Soldier Miyagi, the wonderful new Israeli hippie addition to our group, and Herr T are sitting on one of the round brick blocks scattered over the large elevated plateau at Toyonaka Station when I arrive. I have told Solider Miyagi, who has joined our morning sessions in the park, that this Saturday night would be a great night for a few beers as I don’t have plans early Sunday morning.
So, faithfully, he orders me here after I finish work. Herrn T’s last day in Osaka is nigh, so I take my GEOS salary to the station’s Asnas, a kind of combini, except that it closes when the station closes and is not conveniently open 24/7, and replenish the beer and snack reserves. I love buying goodies for boys, and enjoy their appetite as they dig into the crackers and crisps together with the night’s first sips of beer.
This is a popular spot for teenagers and other people who like spending evenings outside, near a convenient enough store and station, to eat and drink in fresh air, to sing and play guitar, to practise break dancing and locking and talk tranquil, mundane miniatures and heated philosophical monstrosities. Appropriately, we too talk like teenagers tonight, except older and with more mature desires. Soldier Miyagi has recently been inspired by the cornucopia of young female beauty in Osaka, and begun to look out for 18 year old virgins. Herr T is always doing that anyway, not restricting his range to 18 year old virgins. A 16-year-old comes towards us and greets Soldier Miyagi. A boy in tow. They know each other from somewhere. Communicating with gestures. She wants a smoke. Isn’t that illegal? I ask. How old are you? She laughs, she and the boy light up and wander off. She is obviously not a virgin.
Later, when Soldier Miyagi and Herr T are about to hop on the last train, we spot a group of familiar and unfamiliar foreign faces heading towards the station with us. B-san’s former flatmate couple J-chan and Tsu-san and AD, the Welsh-Italian turtle keeper I beat at arm wrestling one night when he made it home to his turtles after all, miraculously, after several unsuccessful arguments with several stubborn signposts and his stuttering bicycle as a go between lacking in eloquence. The new face is Big Man S. “Where is Scotland are you from?” I smile at the familiar accent that immediately makes me feel homesick for bonnie Scotland. “Glasgow.” Big Man S from Glasgow is good at darts. I am not tired and have no early morning plans for the next day. Soldier Miyagi and I join the group for a few pints at a darts bar in Ishibashi. I have never been good at throwing things, or aiming at things. But somehow, a triplet of darts with Scottish flag flights land in my hand, and I can’t stop trying to hit bull. Big Man S takes pity on me and gives me some advice. He is good at teaching. Manages a kindergarden while teaching there. You must be a good teacher to do that. And he is a darts star. Soldier Miyagi leaves us as he has some early morning plans the next day. I stay and play. This is different from throwing a ball. Right foot forward, and all the weight on that. Lock both legs into place, back leg standing on the ball of the foot. Aim with the eye you can see better with. Obviously my right one, the one with the extra pupil like a wolf’s eye. Keep elbow, hand and shoulders in one line and point where you want to hit. And I stand and change positions, lock, stretch, aim, point, throw, throw, throw. Three in the same spot, says Big Man S. First one wherever. But the next two in the same palce. That’s how you learn to aim.
I hardly have anything to drink because something has obsessed me, and I cant stop practising. An old man at the bar keeps shouting “Sugee na!” and “Osshii!” indiscriminately at everybody’s efforts. Especially mine, but his judgement is to sake-infested to be centering on darts skills. He might be impressed by the amount of darts I seem to be throwing in his drunken world of manifold manifestations. My skills are merely taking their first steps, in fact, they are still trying to germinate. I can’t stop.
I throw a few darts with AD, and he tells me he’s been practising for a long time, but still no success. It’s difficult. Simultaneously, we focus our eagle eyes on bull and throw. Smile at each other, shrug, gather our darts from all over the place. It’s difficult.
Then, most of the group leaves. But Big Man S and I move on to the next darts bar. His stomping ground. Here he has learned Japanese, he tells me. It’s obviously a good place for doing that, then. It is a medium sized room a few twisted flights of stairs up a building. There’s a piano. A young bar man who looks like a samurai popular among his mates for his feminine appearance. Everybody knows each other. The palce is like a family living room, only that the family members do not fill the usual positions available in a family. And they have chosen each other. We keep throwing darts until the bar closes.
