Long Things

This is the second time B-san and I make it to the sand-paved park in Ishibashi to do some morning training before daily chores, such as work, take the rest of it away.
In the morning, before children and their mums hit the playground, the park belongs to the old people. Picking weeds, the few traces of green in the park. Wearing hats with big screens in the back to ward off the sun. Playing croquet on the big sandy space. Taking out their dogs. Their walking sticks. Or just themselves, to sit in the bright April sun, alone, or with one, two friends.
“Ah, I know you!” says one of them from a bench facing the playground when we walk past, in thick Osaka-ben. “You’re going to use those long things over there, aren’t you! Yes! I know! You’re the ones with the long things.”
The two aliens with jo and tsurugi (both aptly summed up under the description “long things”) must have made a memorable impression on him.
We return a greeting and proceed to the far side of the park where we deposit our rucksacks – B-san his bicycle – against the trees between play and free training ground.
We start stretching, doing our separate warm up routines, pushing our feet into the sand in low stances, looking at the sky backwards and upside down, through legs and leaves and branches. Stretching into the blues sky, into the sandy ground, and slowly, into spring. I manage two chin-ups. Not a great number but a considerable improvement from the expected zero. B-san hangs from a tree and does some upside down sit-ups.
We proceed to practise rows of kung-fu warm-up kicks, kicking our legs straight up at the sky, arms outstretched to both sides, finger tips pointing at the sky, up, always up, tensing the arms, aiding the intensity of the attack. We kick our hands from the inside and outside, from below, and, with difficulty, flying backwards. B-san is flying and kicking. I'm not. Not yet. I follow and try to put things into my muscles and brain. In that order. Muscles can do a lot of things when guided by another brain, much less when left with my own, still struggling with information overload.
We go through most of the juro, the ten streets of praying mantis kung fu, movements repeated again and again along a straight line. In some of them, martial purposes are clearly visible. Grab the man, pull him towards you and kick him in the balls. Once, twice. A different variant. Nice and simple. Natural. Other moves are beautiful and difficult, all of them tire the legs.
“That’s budo,” says N-Sensei. “Your legs get tired. Your legs get tired doing budo.”
We stand with our arms stretched out in front of us, sitting straight down as if on a chair. As straight as we manage. The Jackie-Chan-in-the-Drunken-Master pose. One and a half painful minutes. Legs start shaking, sweat starts dripping.
Long things. “It takes time,” says N-Sensei. “That’s the meaning of kung-fu. It takes time.”
So we take time. Early morning time. I have never been on a train with so many school children before, blue uniforms everywhere, girls with grey V-neck jumpers, white blouses, red ribbons tied in front, short skirts, loose white socks. Boys with broad-shouldered navy jackets, stiff standing collars featuring their school crests. Salary men grabbing hasty meals on their way to work in the station’s soba shop, canned coffee and the paper from a kiosk. I find coffee without sugar. Coffee and milk. And enjoy the creamy aromatic purity of flavours, waking me up into the morning bustle. A new experience to an Eikaiwa teacher like myself who usually doesn’t go to work until mid-day to efficiently combine a few hours of daylight for kids, university students, and housewives with the evening hours for the salary men eager to learn English for work, or their sparse time spent abroad.
We put in another bit of stretching and talking, face trees on air chairs, sinking down into painful stances to forget the pain caused by slapping the rough bark, slapping the rough bark ever harder to forget the pain in the legs. When the pain somehow gets behind the cover of trickery and manages to get a good right hook in, B-san shows me his circuit, which consists of a running-jumping-climbing tour de force through the playground. But I don’t really get to see the details as I get stuck on the first obstacle, a 6 ft wooden pole, square shaped, to be jumped and walked around on the palms of the hands, which B-san achieves by walking two steps and jumping right up it. I finally manage to do it running and strenuously pulling myself on top of the rough wooden surface as it takes a few decorative shreds of skin out of my forearm, making it look like the wavy traces of a bear’s paw.
When I’ve mastered this once, B-san is back from his full circuit. Practice is practice, and I’m only starting.
With the big pole in front of me, I feel suddenly inspired by the old karate masters and start punching it. Hand conditioning. To burst the skin on the knuckes, make them turn black and grow the bones. It hurts. I’m not even punching it hard, just touching the rough wood with my knuckles, gradually increasing the force slightly. Until I see a red dot on the pole. First the middle joint of my middle finger starts bleeding. Not a good sign, as it should be the punching knuckles that bleed first. But I keep going and finally get one of them to bleed, too. I watch fascinated as my fists paint red dots on the light wood. I follow this initial bout of punching with some knuckle press-ups while B-san finishes his hanging from a tree for more sit-ups.
When he gets back down, another old man comes and talks to him, and I join them as he shows us a hammer he uses to make katana. His accent is thick, and it is difficult to get a grasp on the drift of his monologue. His sumo stomps help reveal that he used to be good at sumo once. He got into swordfighting. But then got smashed over the head. In Japan, you learn to kill in one blow. Now he makes katana. With this hammer. He came over to Osaka from Shikoku with his big family. They were priests before. No big families like that in Osaka. Only in Shikoku. A woman joins him, and we have to leave. B-san is off to work. I stroll through the Shotengai surrounging Ishibashi station. Fighting. A good start to the day. What is the next priority?
Bunburyodo. Fighting. And writing. I pick up a notebook at a 100 Yen shop that helps me decide to pick it saying “sensible notebook” among a madness of pink and blue starts and circles. Just like the insides of my head. Sensible. Right.
I find a café called “Dawlish” with wooden tables and chairs and latte for 350 Yen. Perfect.
Inspired by training and sun, I feel like getting more of both, and there is still about an hour left before work. Trying to find a spot to train near my house, I walk along the road behind it, and find a large field of grass to be reached through some wholes in the fence. Grass. That is a rare luxury in Japanese cities. I climb through the fence and try to piece together the juro. Failing miserably on most. The tsurugi and weaponless kata moves are starting to take root in my head, so I practise what I can, enjoying the grass beneath my feet and the sun in my face. Pieces of freedom. Fighting. Writing. A morning well used.
As work time approaches, however, I find myself increasingly sleepy, until I'm on the train with the housewives, students, foreigners on holidays, and old people that populate the twelve o'clock train to Juso. I'm the only one in a suit. The only salarywoman. Asleep on my feet, snoring "Gambarimasu!"