Saturday Night Overture

It is Saturday Night. But that does not have the same meaning here as it does in other places, where people go out and get drunk, comfortably sandwiched in between two days of freedom.

Here, in my world, Saturday night is the overture to these two days of freedom. This overture starts with a hurried finish at work. My teaching schedule is relatively busy on Saturdays, because in most people’s world, this is free time they can use to pursue their personal interests, such as studying English conversation. But I work days in advance and in between classes, getting my paper work prepared and finished, and preparing next week’s children’s classes, and Tuesday adults’ classes. My Tuesday is your Monday, if you have an average understanding of weekdays and their functions, charms, and stumbling blocks.

So if nothing else gets in the way, such as students staying on to chat long after class, or potential students coming in who need to be interviewed and level-checked, or incomplete paperwork popping up out of nowhere, suddenly screaming: it’s my deadline tonight!, I make a swift exit about 20 minutes after my last class and take the Hankyu Takarazuka train to Toyonaka, where a good, hard, friendly Shorinji-ryu karate class unfolds into a pleasant, sweaty allegro opening to my weekend.

On the seventh day, the Lord rested. He had finished his creation. My Sundays, on the other hand, are usually spent recovering from exhausting weeklong creation maintenance activities, cleaning my flat, and finally, launching my own private workshop of creation, where, short of clay and breath and talent, I use my computer and my fingertips to create, hoping for the best. Hope, it is a tree of life. So I water and nurture it to make it grow strong roots. Then, at some point, my body threatens to grow roots, too, and needs to move, so I go to Toyoshima gym, an exercise followed by food and more Sunday relaxation and creation.

This Sunday, however, another world has snuck into mine, and made different plans for me. It is the Chinese New Year, and we have a Chinatown in Kobe, no more than half an hour away from central Osaka, easily reached by the Hankyu Kobe line. Lion dances, Chinese acrobatics, little shops selling kung-fu garb, and a great variety of dim sum and other culinary delights from the country of kung fu fighting and acupuncture, fireworks and lion dances, are calling out to me.

Thanks to a new acquaintance made at Shosenji aikido dojo, a place that is proving to be a blessing from Japan’s 800 myriads of gods, I will then descend on a twirl of cloud to another training ground to get a first taste of praying mantis kung fu, something that makes my muscles twitch and stretch in joyful anticipation. This Saturday night therefore ends in mysterious plunking pentatonics that will abduct me into a strange world of ink twirls in which I will pray with mantises.

If I’m lucky, my prayers will yield an introduction to whatever god makes war and peace. We could chat over a cup of oulong tea and sit on a soft, twirly cloud, and then close our eyes and descend on our cloud towards a realm in between Heaven and Earth, where the transforming spirit of fighting lives, and fly through bamboo forests in a hypnotised, supernatural, Heavenly exchange of faith and fists.