The Torch and The Cougar

23rd April 2008

Among the continuing report flood about the danger ridden path of the Olympic torch, Tibetan independence protests, and worsening Chinese human rights records in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, I found an especially striking article in the Daily Yomiuri yesterday.
It detailed a murder and the circumstances surrounding it. The murder was carried out by a specialist veterinarian team in Chicago. The victim was a cougar who had apparently travelled about 1000 miles to finally find himself in the streets of the big city.
The murder was publicly approved. Animal rights groups joined the consensus as they had to admit that a predator would sooner or later get hungry, and that even after being tranquilised, the cougar could still jump up 12 ft into the air, and run 70 miles an hour.

Awe-struck, my eyes travelled across to the small portrait photograph of this beautiful murder victim. He had instantly turned into my hero of the day. An organic high performance machine. Born to run, jump, and hunt. Economically designed according to the laws of both functional and aesthetic supremacy.
And as my eyes zoomed in on his, I felt a hot desire run through my blood to slip into his perfect body. To fly in a four-legged run, bounce sky-high on big, sprung paws, set my perfectly geared muscles and lungs into motion, and run, dodge, and manoeuvre with the single minded, unbudging determination of a hungry predator; teeth ready to pierce through fur and skin, gums tingling in an irreversible ascent of desire, to be satiated only by the warm flow of blood, pulsing into its pores and crevices pumped by the victim’s heart, more fervent and alive than ever in its throes, until it stops beating and I get my fill.
I travel back to the crowded bus refreshed, with a bestial power running through my feeble human veins. Colours suddenly look brighter, outlines appear sharper, objects more focussed.
However, returning to my own body and mind, I decide that my previous train of thoughts would best be accommodated in a fictional psychotic killer of the Hannibal Lector type: an intelligent, sophisticated monster that evokes in readers a mixture of admiration and utter contempt and in this way gives them opportunity to explore the borderlines of their own sanity.

Thus having the cougar thoughts filed away, my eyes fall on the strass stone outline of a cougar jumping across my black trainers, and I recall the story of two German brothers, Adolph and Rudolph Dassler, who started a sports shoe company called ADIDAS in their mother's laundry in the 1920s. During WWII, both brothers got involved with the Nazis, Rudolph being closer to them than Adolph. Later, the two brothers fell apart, and in 1948, Rudolph founded his own sports shoe company that came to be called PUMA (German for cougar).
Yet again, I am caught between disgust, a rock and admiration, a hard place: acidic fluids are climbing up my esophagus at the thought of Rudolph’s Nazi ties, yet my head is shaking in admiration of his marketing talent for choosing the PUMA, that biological epitome of athletic prowess, as a sports wear brand. Staring at my PUMA shoes and contemplating the darkest years of my country’s past, I somehow return to the Olympic Games.
Wasn’t there another occasion when the Olympics were held in a country ruled by a most questionable regime? What did the world feel like in 1936 when the Games were hosted by the Nazis?
It makes for an interesting comparison. Hitler, advised by his dangerously talented Propaganda specialist Goebbels, made Germany look like a most admirable and respectable country. Signs that read “No Jews Allowed” were removed from all major tourist attractions, and the Fuehrer gave special orders not to subject any foreigners to the Nazis’ strict anti-homosexual laws for the duration of the games. Black athlete Jesse Owens who famously won four gold medals during the games was allowed to move freely throughout the city, using public transport and visiting places at his liking, which must have felt like royal liberties to a black man from the segregation riddled United States. While there was great controversy in the US about boycotting the Games, the supporting team finally won the struggle. Jewish athletes withdrew, making their well-founded positions on Germany’s government clear, but the United States ended up winning the second highest amount of medals in the world, following host country Germany.
It was at the Berlin Olympics, too, that the Olympic torch was first brought to its destination in a relay race, starting in Marathon, Greece. Two Korean athletes won marathon medals for Japan, under Japanese names, as their country had been annexed by Japan in 1910. And another high light brings us back to the present situation: chosen as best national anthem was the Republic of China’s “Three Principles of the People”, which features the principles diligence, courage, and trustworthiness, and the ideal of “Great Unity” interpreted along Confucian lines as “Great World Harmony” for which everybody is encouraged to strive. Nowadays, Taiwan is not allowed to play this anthem at the Olympics, forced to be part of the People’s Republic of China, just like Tibet, and just as unhappy about it.

