa­ther of this Taido-mob is Norio Akiyama, whom I first met when I was a tike in 1986. Akiyama Sensei is one of Uchida Sensei’s best Taido friends, and he’s the rea­son that Negishi came to live with us in Atlanta for five years. In my trav­els to Japan, I have spent a lot of time with Akiyama, stay­ing at his house for almost a month one time. He’s a great Taido geek. I was telling some­one last week that, if I were able to choose some­one to be my uncle, Akiyama Sensei would be my top pick.

Anyway, in addi­tion to own­ing the dojo in Fuji (where I visit to play and teach on a pretty reg­u­lar basis), Akiyama Sensei is respon­si­ble for teach­ing lots of really cool Taido instruc­tors. His Taido fam­ily includes Negishi and our whole Yokohama crew, Kato Sensei’s group in Shimizu, and Tokai University (where Negishi, Kato, and Fukunaga went to school), as well as his own dojo, which has pro­duced a num­ber of really strong Taidoka.

It was Kato Sensei who man­aged the oper­a­tions of the Tokaido taikai, though Akiyama was “tour­na­ment pres­i­dent,” which basi­cally means that he autho­rized deci­sions and signed the cer­tifi­cates. This event was a lit­tle big­ger than the Kanagawa meet turned out, pos­si­bly because every­one is get­ting geared up now that tour­na­ment sea­son has started, but every­thing ran very smoothly and I think we all had fun.

The Tournament

I felt like crap Sunday morn­ing, so I decided to skip the hokei divi­sion. You just can’t fake a good hokei per­for­mance by doing some things bet­ter than oth­ers or favor­ing one side of some tech­niques over oth­ers. Actually, this is a large part of the genius of Taido’s hokei as a train­ing tool as revealed by the high point deduc­tion for fail­ing to return to gentai.

Since Nakano has pretty much maxed out the tech­ni­cal level of the –tai hokei as they stand, it’s hard to be blown away by most of the hokei one sees at local com­pe­ti­tions. Though I couldn’t have done any bet­ter, I was hop­ing to be more excited about the hokei part of this event than I was. The women’s hokei divi­sion was a lot bet­ter, with Yokohama dojo mem­bers tak­ing first and third place.

Yokohama also did really well in tenkai (2^nd and 3^rd) and won the team jis­sen. Chiba and Takatsuna took 2^nd and 3^rd in men’s jis­sen, and Takatsuna also got 3^rd in hokei, despite an injury which forced him to com­pete only with hentai.

I also did pretty well myself, though I nar­rowly missed get­ting a heavy thing placed around my neck at the end of the day. I won my first two rounds of jis­sen, despite my back and ankle feel­ing all out-of-whack. My first oppo­nent was pretty strong, but I saw every­thing he threw com­ing from a mile away. Despite his size and power advan­tage, I didn’t have too much trou­ble strate­giz­ing my way into his weak points. Essentially, I fronted an aggres­sive game, then trapped him by appear­ing to go on the defen­sive. Big guys in Japan love the chance to attack, so he fell for it easily.

In my sec­ond round, my oppo­nent was faster, but small and not very con­fi­dent. I gave up a yuko for some really wimpy kick, but totally dom­i­nated the rest of the match. At one point I forced him out of bounds by sheer intim­i­da­tion. After that, I just kept hit­ting him with bet­ter tim­ing than he was fast enough to work around. He tried to get in some quick coun­ters, but a half-assed shuto just doesn’t hold up when you are tak­ing a hangetsu straight to the chest, so I won. But damn, was I worn out.

My third match was against Takatsuna from Yokohama. We were both tired and nurs­ing injuries, so we agreed before­hand to have fun and let who­ever found the clean­est open­ings win. I think Kato Sensei wanted to give me a warn­ing for laugh­ing a cou­ple of times, but he could see that it was use­less in a match where two friends are just play­ing with each other. In the end, I lost, but I wasn’t disappointed.

Perhaps I would have tried a lit­tle harder had I known that I was one match away from the finals. Takatsuna’s next match was against Chiba, who was also injured and worn down by that point. Chiba and I tend to stale­mate, with one of us some­times catch­ing a lucky shot for the win. I’ve also sparred a lot with Fujita from Fuji, who took first. All of the judges were telling me that, based on the level and type of jis­sen I was play­ing that day, there was a very good chance for me to win if I hadn’t run out of energy. Oh well. I don’t enter tourney’s to win; I play for fun, so I was happy either way.

Reunions

While I was chang­ing into my dogi prior to the com­pe­ti­tions, some woman I’ve never met before came up to me, very excited to intro­duce me to some­body — a Taido stu­dent from England. When I got a closer look at him, I real­ized, we had met before. It was Josh Macabaugh. Though he had shaved off the dreads I remem­bered from his visit to our dojo last year, we rec­og­nized each other and chat­ted a bit. It was nice to see him again. He’ s (I think) intern­ing in Shimizu for a few months and prac­tic­ing with Kato Sensei while he’s there.

