Anna's World

Happiness and Harmony - The Akihabara Lesson

2008-06-18T22:45:00.008+09:00

Japan likes to call itself the ‘Land of Wa’, or harmony. Before the 8th century, the Chinese called Japan ‘wo’, which is where the sound comes from, but ‘wo’ had the rather unflattering meaning of ‘dwarves’, and the ‘dwarves’ were one of the peoples the Chinese usually summed up under the phrase ‘Eastern Barbarians’. The Japanese took it upon themselves to find a more suitable character to denote their country. Wa. Harmony. This, they felt, distinguished their country from other countries. This was their most essential feature.

Indeed, Japan has a low crime rate. Lost wallets and mobile phones are usually turned in at the nearest police station, and foreigners living in Japan cite safety as one of the great advantages of living in Japan.

The Japanese have a very simple three step recipe for harmony. One. You do what you are told. Two. You follow the rules. Written and unwritten. Three. If you cannot comply with points one and two, you dispose of yourself.

One important concept in Japanese society is ‘kimatteiru’. Every time something is given the attribute ‘kimatteiru’, you can safely identify a rule in Japanese society. When you ask a Japanese person why they impractically dip the sushi in the soy sauce fish first, not rice first, so the fish falls off every time, they will usually shrug, smile apologetically, and answer with ‘kimatteiru’.

The most natural sounding translation would be something like ‘that’s just the way it is’, or ‘that’s just how you do it’, but it is interesting to note the more literal semantics of the word. Really, it is the intransitive form of ‘decided’. It implies that it has been decided, but it also implies a lack of individual input in this decision. It is simply something that ‘is decided’. Not by anybody in particular. But for everybody in general.

Another important concept in Japanese society is ‘Sou desu ne’. This can be translated as ‘that’s how it is, isn’t it’, and falls into the Japanese word group of so called aizuchi, or ‘phase hammers’, which are expected to be uttered by a listener in order to show the speaker that he is listening. This is kimatteiru.

Whether you do in fact agree with what the speaker is saying or not is irrelevant to the choice of phrase. The phrase is kimatteiru. So in reality, the meaning behind the words ‘Sou desu ne’ ranges from ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head’ over ‘I couldn’t agree less’ to ‘When will you finally shut your mouth, you F***ING SUNOVA B**CH?!” I use ‘sou desu ne’ in everyday conversation and can report about its wide semantic range based on my own experience.

With kimatteiru and sou desu ne a high level of harmony can be achieved. And in the rare event that somebody feels too much friction between these two and their rebellious individuality, a third Japanese concept comes into play. This is better known to us Westerners in its traditional form ‘hara-kiri’, which is no longer practised today, but has not changed much regarding its purpose. If somebody fails to be of service during his life time, he commits suicide, making the most valuable contribution he can to the common goal: harmony. It is a brilliant societal framework.

Sadly, for some time now, Japanese harmony has been experiencing difficulties. For one thing, a continuing influx of foreigners who have no understanding of kimatteiru and sou desu ne and unabashedly act upon their individual impulses has sent ripples through Japanese society for a while now. But ever concerned about harmony, the friendly Japanese have erected a nation wide empire of English conversation schools and intermarried with disorientated English teachers and other aliens. Restaurants now considerately advise their foreign guests to fly their begetable skewers on the flying pans at their tables. With touching enthusiasm, the Japanese are trying to cope with the situation that is threatening harmony in the Land of Wa.

The situation becomes more alarming, however, when the Japanese themselves jump out of character, instead of windows, and turn their individual incompatibility with society against society, and not, as tradition demands it, against themselves. When a Japanese individual finds the hidden trap door from kimatteiru to kimeru. Does not follow what is decided, but decides for himself. Does not validate the system with a suicidal sou desu ne but crashes it with a murderous ‘chigau’ – ‘That’s not how it is!’

Tomohiro Kato’s recent rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara district has made headlines around the world. On 8th of June 2008, at 12.30 noon, the 25 year-old temporary worker drove into the crowd at Akihabara with a rented truck and fatally injured three people in the process. He then got out and stabbed another twelve, four of which died, raising the death toll of the indiscriminate killing rampage to seven.

He did not know any of the people he attacked. His killing spree was completely random. Why did he kill them?

The motive is the same one that has driven Japanese dwarves into suicide throughout history. The outside pressures of society become unbearable. Pressure builds up on the inside, until despair kicks in and makes a decision. The traditional decision is suicide. I am incompatible with society. I should punish myself by killing myself. The new decision is murder. Society is incompatible with me. I should punish society and kill somebody. Any representative will do, the higher the number the more satisfying the result.

Kato’s outburst has already caused a flood of enthusiastic imitators. Like Kato, they have posted messages on mobile phone websites, threatening to wreak similar havoc. It is a scary development. How can we stop it?

When Kato was questioned about his family, he sobbed. Ever since he entered a prestigious high school and failed to obtain good grades, he and his parents got more and more alienated from each other. He failed university entrance examinations, a common suicide motive, and trained as an auto mechanic. As a mechanic, he got a temporary job, which was likely to be cut at the end of June.

Kato considers himself unattractive and says it is the tragedy of his life that he cannot find a girlfriend.

He is a compulsive real time blogger, posting messages describing his feelings and plans on a mobile phone website every few minutes. These also included warnings of what he was about to do in Akihabara.

A recent Daily Yomiuri article discussed the sky-rocketing trend of individual blogging among young Asians, identifying it as a new development towards individual expression, which is ‘not traditionally fostered in Asian cultures’.

While this trend is certainly to be welcomed, the anonymous abyss of cyberspace hardly offers an appropriate forum for the tender first fledglings of young Asians’ self expression.

The first day after the Akihabara rampage, the papers talked about possible amendments to Japanese knife possession laws, as Kato had used a dagger in his killing spree. Considering that three out of the seven victims were killed by the truck, not the knife, this seems a blatantly short-sighted solution. Should we maybe also ban rental trucks? Stockings? Glass bottles? Fists?

Where there is a will, there is a way. The will is the problem. And the will to kill stems from unhappiness. Happy people do not spend their free time stabbing random victims in Akihabara.

And with this, there finally seems to be a little tumour in the tissue of Japanese harmony. Kimatteiru and sou desu ne might be a good way of avoiding conflict, and many of us pig-headed Westerners can certainly learn the odd lesson from the impressive Japanese skill of self-effacement, but this is also where the Japanese can learn from the egocentric Western alien.

Respect. It is time to talk about respect, something emphasised frequently by both Japanese and foreigners as a main aspect of Japanese culture. But studying Japanese culture and living in Japan, I have seen with my own eyes what Japanese respect really is. It is precisely the kind of respect called for by kimatteiru and sou desu ne. It is respect for rules, and respect for hierarchical status. But it lacks one aspect that is the main feature of respect in Western culture: respect for the individual.

It is not that Westerners have no respect. On the contrary, our intrinsic respect for the individual, validated and reaffirmed in its importance throughout centuries of philosophical thought, key factor in the development of psychoanalysis and all its sister disciplines, is what makes it difficult for us at times to adhere unconditionally to rules and superiors.

Our respect for the individual is what makes us treasure the fruitful exchange of views and opinions. We do not use sou desu ne. We say ‘I disagree’, and ‘yes, but’. Our culture is full of conflict and debate, pushing forward with a view to a more advanced perspective that takes every individual aspect into account. Nothing is kimatteiru. We encourage dialectic development.

Our respect for the individual is what makes us cringe when we hear about Japanese working hours and marriage conditions, about people living in capsules, and sixteen year olds committing suicide for failing to give the correct answer to a maths problem.