It is difficult to decide whether we should be grateful to Communist China or angry, that it is rather shamelessly showing us its true ugly face. On the one hand, we should maybe be happy that we know what to expect rather than being misled by a calculatingly crafted propaganda machine, hiding beneath clean streets the red flow of blood through its power chords, pumped by the psychotic ruling heart of the country. On the other hand, one cannot help wondering why they didn’t at least try to hold talks with Tibet. Talks could have been extended and prolonged until long after the Olympics without taking real action, making China look good and cooperative rather than bad and stubborn.

But my aim is not to criticise or praise China for the way it is handling the situation. To me the chaotic journey of this year’s Olympic torch, the blood and the violence, the boycotts from Europe and the ensuing protests in China, contain another lesson. It was the often quoted point of view that the Olympic Games should be independent of politics that led the US team to its many victories at the 1936 Nazi Olympics. And while this is quite obviously an impossible postulation, it contains a spark of truth.

The cougar jumping across my trainers, across countless Olympic football fields and running tracks, and across the pages of my newspaper, represents the core ambition of the athlete: to maximise his physical efficiency, excel in his chosen discipline and reach his chosen goal.
The difference is that the cougar is given his disciplines and his goals by nature. He is a predator, and designed to hunt for meat. This is why even animal rights groups agreed to have the Chicago cougar shot down.
Athletes, on the other hand, are not natural predators. They choose their own disciplines, in which they compete in a collective display of human strength and potential.
Looking at our own physical composition, it seems that we are more likely to excel in intellectual than in physical pursuits. We have a choice as to what our goals are and have the potential to understand the size, nature, and quality of our resources well enough to avoid killing altogether. Yet the killing doesn’t stop. The political quibbling doesn’t stop. Can we not be wiser in our choices?

Athletes work focussing on maximum achievement, and the ensuing exploration of their own limitations serves both as a model for everyone, and a valuable counterpoint to ongoing political struggles around the world. When you have completed a marathon in 2 hours 15 minutes, or swum 1,500 metres in 14 minutes 58 seconds, exhaustion and exhilaration make all national boundaries run into a blurred periphery of insignificance.
Effort and achievement rule the individual, extended to team efforts, in which human interaction and cooperation become the number one principles to reach a common goal. Showing the world that people from its every nook and cranny are able to push themselves to breathtaking achievements, and to exchange their individual skill and beauty is an important token of world-wide human potential.

We are not compulsive predators who need to go hunting, only to be shot down by more intelligent, fearful prey. We are intelligent, thinking beings who have created a symbolic gathering of nations: in the Olympic Games, the limitations of the human body and mind are put to the test at regular intervals, the excellence of humankind is united in the workings of one world event, regardless of the national and cultural differences of its participants and spectators.

It is this constant human responsibility to improve as a whole, and the necessity to provide a peaceful working environment for this, that should be the goal WE pursue. And now that we have chosen World Peace as a sensible goal worthy of our intellectual capacities, we can cast another glance at the striking portrait of the cougar, and emulate his unbudging determination, his jumping and his running skills, and his beautiful efficiency of movement in pursuing what is the sustenance of his life.

Breathing in Death, Breathing out Beauty

On Monday, Shihan’s theme throughout the session is “feeling the techniques breathe”. Especially memorable as an illustration of this is a flowing irimi-nage starting from shomen-uchi. As uke’s arm comes up to be brought down in shomen-uchi, nage’s arm rises simultaneously and without touching uke’s arm, simply moves, drawing uke’s body forward in an open and inviting gesture as nage steps around in tenkan, and forms a wide open ring of energy with the additional use of his other arm, then steps around again and finishes in an elegant pose, the front hand slightly rising up as an afterthought, “zanshin”- as if he was waving good bye to uke, who is gracefully rolling away at this stage. In this particular irimi-nage, there seems to be hardly any direct physical contact between nage and uke.
While we are in the middle of practising this, Shihan interrupts to comment that right now, our technique is breathing, and we should be conscious of that and remember the feeling.