I was also happy to get to hang out with Okawa Sensei a bit too. Okawa is a crazy guy, and I first met him dur­ing American Taido’s 30^th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion last year, when Chad and I taught him how to do the robot. He was pretty excited to see me, and gave me some (really excel­lent) advice about my jis­sen. He had been the assis­tant judge for my matches and gave me the low-down on ways I can work on actu­ally get­ting points for all the strikes and kicks I land on my oppo­nents (which is always incred­i­bly dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the score I receive). Then he made his wife take pic­tures of me with his students.

What?

At the end of the tour­na­ment, we all lined up for awards. Our team had a good num­ber of cer­tifi­cates, medals, and tro­phies sit­ting around, and we were pretty stoked. Akiyama Sensei likes to inno­vate, so the judges decided awards for the best sen, un, hen, nen, and ten. Much to my sur­prise, I was picked to share the nengi–sho with Sano (whose nenin hokei is really, really good). I think I was cho­sen because I took all of my scores for nen­tai attacks (hit­ting one guy with at least 5 hangestu in one match). It may have also had some­thing to do with the fact that I think Okawa Sensei really wanted me to win some­thing at my last tour­na­ment in Japan.

At any rate, I was sur­prised with a fancy cer­tifi­cate for “best nengi,” which is really funny to me, since I’ve always con­sid­ered nengi my weak­est technique.

My Last Tourney in Japan

This was it. Last chance. I think that was a good note on which to end my Japanese tour­na­ment expe­ri­ence. Not hav­ing many tour­na­ments in America (and being one of the only qual­i­fied judges when we do), it was really cool get­ting to com­pete with so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple. I’ve enjoyed mak­ing friends and shar­ing ideas with all of them. This being a “fam­ily” event, it was a super-friendly time to par­tic­i­pate in my final com­pe­ti­tion of my stay in Japan.

The Official Party

After the clean-up, we had the offi­cial toast­ing and pouring-drinks-fo-each-other cel­e­bra­tory “party”. Everyone met every­one they didn’t already know, and we ate like pigs. Fumi (the head instruc­tor at Fuji and one of my long-time friends) was get­ting pic­tures with every­one, just in case they became famous. Oe got sloppy and then emo­tional. After a while, he was cry­ing and giv­ing every­one espe­cially heart­felt hand­shakes and hugs. I swear, I thought he would never let go of my hand, but he’s a really great guy, so you can’t help but share the sen­ti­ment, even when he goes a lit­tle over­board. Each dojo made speeches, and Josh and I (the for­eign­ers) also had to make some com­ments. And then we ate like pigs again.

Now this is a first: I don’t know how it hap­pened — espe­cially at a Taido func­tion, where such things are usu­ally well provided-for, but we some­how man­aged to drink all the beer. It may not sound like such a big deal, but we were less than half of the way through the sched­uled ros­ter and sud­denly, there was no more. We asked the staff for more, and they told us that it was gone. We had fin­ished it all. Oe and I were try­ing to con­vince the hall man­ager to go to the store and buy more, but it just was not to be. We spent the next hour scav­eng­ing aban­doned glasses and bot­tles and self­ishly guard­ing any­thing alco­holic we could find. How can you pour a drink for the guy who kicked you in the face if there are no drinks to pour? It was a seri­ous deficit.

Logistical issues aside, we all got so have some really good talks about the day’s events and our plans for the future (even if we were a lit­tle more lucid than usual). It prob­a­bly sounds a lit­tle silly that I make such a big deal out of the post-event drink­ing par­ties, but you would be absolutely stunned how many impor­tant deci­sions get made at such affairs. Invitations are granted, friend­ships are begun, advice is received (and quite often acted on later), ques­tions are answered can­didly, teams are formed, and whole other tour­na­ments are planned (I’ll tell you more about that one later…). The get-together is every bit as impor­tant a part of the tour­na­ment than the actual com­pet­i­tive games are.

Now, let's all go drink more!

So after drink­ing the entire house, the Yokohama dojo made a col­lec­tive deci­sion that we needed more. Wait, I don’t want to make it sound like we’re a bunch of alco­holics. Isn’t it only alco­holics that need a drink? Well, in that case, we decided that there was beer and sake remain­ing in the Tokai Uni area, and that was it wait­ing to be drunk by some­one. In other words, there were drinks that needed us. That’s bet­ter, isn’t it?

We toasted our first-time cham­pion, Tanaka, and tried to get Miho and Nakajo to hook up . We talked and laughed (and Oe got a ride home early, so nobody was cry­ing) and ate greasy iza­kaya food. It was pretty-damn fun, and we all man­aged to get home at a semi-resonable hour.

Best of all, I was able to take Monday off of work, so instead of mak­ing the long ride back to Gunma, I spent the night at Negishi’s house and slept in.