Our respect for the individual is what makes us respect ourselves, and seek happiness. A happiness whose content is not kimatteiru but custom made to our individual taste and experience. We accept the search of happiness as a driving force behind our own and other people’s actions.

In Western culture, self-expression is traditionally fostered as an important gateway to fruitful communication and personal happiness.

This is the factor I find lacking in the near perfect construct of Japanese harmony. Nowhere do we find the key ingredient of personal happiness. A harmonious society without happy individuals is like apple pie without apples. It is a non-sustainable, absurdist concept, and it tastes bland to any human palate, not just the Western one.

By no means can Western society claim to have attained perfect saturation of personal happiness, but as this is something we actively seek, we are actively striving for it.

Where an individual finds himself overwhelmed by the situation around himself in the Western world, he has the socially accepted and widely available option of psychological counselling. It requires no changes in the law. It is not an immediate solution, but it is a path with a long-term view towards improvement.

In a culture where individual expression is not traditionally fostered, it will of course be difficult to take root for a useful mental health care system, a cure that relies on self expression for both diagnosis and therapy. People need help, people need friends. Firing self expression randomly into cyberspace is unlikely to make unhappy people happy, give friends to the lonely, or provide solutions to the troubled. People need human feedback, especially if they are still inexperienced in th medium of self expression. It seems like a steep climb ahead, but still, I cannot help but hope. I fall asleep at night, out of the world of kimatteiru and sou desu ne, and straight into utopia.

Here, we all live in happy harmony. It is lunch time, 8th of June 2008. We are sitting in a restaurant in Akihabara, a district in Tokyo known world-wide for its cheap electronics and geeky appeal, talking about future job options, exploring actual and fantastic possibilities, exchanging useful advice and cynical jokes.

“Why do you dip the sushi in the sauce fish first?” I ask. “I wonder,” says my friend Kato. And while he tries to dip the sushi rice first, I try it fish down. It tastes better than before. “Ah, I see now,” I comment, enjoying the flavour repercussions of the sauce-soaked fish in my mouth. “It tastes better this way.” “Sou desu ne,” says Kato, convinced after his unconventional rice first digression, and smiles. Sizzling pans are flying across the tables, offering paradise on skewers, leaving mobile phone websites empty while they fill our stomachs with warm flavours of friendship, happiness, and harmony.

The Torch and The Cougar

2008-04-27T15:33:00.001+09:00

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

2008-04-25T07:42:00.001+09:00

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

2008-04-22T07:14:00.002+09:00

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.

Aikido Heaven

2008-01-22T19:54:00.000+09:00

“Feel the impact of the attack instantaneously, and react to it accordingly.”

So we practise. Free style aikido. Choose whatever waza fits the particular attack you receive. “Morau,” says Shihan about receiving the attack. A word choice that suggests that the receiver appreciates what he gets, rather than simply getting something.
We attack and receive, and try to appreciate whatever is there, to truly feel whatever is there, or feel first, and truly appreciate through that- cause and consequence blur, and that is the aim of the exercise. The key word today is “tossa” – instantaneous. That is the aim of our practice, to be instantaneous, to tailor our waza precisely to whatever is given to us.

I want to simply flow and react, but realise painfully that my aikido vocabulary is not big enough to rely on mere instinct. I would need more possibilities, more ways to move (with) my partner, in order to react appropriately to the multitude of attacks I am given. I do not want to endanger my opponent or myself. This adds pressure, while the thought Shihan has put in my mind creates an unusual kind of freedom, makes room for inspiration and a learning experience different from our usual training.

“I apologise,” says Shihan after our second bout of free style aikido, our second attempt today to practise enforcing a particular way of thinking, rather than the technicalities of a particular waza. “Today’s training is rather theoretical. But if we never do this, we will not proceed beyond primary school level with our training.”

Then the second speech follows. “There is a saying that goes kan ippatsu. Kan is written with the kanji meaning “interval”, followed by ichi - “one”, and then hatsu -“hair”. Imagine that: only a hair’s width between you and your partner when you interact during the waza. It is a very small space. But on the other hand, you could say – wow, a whole hair’s width fits in there, where, really, there should be nothing at all! Where we should perceive one single being, no dividing line? So what I would like to practise today is try and reduce this hair’s width to first half a hair’s width, then a third, then a quarter of a hair’s width, until you manage to perfectly connect. Don’t push for it. Just perfectly glue yourself to whatever part of himself your partner gives to you.”

So we practise, feeling for little gaps and tiny crevices in our partners’ fingers, hands, forearms, seeking to fill each empty space we find, with ourselves, connecting to every bit of live tissue that touches us with a sense of complete appreciation, welding ourselves to it, giving up ourselves completely, fully committing to the creation of a new entity born out of the interaction between two centres of ki that Meet. I. Love.

I feel reminded of a story I read in a book called “The Empty Force” and believed by most scientifically minded people to be complete nonsense. “Master Wang,” it said about one old Chinese master of the Empty Force, “could keep a bird on his hand when it alighted there, simply by applying the power of ki.”
Although this is most probably a myth, this story conveys a powerful image. Even when I read it a few years ago, without the first idea about aikido, it conveyed to me a the image of what aikido is meant to be. Glue yourself to the bird, and the bird can’t take off.

Although I would personally add one thing to the story. What I am striving for is to learn how I might glue myself to the bird so subtly and gently that the bird, without noticing the slightest change, would just take off with me and fly me through the sky.

5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – Zen! - And a Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T20:19:00.000+09:00

And there’s the sound of the gong again. Once, twice, three times, gradually reawakening us to each other and the world around us, AND to the New Year: 2008, year of the Rat.

Dave has told me that at the New Year’s ceremony, Shihan wears a funny hat, and does this: (he acts like he is holding an accordion in his hands and pulls it apart vertically, then brings it back together, while his tongue vibrates noisily against his palate). “Wow!” I say. “I want to see that!” (whatever it is!)
The next time, I am chatting to Shihan after training, with a small group of people who are talking to him about the New Year’s zazen gathering at the temple.
“I heard for the new year ceremony you’re wearing a funny hat." I tell him. "I can’t wait to see that! I’ve been looking forward to that ever since Dave told me about it!” Dave joins us. “Ah, the funny hat, hm?” Shihan looks at him and laughs.

Finally, the day of the funny hat has come, and I am tense with anticipation. Before we start our meditation, about half an hour before midnight, Tomoyuki Sensei, Shihan’s son and successor as head of the Zen temple and adjacent aikido dojo, gives us a short introduction on how we will conduct the zazenkai, the meditation gathering.

Before you sit down on your zabuton, a thick, round cushion the size of a Christmas cake, you put its edge on the tatami mat and turn it around, squeezing it lightly here and there, fixing its shape. On one side it has a white tag, which is there to carry the name of more frequent zazen practitioners. In our case it is white or carries somebody else’s name. When you finally put down the zabuton, this tag should be in the middle, facing away from you.
The first time you do this, everybody is sitting along the walls of the room facing the room and each other. Then, you stand up and turn right and left, both hands together in a praying gesture called gasshō, and bow to your neighbours. You sit down on your zabuton, and, already seated, take a 180 degree right turn until you are facing the wall.

This is how you sit: first put your right leg on your left, if you can, then, definitely, put your left leg on your right, so in the end your legs are crossed. The lotus seat. Then your hands: your fingertips are facing each other, until they meet and the left hand slides on top of the right, like paper sliding doors. Your thumbs meet and make a circle out of your hands that must not be broken throughout your meditation.
You close your mouth and try to imagine your palate where your eyes are. With your tongue you make a shape as if you were pronouncing an “l”. Then move your body left and right, until you have aligned your belly button and your nose in the middle. You do not close your eyes. Then, sit, and think of nothing.