The following Wednesday, he takes up the thread saying: “Last time I said your techniques should breathe. Yamada-Sensei often spoke of breathing trees. I suppose the tatami in this dojo are also breathing. Practise in that spirit!”
When he is demonstrating another technique, he pauses to tell us about a Moroccan researcher who bought one of his DVDs in the Netherlands and thereupon decided to come to Shosenji this summer to study aikido.
“On this DVD,” says Shihan, “it said ‘The aikidoka uses his opponent’s own power to topple him.’ Many Western people seem to be under the impression that once you start training aikido, the world is going to turn into a Steven Segal movie. What people often fail to see is that in aikido we are trying to achieve harmony with our partner. What we are trying to do is not to topple someone, but to be really good friends with everybody we are practising with.”
And with this, he demonstrates a beautiful, flowing kotegaeshi, with a slight fermate on touching uke’s arm with his arm closest to him, maintaining a light but irresistible connection, keeping it at bay, before the other hand and the tenkan come in and lead to a harmonious finishing chord.
I get to practise a seated nikyo with Sumiyoshi-Sensei who kindly enlightens me on some technical basics, like moving off to the side with a sweeping atemi to set up the finishing move that has uke lying on the floor with a sore wrist, unable to get up.
With Itamar, I practise a sankyo to yonkyo transition, and Shihan comes in to explain to us how in the sankyo part uke’s arm, needs to be twisted towards him, turning the outside of his arm in the direction of his centre and beyond, with a tendency to aim the movement behind him, in order to make him uncomfortable enough to want to move out of it. Then follows the yokomen sword cut-like yonkyo, stepping around into ura to bring uke down.
I get to practise a pretty throw from ushiro-ryo-kata-dori with Hattori-san, and again Shihan comes to our help, this time explaining that before we can put the finishing touch to this move, we really need to wind up our body and take uke’s balance away in order to then have an easy time finishing off the throw.
We do a kokyu nage with nage sitting, and uke attacking him from the side with a katatedori. We witness a demonstration of this being achieved mainly by inviting uke using hip-movement while seated. Consequently we try to give the technique this subtle, powerful twist, which proves to be a difficult quest.
We finish with our usual seated kokyu nage, another breathing technique.
Meanwhile the wind outside is breathing the flowers off the trees, and for these weeks we have to watch the flowers fall, I suggest that everybody has a listen to Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden”, a European exploration of the topic of youth and death. But it has to be the Amadeus Quartett performance. In most other performances, the piece is distorted beyond recognition because it doesn’t breathe.
Listening to this work while watching the blossoms fall, European artistic romanticism meets Japanese seasonal romanticism. And although their shapes are as different as night and day, the Japanese subtle and seeking individual, internal harmony with nature, the European pronounced and seeking the communicative articulation of every emotion, we can see a common theme here. The cherry blossoms are beautiful and die young, at the height of their beauty: a close link exists between the seemingly opposing factors of youth and death.
Motojiro Kajii creates an even starker contradiction to be contemplated at the sight of the pure, pink beauty of Japanese spring. In his famous short story “Under the Cherry Trees”, to appreciate the unbelievable extent of the blossoms’ beauty, he has to conjure up images of sickening multitudes of dead bodies buried underneath the trees, crawling with maggots, pouring their detrital juices into the ground to feed the trees’ roots and thus give them the power to grow their celebrated beauty.
His European counterpart Schubert who took on the same subject around 100 years earlier knew what he was talking about when he wrote Death and the Maiden. Out of his 16 brothers and sisters, 11 died in infancy. He witnessed the sudden transition from youth to death as a natural phenomenon, just like we do here in Japan every year, seeing the blossoms sprout, bewitch the world with their beauty for a few weeks, and then come down in soft spring snow storms, melting into the sun of May, then dissolving into the rain of June.
Like in the Tao Te Ching, however, it is only this contradiction of opposites that makes the world whole and enables us to exist and perceive inside it. At Fred’s Café recently, they were playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A good choice, as the spring flowers and their death make us especially sensitive to the change of the seasons. But I cannot even hear a single season in the flat sound that comes dripping out of the speakers. There is no depth, no articulation, no imagery, no life. In Japan many people seem to be under the impression that once you start learning how to play the violin or the piano, you can conjure up the beauty of Mozart, or Bach, or Beethoven, and the world turns into a symphony. What they fail to see, however, is that what we are really trying to achieve in performing is to achieve complete harmony with instrument or voice, to breathe through it, and let it breathe. Only then will they come to life, and youth and beauty spring forth from places where before, there was nothing but ugliness and death.
So, let’s hear the wind breathe, watch the blossoms fly, listen to the maiden die, feel our techniques breathe, and make really good friends while training aikido. This is the principal of life, and of the arts, including the martial arts. You breathe in death. And you breathe out beauty. Ah, here comes the blow. Um, here comes the throw. The eternal circle expressed in the open and the closed mouth of the two lion dogs guarding the temple. Spring is almost over, and as the sultry summer heat is fast approaching, we have to remember to keep breathing.