Then, we move on to a snack bar across the road. Everybody in there, Big Man S tells me, who looks like a man is probably a woman, and vice versa. But before we walk into the snack bar, we hit the combini across the road. We need something, Big Man S tells me, and consequently introduces me to a magical drink that comes in a small golden bottle. Ukon no Chikara. He chooses, I get to pay. He has paid a lot of drinks before, and it is only fair that I pay, but I have to laugh at him taking me into a combini to buy something and telling me to pay when we arrive at the counter. I am still laughing on the way out and tell him “You’re such a gentlman.” “Yeah, that’s a Scottish gentleman for you.” This is so perfectly in tune with International stereotypes and so funny that I actually find it charming and have to laugh even more.
In the snack bar, a thin girl with black lines along the top parts of her teeth sits next to me and can’t take eyes or hands off me. Apart from this slightly difficult to deal with situation, there is an interesting mix of people and gender here indeed. We are served crisps and have another beer. No problem with Ukon no Chikara. Never mind that I was tired before I left the house in the morning and ready to view the first couple pints after work as a good night drink. Ukon no Chikara. Feel the magic.
Big Man S sings Living on a Prayer with an appropriately rough voice. We hear several other good shots at karaoke. Gay and merry till the end, it is daylight when we leave. O well. Sometimes, you reach things you have never aimed for. Although the bright light is a shock, the fresh morning air and bike ride along the Senrigawa river make a great reflective cool down to a trippy night full of aiming and throwing, merry and gay, and blessed with the magic of Ukon no Chikara, the choice of a Scottish gentleman, a new friend.
My next Saturday lesson with R-kun is spent throwing the ball at phonics cards, and then trying to land it in my rubbish bin, gathering points from one orange, two oranges, or three oranges, one round for each number of points. If you get the ball in for the one point round, you get to move on to the two point round. R-kun is 13, chubby, clever, good at thinking and aiming and throwing things, and a good craic. I love my classes with him. We just play. Practise aiming at things. I give him candy and chocolate. We do his homework together. He is too lazy to do it on his own. This is one of my favourite classes. I have become obsessed with this idea of aiming at things and throwing things.
I have always been bad at both. I remember the Spanisch aikido guru who gave us a great weekend of training out in the middle of nowhere in La Rioja. Lying in ice cold rivers. Doing a thousand cuts with a bokken, marching through hills and green fields in a long, long line of people. Doing aikido to Indian sacred music. Discussing whether aikido is about being in tune with nature. Whether nature isn’t cruel. Whether we can say that.
He puts up three empty wine bottles. We are in La Rioja after all. Wine has to play some part in our spiritual training. They are about 30 feet away. “This is an evolutionary experiment,” he announces. “Let’s have three women.” Yolanda, Sonya, and I sit down in seiza where he gestures us to sit. He hands us some pebbles. “Now throw them at the bottles.” “At which one?” I ask. Yolanda and Sonya laugh. What’s so funny about that? But when I try to throw the pebble at the middle one, I understand why it’s funny. My pebble lands rather far away from any of the bottles. Next, Sensei gets three men up to do the job, and they all manage to hit the bottles with ease. A traumatising experience. Typically, I will not accept that I am naturally bad at something. There must be a way to learn it.
And here I am. I am 27 today. As usual, chronology is all over the place in this blog, but my head is right here right now, in a Nikon moment, combining experiences to lead me closer to enlightenment. It seems a good little lesson. Aiming at things and throwing things can be learned. Only last Saturday, in my class with R-kun, playing a variation of the one-two-three-oranges rubbish bin basket ball game, I used some of my recent aiming and throwing experience, and a useful piece of advice from Big Man S: “Take your time and aim!” I hit the bin every time. It is a very useful skill to hit the bin. I will continue practising that daily. Sort things out. Kick things out. Choose a target, throw, and aim. You aim, you miss, you throw, you hit, you live, you learn. So here I am. 27. Taking my time. Aiming.