A gong will be sounded to start the session, and then again to end it. In between, if you should start feeling sleepy or unfocused, you can ask for assistance by tilting your head left or right, and putting your hands together in gasshō again. Consequently, Tomoyuki-Sensei will come around with a long wooden stick the shape of a small oar, and whack you on whatever shoulder your tilted head leaves free. After this, you keep the gasshō for a little bow to thank him for beating you back into concentration.

We go through one round of meditation. My chance to get a free hit. I am slightly nervous when I put my hands together and tilt my head, and to intensify the pressure, I have to wait for a long time, before Tomoyuki-sensei discovers my request. First I feel the flat end of the stick lightly touching my shoulder and pushing my head further to the left, in order to avoid hitting it instead of the shoulder. I oblige, and get a rather gentle hit on the right shoulder.
Somehow I was hoping for something harder and more violent that would send a thrill of wakefulness through my body, but I take this surprising gentleness as a Zen message from Tomoyuki Sensei. In Zenshū, the school of Zen followed at Shōsenji, they believe in 経外別伝 kyōgebetsuden, 不立文字 furyūmonji, or 以心伝心isshindenshin, meaning that enlightenment cannot be achieved by relying on scriptures or oral explanations, but has to be transmitted from heart to heart, on a more direct, emotion based level.
After our session, Shihan demonstrates to us with a loud slap on the tatami floor how hard other people get hit sometimes and I catch myself looking for a red welt on the tatami mat when he is finished.

After a while of sitting and meditating, we are told to stand up and turn left. This time, our left hand should clasp its own thumb, then the right hand is wrapped around the left, both hands held about a fist’s breadth away from the point where the ribs start curving down and back, forming the lung’s protective cage. Your elbows are pointing left and right, away from you.
Now, you slide one foot halfway past the other foot, and then proceed sliding the other foot forward. In this fashion, forming a large circle along the walls of the room, we walk forward, covering half a foot’s length at a time. In front of me walks an elegant old lady, her grey hair fixed into an old-fashioned hairstyle suited to her black kimono. She is wearing a black and white hairclip, and white tabi socks with cleft fronts to separate the big toe from the other toes. A ghost? I watch a grey curl on her white neck and try to keep my balance and not shift it too much from left to right as I walk.
“This,” says Shihan, “is exactly the same thing as zazen, except that now you are walking, not sitting down. You should be doing this with exactly the same objective in mind.”

Then, we are told to proceed at normal walking speed until we arrive back where we started to thank our neighbours and sit down for another round of zazen.

We are facing the wall, our eyes open, trying to think of nothing. Then Shihan’s voice comes in, friendly and bright, and provides a welcome object to focus our thoughts on. Concentrating on something is infinitely easier than concentrating on nothing.

“You have now spent almost 30 minutes in zazen meditation. Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. Happy New Year.
Starting the New Year with zazen has the objective of resetting yourself. It is done in an effort to go back to your true, original, unsullied self. When we are born, all of us, every human being, is as pure and complete as the Buddha himself. We call this state of being 自性 jishō, written with the kanji for “self,” and then the kanji that consists of “heart” and “life, birth”. At this stage you are still completely void of any outside influences. Then you begin to interact with the world, and in this respect, on one level, you grow. We all grow from the time we come into being. On a different level, however, you start moving away from your original Buddha self. You accept the world of objects as reality, the world that shapes your everyday life. You become part of it, and it now costs effort to return to your origin, to the peace you were born in. This is what we are trying to do in zazen.

In zazen, there are five levels. Just like the grading system at school. One is not so good. Two is only slightly better than one. Three is average. Four is good. And five is very good.

The first stage, level one, is called 外道禅 gedōzen. This means that you are simply moving about, living your life. You are taking a bath, training aikido, or having your dinner, you do not have a set perspective in life yet. You are taking in the world, and forming a part of it outside the Way.
Then the second stage, level two, is called 凡夫 bonpu. Bonpu means that you have entered the way. You have understood that the world is ungraspable. We have this sensation at night, when it is dark, and we don’t know what is what. Bonpu means you have understood emptiness.
The third stage, level three, is called 小乗禅 shōjōzen. The kanji for this are “a little”, then “to ride, or to board”, then “Zen”. This means that you have grasped the logic of life. It means you have understood that whenever you do something good, something just as good will come back to you. That whatever energy you send out, it will return to you. At that stage, you are doing whatever you are doing for yourself. You are doing it to improve your own personality, to perfect your spirit of humaneness, and act accordingly.
The fourth stage, level four, is called 大乗禅 daijōzen. This time, the kanji are “big”, “to ride, or to board”, and “Zen”. When you reach this stage, you are extending your efforts to create a harmonious exchange of energy, to other people. You make yourself part of a communal effort to achieve harmony. You work with others towards the same objective. Reaching this stage is already quite something. There is only one more stage that can be achieved after this.
The fifth stage, level five, is called 最大乗禅 saidaijōzen. Written with the kanji “highest or most”, “big”, “to ride, or to board”, and “Zen”. This means that you manage to return to your original self, your Buddha nature. We call it 新起源shinkigen, which can mean a new era, but here, written with these kanji, it means new beginning, and this is achieved as you return to 自性 jishō, and your heart becomes like the surface of a completely still lake.
If the lake is completely still, whatever moon is in the sky is reflected in complete, unrippled likeness. If there is a half moon, the water reflects a perfect half moon. If there is a three day sickle moon, the water reflects a perfect three day sickle moon. We call this 水の心 mizu no kokoro, heart of water. This is the final level of zazen, our ultimate objective. But I would like to remind everybody that your objective is always to do the best that YOU can, without comparing yourself to other people. If you want to compare yourself, compare yourself with yourself. For zazen, this individual devotion is called 只管打坐 shikantaza.”

Translating each single kanji, this means “only this matters, hitting, sitting”. So we sit, our best possible selves, focusing on nothing, the place we have come from. Shihan continues.
“You have now spent a total of about 50 minutes in zazen meditation.” Shortly after, the gong is sounded again. We are told to move our legs and let them recover, then stand up and turn left and right, hands together, to bow to our neighbours again. In the end, everybody bows to Shihan, who is standing in front of the room, dressed in a ceremonial golden robe with excerpts of scripture sewn onto it in white rectangles.

People start walking around, wishing each other a happy new year. There are four other gaijin at the ceremony. Itamar and his friend Yair, Roberto, a performing artist and yoga instructor, who happens to be Itamar’s neighbour and an old acquaintance of Dave’s, and finally Thomas, engineer and ballroom dancer from Hannover, and my mum’s old classmate.
We catch up with Thomas and Itamar, tell them how we started the night watching the K1 fights at Osaka Dome, with 30,000 other people. People, people, people, flash and light, flames getting spat into the air as the fighters enter through a giant gate to booming songs, a group of dancers introducing them with large arm movements like opening flowers. I feel like I have entered the arena for a modern gladiator fight.
We get to watch some great fighters in the ring. The Korean giant gets beaten by knockout! His downfall is Pettas from Denmark, a tough guy with a German footballer’s face, half his height, who fights like a little terrier. Akah, beautiful, muscly, black, his hair in breids, puts up a great fight against Japanese legend Musashi, who looks slightly flabby, seems slow, tired and pale, as if he has drunk too much at all the year end parties. Akah seems to be pushing for a clear win, but then in the third round, Musashi knocks him out with a smashing right hook, followed by a high kick without actual effect, but great for additional entertainment value. Masato offers a nice spectacle against a skinny Korean and secures a clear win. We get to see Yamato the kid, another muscle packed little terrier, his body completely Y-shaped, packed with upper body strength. The kid wins, too. In the last fight, the main event, we see two big Japanese fighters. One of them has the look of a cool fighter, sure to win. The other one looks like an unpopular kid, eyes too close together in a wide, moon face, a cauliflower ear. His intro movie on the giant screen shows him returning to Japan especially for this fight, and fighting an anime dinosaur, which, in some parts, is shown with his head on his reptile body, jumping around with boxing gloves on his claws, ready to fight. True to his cauliflower ear, the dinosaur wrestles down the cool kid and twists his arm round the elbow axis until cool kid has to tap out. Wonderful. A wrestling win at the end of the spectacle. Just what I wanted.
“Pure violence!” snarls Itamar. “No,” I defend my love of fighting. “It’s a skill. You are watching skill at play. The art of fighting.” He shakes his head. Thomas, who has misunderstood us and thinks we have been watching TV, asks us if we saw the ballroom dancing, too. We explain to him that we went live. “Aaa! Now I understand the excitement!” he laughs. Then we are interrupted.