Flowers Dancing at the Old Temple

On Saturday, the 29th of March I see the first cherry blossoms on my way to Iga.
One week later, on the 6th of April the cherry tree at Shosenji Temple in Osaka is in full bloom, its luscious pink branches hovering in the air, to which they give the proverbial magic touch of Japanese spring.
Today we have come together for an afternoon training session, a kyu and dan grading, and, finally, a hanami party under the abundant pink clouds of the big tree. Some good souls, may the spring god bless them, have been preparing food and setting up the grounds for the much anticipated hanami since one o’clock noon, filling the garden with promise and good spirit.
A large number of people have come together to train, and although the dojo is crowded, and special care needs to be taken not to tumble into and onto others while practising, the flow of energy seems undisturbed, as people who have never met are united under the parasol of Shihan’s words and demonstrations, by the mechanics and the spirit of aikido. To use everything they are given and give everything they have. Thus energy is kept unbound, and spirits mingle freely.
Shihan has told me to grade for my third kyu. During the practice session preceding the grading, he tells me I will be called up for the fifth kyu grading because I have never been graded before, so the system allows nothing else. I am happy about every glimpse I can get of Shihan’s eyes, so his news about the grading are a welcome opportunity for this and become yet another factor to contribute to my sunlit mood. My mind and body are travelling along the bright rays dancing through the big white dojo, along the fluent lines of my partner’s movements. She is a beaming little woman with a determined gentleness that is infectious. I admire her style and my body easily yields to cooperating with it and emulating it. “Your waza are very pretty!” she tells me, and I tell her I feel lucky I get to train with somebody as good as her.
My objective is not a certain colour of belt, and the thought of wearing a hakama like the more able people in the dojo seems more intimidating than attractive. I will not be able to be a carefree white belt anymore always entitled to helpful advice from senior aikidoka. I will have to be one of them, and make sure my aikido does not fall below a certain level of skill. But if I am bestowed with that responsibility I shall treasure it and do my best to fill the big black skirt.
After all, whatever I might be wearing, my objective in practising aikido remains the same. Even though at my present level of skill I have had only the tiniest glimpse of its actual implications, I sense in aikido a magnificent teaching that helps understand and master the flow of energy in any situation, that helps take in whatever hard blows are dealt, and gives the will and ability to hold on to and feel the impact of whatever attaches itself, however leechlike and unwanted; to accept it wholly for what it is, and return it to the world cleansed of its negativity, neutralising its aggressive energy, re-enforcing both one’s own and the aggressor’s right to existence, leaving the flow of energy undisturbed, and thus purifying it. On the horizon I glimpse peace of mind, and a power that consists of harmony.
The grading seems very short. All waza to the right are to be performed as omote, moving to the front, all waza to the left as ura, moving back, or rather around. I forget this at one point but catch on from the next technique. We are asked to do ikkyo, shiho-nage, and irimi-nage. As customary, we finish with seated techniques, or zagi, doing kokyu-nage, the breathing throw. The dojo seems to be breathing with us, a breath of fresh air in a world otherwise jam-packed with exhaust.
After we finish our grading requirements, we close with the same ceremony we have started off with, bowing again to the front, to Shihan, and to each other, then return to sit and watch the rest of the grading in seiza. This gradually takes all sensation out of the lower legs, so that by the time the dan gradings are finished, I am surprised that my numb legs do not buckle as I go through the usual mechanics of standing up and moving around again.
It is interesting watching the dan gradings. How many people can display a similarly high degree of aikido skill, yet their way of moving takes on shapes as different as the people themselves. I get to admire my friend Brown’s aikido from close by, as he is working with his partner directly in front of me. I feel reminded of a large, strong bamboo plant that moves back where a breeze attacks, and springs forth again where a void presents itself. But rather than a docile bamboo in the wind, this plant takes everything and everybody with it that dares to blow its way. I am surprised when he tells me later that he merely served as an uke and was not part of the actual grading.
We finish the session with another twenty minutes of training, and start crowding the changing rooms in order to move from the white world of the dojo into the pink world of the cherry blossoms. Outside under the flowers, a cornucopia of food and drink awaits us. A big, steaming pot of nabe – a brown broth containing chunky ingredients such as cooked daikon radish, eggs, chewy gelatinous triangles made of devil’s tongue starch, or konnyaku, deep-fried congealed fish-paste, and tofu. Trays laden with onigiri seaweed wrapped rice balls, fried meat and vegetables. Tubs full of water filled with treasures of silver and golden beer.
We pour onto chairs and staircases. Shihan appears in the middle of the crowd and welcomes us to this year’s Shosenji hanami party. The celebrations are sent safely on their way with a big “Kampai!”
People gather in groups and couples, hover across the trays like a swarm of locusts and run their tentacles through the treasure chests like an army of octopus-shaped pirates, all the while breathing the intoxicatingly cherry flowered air.
Our friend Itamar has come back from a long holiday at home in Israel with short hair. At first nobody recognises the mysterious young stranger, but when they hear him speak, their eyes double in size, and they say: “Otokomae yan!” (“Wow, you look good!”). As he has now assumed the position of part time priest for Japanese Christian style weddings, he feels that this style suits his solemn responsibilities better than his hippie curls. And on top of his re-styled well-received self, he has brought back with him a whole bag of caramelised pecan nuts which turn out to be a popular flavour in the second, sweet load of epicurean beauty presented under the pink flower canopy.
A smile spreads across my face as I spot Dave who I thought would be busy tonight. But he is here, and we eat and drink together and earn ourselves new buckets full of surprised comments mentioning how well we get on. While this should not be such a surprising component in a couple, it frequently surprises and amazes myself.
Thus, with a refreshed smile on my face, I start passing a note book around to honour something I had always thought to be an ancient Japanese tradition: the writing of poetry under the cherry blossoms. “Would you contribute a haiku?” I ask here and there and everywhere. After three first contributions from Dave,