“Teatime!” says Shihan in English and laughs. There is a low table in the front right corner of the room, and Mama-san, his wife, kneels down in front of it. The other women gather around her, and prepare to serve green tea and yōkan, a sweet made of red beans and sugar, crushed into a paste and shaped into a roll that is cut into slices and eaten with a flat, wooden stick.

“Anna-chan,” Mama-san calls me. “Will you help us serve?” It is the women’s job to serve the tea and sweets. Normally my European sense of gender equality would probably result in feelings of resentment at this request, but as I feel part of a big Pagan ritual, and her call to me seems more like a sign that I am accepted as part of the family than like an admonition, I am happy to help and kneel down next to her with the other women. I discover the old woman wearing the black kimono next to me. "What was the fifth stage of zen meditation called again?" I ask her to find out whether she is in fact a ghost or not. Her eyes turn to a helpful spot on the ceiling, and she slowly but conscientiously recounts all the five stages Shihan has told us about. "Yes, and the last one was saidaijozen, wasn't it?" I'm still not sure whether she is a ghost or not, but now Mama-san calls my name, and I have to pay attention.
There are several serving trays, a dark, lacquered red brown, round with a long stand like wine glasses, elevating the serving platform. The ones for tea have a hollow cylinder attached to the middle, to balance the rounded tea bowls. The trays for sweets are flat. Mama-san places a white napkin on a tray, a slice of yōkan, and a wooden eating stick.
“Now you hold it like this.” She balances the tray in her left hand, and holds her right hand parallel to the stand, fingers pointing skywards, so that both hands are perpendicular to each other. “Then you get up. Get up beautifully, without bending your back, and walk to the person you are serving. You kneel down, turn the tray so the wooden spoon is lying on their side. You bow and wait until they take the napkin with the sweet off the tray. Then you bow again and carry back the tray to serve the next person.”
I get up and try my best to obey her orders. On the way, Shihan sees me and corrects my hand gesture. As he shapes his hands in the air, I suddenly feel reminded of the hands of Buddha statues, which eternally bless the world with this same gesture.
Shihan opens the sliding door to leave and turns to his wife. “They,” he nods in our direction, “came to see the funny hat!” He erupts into a bright little round of giggles and leaves the room.

We see him again downstairs. In front of the room, there is a large altar full of gold and flowers, and wood, and a whole host of things that make the place look like a holy site, a shining place of worship for a divine entity that has the power to put our world in order or disorder.
To prevent disorder, the ceremony has to be in order. Shihan is wearing his funny hat. Golden, it stands high on his head and is part of a cape that falls down over his shoulders. We line up in front of the slightly elevated altar part of the room. One by one, we walk up to the left column and bow. Then on to the middle, where smoke is emanating from a tray. We cleanse our hands in the smoke and put them together, facing the altar, making a short wish for the new year, or conversing with its supernatural denizens in whatever manner we like. We proceed to meet Tomoyuki Sensei’s wife who is standing near Shihan with a friendly smile, waiting to hand out white, flat packages to everyone. Omamori, lucky charms, bearing the temple’s name.
Finally, we get to face Shihan with his funny hat.
It is my turn. In his hands Shihan is holding a long book containing the sutras. Moving it like an accordion, he fans the content of all the holy scriptures into my face. Afterwards, he closes it and touches my forehead, then my left and my right shoulder. I want to comment on his hat, but the seriousness of this strange pagan ritual sucks me in, and I can’t step outside of it and joke about it while I’m right in the middle.
We all get our blessings. Most people leave, but we kneel down to witness the rest of the ceremony. Tomoyuki Sensei is sitting in a hidden away corner of the room, chanting sutras with a nasal voice, breaking and fluctuating across the holy words, the chanting monotonous, with only slight variations, accompanied by an eerie combination of percussion instruments, gongs, drums, and other objects he is operating from his hidden corner, producing sounds as he hits them with his gentle teachings. Shihan is standing in front of the central altar, sometimes chanting, other times engaging all kinds of other mysterious actions. He is holding a kind of broom with long horse hair that he throws towards the altar, then behind his back. The whole ceremony is a complete mystery to me, yet it is utterly compelling, and I can’t stop watching. Not just because of the funny hat.
Mama-san comes into the room. Shihan interrupts his sutra singing and addresses his wife: “All right, love? Is the tea stuff cleared away? Would you like to come for your blessing now?” And like all of us before, she walks up to the column and bows, then cleanses her hands in smoke, and receives her blessing. Then she sits down joining us, Tomoyuki Sensei’s wife, the old lady ghost, Dave, and me, to witness the ceremony until the end. It is long. I try to make out what words they are chanting but I can’t. I try to discern how father and son interact, where they join their chants, where the percussion comes in, try to find some meaning in the horse hair and the golden hat. But I can’t. A mysterious pagan ritual. The last part involves Shihan putting down his hat on the giant zabuton in front of the altar. With the ceremony finished, Shihan turns around and sees us.
So immediately he goes and puts his hat back on. “There! The funny hat!” He smiles and poses, two fingers for victory. A Kodak moment missed. I get out my camera and beg him to do it again. “That hat looks so good on you!” I say, and Mama-san and Tomoyuki Sensei’s wife giggle. I manage to catch a nice awe-imposing posture of Shihan, and a picture of Dave and Shihan together, the men of the night dressed in their separate professions, perfectly harmonising in this bizarre environment where rituals are performed, and all actions aimed at directing life onto the Way. Impossible to express with words, it encompasses all and nothing, an expanse unimaginable to the human mind. Thus the Way remains forever mysterious until we rediscover nothing, and thus ourselves. We start the New Year looking for nothing. Nothing can go wrong. We shall not be disappointed.

In the spirit of fighting, Zen, and the funny hat, I wish everybody a successful, harmonious, and happy New Year.

A New Job

2007-10-25T18:03:00.001+09:00

A New Job

One Sunday, I get an unexpected visitor in my secret life. It is the bright, environmentally conscious vegan photographer –JET teacher Timdesuyo who trains aikido with me at Shosenji dojo, here to take some pictures and get some information from the world of shadows for an article in this regions’s popular foreigners’ magazine Kansai Time Out, short KTO.
Only a few weeks later, I’m holding a copy of the magazine in my hands, to have a look at what he has written about the place I devote my weekends to, and the people that populate it. His pictures are good, the article a summary of parts taken from the recently published bilingual edition “A Journey to the World of Ninja and Kengo”. With nothing but Kansai Time Out to accompany me on my train journey from Sone to Umeda, I dejectedly leaf through the classifieds section, and my eyes fall on an ad placed by the German European School in Kobe. They are looking for an early years teacher and an English as a Second Language teacher. Somehow I can’t take my eyes off the ad.
German European School. It sounds like a place that would give me work. Me being of distinctly German-European heritage, and with language skills in German, English, and Japanese. Also, to me European values seem especially attractive in a workplace right now, since I am working for a Japanese company, crushed daily by the weight of corporate pressure, spending every night painstakingly resurrecting the individual I am before I go to work, from the paste of muscles, blood, and sweat, the raw materials used throughout the day to contribute to corporate profits.
Teaching. Well. It is what I’m doing at the moment. It is something I CAN do. My main worry is my secret life. There might be opportunities there for me which would grant me better access to the world of shadows than this. But then again, there might not. And if I should get this, my working hours would decrease, and I would get more holidays to escape into this world, and become a bigger and stronger part of it.
Taking the ad as a sign, I give my CV a quick once-over and put together a cover letter that emphasises my Germanic roots, language skills, teaching experience, practising fondness of European values, and most of all, my enthusiasm at taking on this position (either one of the two offered, yes that’s how far my skills go). My internet connection is stubbornly denying me access that night, but I manage to send everything off the next morning before I go to the gym and move on to have myself crushed and used once again.
A few hours later, I have escaped from work for a short period of time to grab a snack at a nearby kombini, and my phone rings. “Moshi moshi.”
“Ja, Frau Sanner, Müller hier, Deutsch-Europäische Schule Kobe. I have your CV here in front of me. Are you still interested in this position?”
Hearing a German voice in a kombini in the middle of Osaka startles me so much I forget which three kinds of yoghurt I had narrowed my choices down to, but as it has been a mere three hours since I applied for the position, I reply promptly that I am indeed still interested.
“Dann müssen Sie ganz schnell hier her kommen, sonst wird das dieses Jahr nicht mehr!“ (In that case you have to come here, and soon, otherwise it won’t work out this year.) “
“OK, would that still be possible tomorrow morning?” I ask, as I am working till late tonight, as usual, and have to dash back to the school in a minute.
“It IS still possible tomorrow morning, but that will be the last chance, Frau Sanner. After that I’m off to the UK and Germany to do conduct some more recruitment activities and then go for a long summer holiday.”
Long summer holidays. Various instances of my present superiors trying to talk me out of even the seven days of holidays I dared to take for the whole year come floating back to me. I am definitely still interested in this job.
“How about tomorrow 9 o’clock,” Herr Direktor Müller suggests efficiently.
“Tomorrow 9 o’clock. Certainly.” I efficiently agree, feeling perfectly at home in this conversation. Herr Direktor Müller describes to me how to get to the school, and we end our pleasant and efficient call.
As the yoghurt shelf comes back into focus, I find myself looking for Müller yoghurt, the one with the corner you can flip around and pour jam, or little chocolate balls, or cereal into the bigger corner that holds the yoghurt. “Alles Müller oder was?” goes the commercial. But the choices offered bring me back from Germany to Japan, Hannover to Osaka, and I have to make do with a new blueberry edition of shibō zero (non-fat) blueberry yoghurt instead, featuring health-inducing pieces of jelly-like aloe vera.
Then I rush back to the school, and for a change, at the prospect of leaving this establishment for good, my business smile comes naturally.

The next morning at nine o’clock I knock at Herr Direktor Müller’s door.
“Guten Morgen Frau Sanner, bitte nehmen Sie Platz!” he gestures me to sit down in one of the three chairs lining my side of his giant desk, and I marvel at his air-conditioned office, which is almost the size of Juso school, my present work place. It is only 9 o’clock, yet, already, Mr. Müller is stressed. There is a mother in the office, molesting the secretaries about her own failure to officially withdraw her child from the school, and as a result, having to pay for tuition this year. She simply doesn’t want to pay. Mr Müller touches this forehead with the inside of his hand and rests the whole forearm face construction on his elbow for a while. Then he attacks the coffee the secretary has carefully placed in front of him in the meantime. I decline the coffee I am offered. I have already had my morning dose and am too excited about what is to come.
Mr Müller asks Miss A, the Japanese secretary, who speaks good German, to take care of the trouble for now, as he has an interview to do, and Miss A retreats from his office with a strained smile.
Mr Müller tells me that in Germany, he used to work for a school with five times as many children. And still, in Japan he is faced with a lot more stress. Staff are extremely unflexible, and as soon as a child comes into the office with a bleeding knee from playing outside (an everyday type of incident at a school that instructs children between 2 and 13 years of age), it digresses from their written code of conduct, and they are at a loss. I express my genuine empathyf or Mr Müller’s trouble and remind him of his privileged position. “At least here you are allowed to exercise European values and common sense to fight the occasional shortcomings in simple management skill.” Mr Müller agrees with an amused chuckle and asks me about my teaching experience and my language skills. He seems satisfied with my answers.
“As for your language skills, I cannot rely on my own expertise.” He continues. “So we will shortly be joined by Mr Inman, head of the European section.” Mr Inman is a friendly looking young man from Yorkshire. I have read his personal profile in Kansai Time Out. “He will take a look at your English skills, but at the moment he is still busy.” Mr Müller takes another sip of his coffee, which seems to inspire him to come up with yet another efficient idea. “In the meantime, I will have Miss A talk to you in Japanese for a little while, to check your Japanese level. If you really are as good as you say, you would be gold to us. We could use you for whatever needs to be done. You could teach Japanese to begins, take the German kids when they need a sub, and obviously fill the position as ESL teacher that we need filled…” Herr Direktor Müller calls Miss A away from her brave stand-off with the irate mother who is still unwilling to pay, and she sits down next to me and asks me about my present job. I tell her how I enjoy teaching but despise the business side of things. She asks for some more detailed information about what this business side entails, and I tell her about the publishing branch, selling text books, the foreign exchange branch whose molestations are never ending, monthly specified campaigns and contract renewal promotions. She empathises and kindly tells Mr Müller she has never heard a foreigner speak such good Japanese before.
Next, Mr Inman joins us with a big, welcoming smile, and we all converse in English for a while. He tells me that their concern is that sometimes foreigners apply for English language teaching positions, but when you meet them, they make grammar errors and cannot be accepted as English teachers. “But in your case,” he continues, “it is clearly not an issue. I can even hear your Bath accent.”
Mr Müller smiles and tells me to leave them alone for a while, so they can consult about the matter. I walk around the area and inspect the cute little café selling cakes made with organic ingredients across the road, locate the nearest kombini, and enjoy the patches of green that are surprisingly abundant here, compared to concrete djugle Osaka.
I arrive back at Herrn Direktor Müller’s office, and Mr Inman says: “I think we have good news for you.” I got the job “The only problem I see with this,” he goes on, “is that you’re seriously undershooting yourself. You have all these language skills, and here you’re just going to be teaching little children, which is not the most stimulating job. So if you’d say you wanted to work here for two or three years, I wouldn’t believe you. But if you just want to get away from your present job, that’s fine. ” Mr Müller tells me he is having the contract prepared as we speak, and would I be so kind as to sign it right now, so he can reduce his recruitment activities in the UK and enjoy an even longer long summer holiday? Aber natürlich kann ich das. Of course I can.