Sakura ga ii
Mina-san daisuki
Kimochi ii wa!
Translation:

Cherry blossoms are great.
I love you all.
Man, I feel good.

Pooche, our little Chihuaha, who fell in love with the temple’s own Poodle lady Chocolat that night and was experiencing the pain of unrequited passion under the beautiful blossoms,

SO many smells and
SO many bitches in heat
I STILL can’t get laid.

and myself,

Under the blossoms
Beer and food and talk and smiles
Warm and warming hearts

Matsumoto-san takes my book and swiftly pens a smoothly crafted poem.

Mitasarete
Chiriyuku sakura
Yutaka kana

Translation:

Filled with
Falling cherry blossoms
Abundant

After that, I earn mostly hesitation noises at uttering the haiku request I had thought so perfectly natural. People demand thinking time, or politely withdraw. I manage to collect two sweet poems featuring my smiling face:

Aikido
Anna no egao
Sakura kana

Translation:

Is Aikido Anna’s smiling face not really a cherry blossom?

Anna-chan no egao ni soete
Shosenji zakura no utsuru
Nigorizake

Translation:

Along the lines of little Anna’s smile
Shosenji cherry blossoms
Cast their reflections onto the surface of cloudy sake

I get a contribution in Hebrew from Itamar, which, unfortunately I am unable to reproduce here in Latin transcription because embarrassingly I am unable to decipher the language of my ancestors. But he was kind enough to give me an on the spot translation:

Cherry blossoms above,
Pink, diluted with white,
The path is still very long.

And finally, I ask Shihan for a contribution. He thinks for a long time, his eyes directed at the blossoms above him, and then honours the pages of my book with the following contribution:

Kodera no niwa ni
Ranbu no sakura kana

Translation:

In the garden of the old temple,
Cherry blossoms are dancing.

As I read my haiku collection, I notice that the idea of a haiku seems to have a completely different shape in the Japanese mind than it does in the Western one. What we learn first of all about a haiku is that it is a poem that consists of 17 syllables taking the structure 5-7-5 in three lines. Apart from Matsumoto-san’s haiku, none of the haiku I had collected under the Shosenji blossoms corresponded with this structure. All of them, on the other hand, again with the exception of Matsumoto-san’s poem, ended with the syllables “kana”, which in my mind, schooled by the sound of contemporary Japanese, expresses uncertainty, but might have a different meaning in the ancient Japanese Japanese people seem to perceive as typical of haiku poems. It is an interesting new insight into the Japanese perception of a Japanese cultural phenomenon well known abroad, yet obviously pictured by Japanese and Western thinkers in rather divergent ways.
With golden streams of beer and crystal fountains of sake flowing through everybody’s veins, we engage in a bout of bingo, numbers being called out by Noriko, compelling everybody to punch through little squares of cardboard, until the winners are determined and little packages of prizes handed out.
A friendly speech by Yano Sensei finally concludes this year’s celebration of fast dying spring beauty, and people unite in a swift tidying up effort to leave clean this territory where the flowers dance every year, and spirits and bodies dance every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday on their everlasting search for harmony and gentleness.