When I arrive at Juso school today, I have trouble suppressing my smile when I force a polite introduction to open up the news to manager. The Japanese English teacher has announced her premature retirement from the company only two weeks ago.
“I’m really sorry,” I say as soon as we sit down for our morning meeting, “this is probably the last thing you want to hear, o honourable manager. But I’m going to quit.”
Manager is shocked. But she is not overwhelmed by the news. She rather professionally accepts it with a “Shō ga nai.” (That can’t be helped.) She asks me about the new job. When will I start, what will I do, where is it, and how much will I make. When I tell her about the money, which will go up by about 50%, together with a rise in holidays by about 700%, her eyes light up. And her next reaction comes as a surprise. “Isn’t there a job there for me?”
And slightly incredulous at how my news about leaving have affected her, I write an e-mail to Herrn Direktor Müller, instructed by manager, asking him about possible secretary positions at the school. Unfortunately, the e-mail arrives at the wrong place: at GEOS head office. When I realise my mistake, I promptly send another e-mail to my trainer, apologising for the miss. I get back an irate message, rebuking me of gross abuse of the business e-mailing facilities for private purposes. Luckily, the content of the German message is lost on my trainer, otherwise the consequences for my manager might have been deplorable.
I use this golden opportunity and retort by giving a phone call to head ffice and renouncing my retirement from the company by the end of august. Surprisingly, my trainer is not only professional but even kind about it and tells me she will promptly inform me of what needs to be done in order to leave. Another advocate and practising member of efficiency. I put down the phone, and pop a red pill into my mouth that has been hiding in the deepest corners of my jacket pocket somewhere, for a long, long time. And as it dissolved in my throat, I see a bright future opening up before me, far, far away from the mines.

Holy Days in the World of Creation

2007-08-12T14:19:00.000+09:00

When this virtual world you are honouring with your visit right at this moment, is brimming with life and adventure, the real world it aims to reflect is often times a rather flat affair, with only a sparse number of events that leave any sort of impression on the mind, and with time in the evenings or mornings to make these shine in a shimmering, sparkling blog-reality.
Any event can come alive and begin to sparkle if you spend that kind of quality time with it: you sit at your desk. You have a glass of something cool and refreshing, let it seep upwards into your brain through osmosis as you concentrate. You feel the bluish glow of the screen on your face. You feel the tingle in your fingers as you remember the little hand movements you need to operate the machine that lets you compose and travel. The internet space craft that allows you to look at any detail of the world you choose, anything you need to make that little map come even more alive, that little piece of the world you are trying to draw, according to your own personal measurements. A piece of your world, for your precious map-readers’ orientation, information, investigation, and intoxication. And you hack away at the keys, composing it, drawing the outlines of areas, the course of the rivers, colouring in the different altitudes of mountains and valleys, inventing a key to the different types of produce and the different riches each place has to offer.
Look at my first month in Japan. I needed these journeys. I gave you fourteen little maps in one month. I was only starting out here. I was mapping out my own environment for my own personal use, finding supermarkets, dojos and gyms to ensure my body and mind would continue to function at the necessary level. I had work, and no social life. But I was not suffering. I was travelling, tripping, and sharing it all with you. I had a spacecraft and a map making machine.
Then, things began to settle and take off. A very common oxymoron in the world of travelling, settling, and re-settling. People come in, different planes of exchanging information and energy, of creating sparkling worlds, there is obligation and temptation, incubation and initiation, flagellation and resuscitation, all very energy and time-consuming activities.
And the world I share with you, the things I manage to take out of my busy life and make sparkle for you diminish. If there were 50 hours in a day, I would indulge in making everything sparkle twice, experience its splendour first hand, then revive and re-experience it through my words, opening it up to everybody else who wants to travel with me, every one of you, my precious readers, who give me the opportunity to experience the beauty of this double-grandeur, of sharing my adventures.
But for a while, life has been so full. This world is run by one person, and when reality takes over, you have to be right inside the battlefield. There is no more time to go on reconnaissance missions, map out areas, make things sparkle in dreamy journeys of the mind, develop strategies, and gather information. It is all right here. And you have nothing but your body and soul, and any armour, shield, or weapon you manage to pick up on the way to get through it. It is a miraculous battle. Full of the world, full of reality, full of splendour. Full of writing, too, but writing that would be inappropriately kept in a place like this, in a place anybody could discover on a random space craft journey, anybody could use in their map-making to find me. You have to be careful these days.
But for a while, I have left this world barren, and it was threatening to turn into a forgotten world of the past, along with Atlantis and the record-less world of ancient ninjas, only with less mystery and recognition attached to it, which is a fate I will not allow and can easily avoid, being the creator of this world.
Being a creator, I can tell you that a lot of the time, things do not go according to plan. I had the noble plan to work on the creation of this world conscientiously and regularly, to create along with it a sense of reliability, to create an enjoyable reading and relaxing habit in my readers at the same time as cultivating an enjoyable writing and working habit in myself. But in fact, most of the time, the only plan that works is the plan to create. Because it is more an urge than a plan, and thus much more likely to work. The urge to create. But even urges sometimes have to yield temporarily. I live in a pre-created world, and am constantly trying to create and re-create my life in it, at the same time as creating a new world from the results I achieve: this one.
And in this complicated work of my creation, dear reader, the holy days arrive not according to schedule, or calendar, but unexpectedly. The holy days when the creator rests from creating the world. But it is no simple rest. As stated above, it is holy, in other words, indispensable and undeniable in its rightness. I do not simply rest. No. In fact, I spend my holy days being re-created, and re-creating myself. It is a creator’s job. Without a fully created creator, no world can be created.
So as I succumb to the holy days that have struck me forcefully and unexpectedly, and are likely to hold up the process of creation repeatedly until early September – according to my unreliable plan of creation - I assure every visitor of my world, and every follower of my maps, that I have my space craft and my map making machine securely lodged in cardboard boxes to be moved to a new place from where I will continue following my urge, from where I will fly and explore, and type and draw, and colour in, and create. Hoping that all my readers are successfully re-creating themselves, too, in the holy days that strike the worlds of their creation.

Taking Time, Aiming at Things

2007-07-03T00:43:00.000+09:00

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.

Foxes, Dogs, Angels and Devils

2007-06-16T02:44:00.000+09:00

People used to go out and shoot foxes in the mountains to make themselves nice little fur scarves. Now, A while ago, somebody came here to the Temple and brought his dog, because the dog was sick. The reason he had cooked up for this was that the dog had some metaphysical connection with his wife’s fox fur scarf. The poor fox had died without wanting to, been turned into a fox fur scarf without ever having signed an agreement for his remains to be used in the service of human vanity, or his family having agreed to any such thing.
Only natural that his soul, still hovering upon the furry beauty of his skin, should not be ready to rest in peace. Instead, it rose in pain, and infected the poor dog with a malicious malady of incalculable measures. So both the dog and the fox fur scarf had to be taken to the temple for a Buddhist ceremony to show penitence for the horrible sin perpetrated upon the fox, and rid the dog of his ailing sickness.
Now, Shihan said, there are always two yous. And in this case, too, there were a good Shihan and a bad Shihan. A little Shihan in a white robe, glittering bright in his halo light, and a little cleft-footet devil Shihan with red horns spring from his head. The devil Shihan is smoking a cigarette.
One of those two, Shihan continues, thought: “What the fox are people thinking, abusing their god-given intellectual capacities to concoct such asinine inanities?!” The devil Shihan takes a hearty drag from his cigarette and angrily puts it out with his cleft foot, reaching for another and tossing it coolly between his fingers to light it. But angel Shihan comes and blows it away. The other Shihan. Who thought: “Poor fox. Yeah. Why did they have to kill him. Who needs a fox skin for a scarf. Nobody has the right to do that. It is the most random thing to do. So why shouldn’t the fox’s soul in return decide on a path of revenge as random as cursing a dog with disease?” The angel makes the cigarette flare up in a lightning ball with the might of his halo and wins. Shihan performs a Buddhist ceremony to free the dog from disease, and help the restless fox’s soul find peace.
Shortly after this, Shihan, the one that houses both devil and angel in his chest, returned to their usual balance, united in a strong centre, walks to the window after training to breathe in some fresh air, and his eyes meet those of a fox. “Hello,” he thinks. And has a silent understanding with the fox. From this day on, foxes are friends. And a family of three foxes moves into the peaceful grounds of Shosenji Temple.
Kitsune, the word for fox, can be written with the ki kanji from aikido, the tsu meaning wave, and everywhere, and the ne meaning root. According to old folk knowledge, foxes are the animals people can most easily communicate with.
But, Shihan moves on to the conclusion of his speech, you never know what mysterious coincidences lead to unexpected blessings. Your ki interacts not only with other people and foxes. It interacts with animals, with plants. Plants grow better if you talk to them, everybody knoes that. Even things we think have no life in them whatsoever can influence us and be influenced by us. Always choose the good you. Now let’s keep practising. And remember. Always choose the good you.

Ten Minutes of Sky

2007-06-09T01:48:00.001+09:00

Mornings are spent in the park. Seven o’clock is the optimal starting time, but I usually don’t make it until about half an hour later. It is difficult to go to sleep at night, difficult to get up in the morning, and difficult to get going. On the run, on the bike, always on the run, and always on too little sleep, but it is worth the effort. There are moves to be learned and trees to be hit. Trees. To bear your weight, you can climb them, spit from them, dangle from them, use them to increase the number of your daily pull ups, look at them as miracles of nature in a desert of concrete and sand. They make you grow. I started with two pull ups. I can now do seven sometimes. I massage their bark, and they harden my palms and forearms. They are good friends, trees. They take your every punch and abuse wordlessly and simply inflict reciprocal pain on their part. They are hard. Yet gentle. The perfect partners.
On Fridays, we get to the dojo at nine, where B-san patiently takes me through my first steps in iaido. Before we start there are usually some little chores to do. Morning chores at the dojo. Hoover the dojo, get the white tape and a pair of scissors from the cupboard in the women’s changing rooms and mend the mats where they are torn, or where previously mended places have started to peel off and are sticking up in dirty tatters that need to be torn off and replaced with new tape. The fridge has to be re-filled with new bottles of green tea and juice. The dojo is well maintained. While we clean and mend, Chocolat, pronounced, elegantly, in the French way with the stress at the end, flaunts red ear clips and makes the windows shudder with his psychotic poodle bark.
Finally, we kneel down and bow to our swords. Even this part is difficult. What hand do I use to grab the sword? From where to where do I move it? And how do I keep it from falling out of the scabbard while I do all that? Time for the first kata. And the second, which is rather similar, facing the other way in the beginning. Pull the sword, slice through the enemy’s eyes moving forward with a little stomp, cut from above with both hands, sliding forward again, sword to the side, with one hand this time, while the other hand rests on the scabbard, hilt in front of the forehead, slice down from left to right, change legs, re-sheath the sword while kneeling down again. Get back up. Walk three steps back. Finished. A lot of ceremony. A lot of room for mistakes. I forget to be on the balls of my feet. I can’t synchronise my arm and my leg movements, or turn the scabbard the right way, at the right time, but gradually, at least, I am becoming more aware of all the things I’m doing wrong. The first steps…and the first women arrive for the 10 o’clock aikido class. B-san takes us through the warm-up, and Shihan comes in for the training’s opening greeting.
“Getting up and sitting down,” he says after we have bowed and asked him to honour us with his teachings once again. “These are two completely normal, everyday activities. Yet, they are of utmost importance. When you sit down, be aware of how you sit. Think: Is my back straight? Are my shoulders relaxed? What are my feet like? Ideally, only your big toes should be on top of each other. It doesn’t matter which toe is on top of which, you make yourself feel comfortable and stable. And this kind of everyday action that is carried out with all the right thoughts, and completely in accordance with nature, is called kukyo.
When you tidy up your body, it tidies up your heart, and when you tidy up your heart, it tidies up your body. Both are possible, but it’s usually easier to try and tidy up your body first. You can look at yourself in the mirror and see whether you’re doing OK, whereas it is not so easy to spot where your heart is cramped up, or what part of it needs straightening up.
Both when you stand and when you sit down, you should be aware of everything that goes on around you. The slight breeze coming in from outside.” I become aware of a slight breeze coming in. “The voice of the crows.” I become aware of the voice of the crows. “Tenkan. Let’s start.” I work with Herrn T who is honouring us with his presence again after he has been absent from this class for a while. But today he has made his long way here from his temporary residence in Kyoto for the last women’s class before his trip to the rest of Japan. “You are a ball,” Shihan interrupts my tenkan, always a thoroughly appreciated initiative. “This,” he tells Herrn T, “is the Anna-ball.” He sinks my hands down further and reminds me to extend my fingers, stretch my fingertips forward, to extend my ki. Otherwise, it stays too small to move anything. “Be a ball.” I am a ball. The Anna ball. “If you’re a ball, then your partner has no choice but to become part of your ball, and you can roll him around however you please.” I practise being a ball and rolling Herrn T around. Roll, roll, roll. Then we are stopped by the claps dividing the techniques we train, and listen to more wise words.
“Nothing should come as a surprise to you when you walk around, sit, or stand,” says Shihan.” Everything should always be perceived at any one time. Crows, a bug, a…well, I have to say, sometimes there are things that are just simply hard to bear.” He tip-toes to the side a few steps, looking like something has just crawled up the inside of his leg under his hakama. But it is just the re-enactment of a memory that still seems to trigger shock waves of disgust. “Like spiders. Spiders are horrible, that’s a fact. But try not to let anything faze you. When you’re working with your partner, you are giving special attention to your partner, but really, your partner should just be another part of everything else. And so should you. Now sit down.”
We sit down. “This sitting down was very good. Much better than your last sitting down. I want to make a point of these things here at Shosenji. Sitting down and getting up are just as important as practising techniques. Give them your best every time.” He says ‘best’ in English. Then he stalls briefly. “Was it better or best? Which one is higher?” “Best,” B-san helps him out. “Hm. To me, better always sounds better. But let’s have a look at this over here.” He leads us to a calligraphy that shows the 35 strategic principles Miyamoto Musashi set down for his Nitenichiryu (Two-Heavens-as-One School) of fighting, in which he used two swords, one shorter, one longer.
“These here are Myamoto Musashi’s 35 principles. But just look at the last one. Banri ikku.” Ten thousand principles. One Sky. Ten thousand things. One void. Everything. Nothing. Japanese is such an ambiguous language, it creates beautiful layer cakes of meaning in the most concise of kanji compositions.
“Banri, ikku,” says Shihan. “Just remember this last one. The others are just little notes on the way there. This last one, number 35 is what really carries the meaning of it all. Even within the multitude of everyday things and actions, there are units of emptiness. Every little principle and every little thing is part of the one sky we know. So take in everything. Make yourself empty. Musashi said, when you carry a sword, the sword has no heart. It can go anywhere, anytime. You consider little everyday things like sitting down. Standing up. Positioning yourself. Usually with your back to the wall and the floor and the ceiling, facing the rest of the room. But any kamae, or ready stance, that assumes a particular attack to come in is not an appropriate kamae. Musashi said, the perfect kamae is no kamae. Always be ready. For anything.”
Then we all grab a bokken, wooden sword and stand in a circle. “Try to find a way of holding it that is so comfortable to you, and you could move yourself and the sword in any way and in any direction at any given point in time.” We all experiment with our grips and stances, sliding our hands up and down the smooth wood, shuffling about, sinking our feet deeper into the white mats.
“Now, number one. Step 45 degrees to your right, then back with your left foot, and cut down from the side. With this, you fell your opponent’s trunk from the shoulder down. Number two. Step 45 degrees round with your left foot, then cut straight down. With this, you cut your opponent’s hand off, through the wrist.” We follow his instructions. “One.Two. One. Two. One. One.” We follow. “See. When you put Musashi’s principle into action, your concentration skills are amazing. You don’t think: the last move was one, so now he will say two. As soon as you do that and assume a particular outcome of the situation, you are not aware anymore, you are not empty. Create the emptiness you need in yourself to let totality in. Empty your heart and let the world come in.”
After training, I pay my 5000 Yen for June and join for a long round of irimi-nage performed on Herrn T under B-san’s instructions, as a farewell present from this group. N-san has been to Miyamoto Musashi’s grave and birth place in Okayama, the neighbouring prefecture of Hyogo, which is next to Osaka. She was really there for the hot springs, but took the opportunity to see the Musashi sites and kindly bring us back some very nice Musashi tenugui hand towels and peanut cookies featuring Musashi’s portrait on beautiful wrapping paper. I pass the cookies and get changed as I have to hurry to my first class at one a clock. Although today, the sky is cloudy, and I can’t listen to my pulse-and speed accelerating running and getting-to-work-as-fast-as-possible playlist. Instead, I try to catch the heartpiercing lyrics of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen while cars thunder past me on the left, and idle shoppers and other cyclists drive me mental on the narrow pavement. I am so absorbed, I almost crash into the sinking barriers by a train crossing as they come down. But luckily, as usual, I am surprised by my own last minute manoevers and make it to Juso in one piece. Albeit tired. And struggling to focus on the content of my own lessons. After the first class, I go to the post office to pay a bill and the combini for lunch. Salad. Onigiri. Sugar free chocolate. COFFEE. BLACK. The usual fare.
When I get back, I have twenty minutes before I have to expect the first students for my infant class to come in with their mothers. I take my futon cover, brought to the school for the kids’ playroom to teach “sleep” and “wake up”, and put it outside on the big roof terrace. I put my suit jacket on my teacher’s chair, take my i-pod and mobile alarm clock from my bag in the office, open the big window in my room, and I jump through it onto the roof terrace. Time to lie down, a simple every day action. Doing it here makes me remember the beauty of it. I lie down, and let my mind drift into the clouds breaking to reveal the odd beam of sunshine. I listen to more heartbreaking beauty. In my secret life I die for the truth. I think of the song I want to write. That has a soul already but no body yet, that still needs structure to be sung. Ten minutes of sky. They don’t last long. But what the hell, I’ll go back in. We’re all going to be dirt in the ground. So what’s teaching another batch of biting, screaming, kicking kids. I like reading. I like playing tag. I like making a snowman. I like flying a kite. It will get them through the year.
And I have my ten minutes of sky in my head. Ten thousand things. One sky. Ten thousand chores. One little space of emptiness. But emptiness, no matter how small, absorbs everything. And everything, no matter how big, fits into emptiness. And the last minute of the day will come. And the manager will say, let’s empty the bin. And once again, I can get up from my office chair, sit down on my bicycle, and lie down in my bed. And try to dissolve the day’s ten thousand things into the black emptiness of sleep. Heaven.

From Dusk Till Dawn

2007-05-29T10:00:00.000+09:00

“Im at an ENEOS petrol station now.” I-san tells me through my mobile phone. B-san and I have been lounging about on the picnic tables next to the baseball field behind my apartment building, waiting for him to find us, eating some combini breakfast. “Do you think it’s the right one?” asks I-san. “I don’t know. Any landmarks?” “There’s an old woman cutting trees next to it.” A typical I-san landmark. “O. I wonder whether that’s the right one.” I can’t remember any trees anywhere near my house, never mind an old woman cutting them. B-san and I walk down the motorway towards the petrol station. Indeed. Right next to it, there is a small old woman, cutting small young trees. And a few feet away is I-san, leaning against the white littleToyota Vitz he has rented in Kobe for the day. We greet him, I introduce I-san-san and B-san, and we jump into the car. And drive down the sunny Motorway on this first day of Golden Week.
It is a truly golden day, blessed with sunlight and freedom. The road is busy but not crowded, so we drive on to a soothing, tickling, trickling soundtrack kindly provided by B-san. “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life!” Nina Simone’s voice melts from the CD player in chunks of forgotten ice cream at first, then flowing more smoothly, like beer from a rusty old barrel in a summer cornfield waking from the night. I turn up the music, and we ride away into the sun towards our appropriately touristy Golden Week initiation destination: Ninja-mura in Iga, Mie-Prefecture. At several points, we have to stop and queue, and pay motorway fees. I-san pays for everything. We will sort it out later.
The drive is pleasant and quiet, with stretches of conversation and longer stretches of thoughts, three worlds quietly evolving, floating about the car, flying out the window, and coming back in, inducing, killing other thoughts, idle driving dreams changing shapes with the passing landscapes, in the speedy breeze. Clouds in the wind, shadows in the sun.
Finally, around ten o’clock, we arrive in Iga and find a free parking lot a short walk away from the village. We are not the only ones who have made our way to this rural tourist spot today. Amidst other groups of people, families, friends, couples, senior citizens’ gate ball clubs, we make our way up the shady path, between big, old trees. It leads up to a landing surrounded by yaki-soba fried noodles, tai-yaki fish-shaped sweet bean paste cakes and other fast food stalls. A souvenir shop to the right. In the middle, there is a group of people in ninja costumes, smoking cigarettes, munching on yaki-soba, talking about the weather.
We cut through the square and enter Ninja-mura proper, where we buy tickets for the first attraction: a ninja farm house. At the ticket booth, we get given English pamphlets with explanations on them. Many ninjas lived like normal farmers, so this is what a typical Japanese farm house would have looked like during the Kamakura and Edo periods. Except that the one we are about to see has several special features that other farm houses did not have.
We join the long queue up to the farm house and let our eyes wander about, leisurely travelling from face to face, past sunny patches dancing across fallen leaves and shoe prints in the sandy ground, catching drops of idleness running down the chins of child ninjas. My eyes are still in the process of opening up to the world. In everyday working life captivity, blinds grow on the sides of my eyes, narrowing my vision to whatever duty needs to be performed next, switching my facial features to mechanical smiles mode. The blinds are receding, the muscles relaxing, I can see the sun, and with each breath, the air in my lungs lightens my body.
Our group is let into the house by a smiley female ninja who bows “Irasshaimase!” in a near-ultrasonic voice and proceeds to demonstrate the house’s special features to us. Disguised as just another part of the wall, there is a revolving door. The girl touches it ever so lightly and disappears through it, stopping it from the other side. The wall has swallowed her. In the floor boards of the ground, there is a loose one to be opened by a skilled tap of the foot. A sword lies hidden underneath, the short, straight ninja-tō, to be thrust at the enemy, rather than cutting through him like the long, curved nihon- tō or katana. A rack on the wall is swiftly turned into a ladder that leads up to a flap in the upper part of the wall, through which the ninjas could escape via the roof.
When we have seen all the special features of this ancient ninja residence, we are invited by a real ninja to watch him and his fellow ninjas display some of their secret skills in a ninja action show. We don’t have to be told twice. To me, this sounds like the best part of the whole Ninja-mura experience. At 200 Yen each, we get some good seats in the middle of the front bench facing the sandy open air stage, and sit looking for the ninjas, carefully scanning the edges of walls for traces of shadows, and the suspicious stillness of the objects around the stage for movement.
Finally, a tall ninja with a samurai style pony tail appears from back stage and welcomes us to the show. Not much secrecy about his entrance. “Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be handling real ninja weapons here on stage, a dangerous business, so please do not get up from your seats and approach the stage during the show. I would also like to ask you to set your mobile phones on manner mode. Our show contains some high intensity action, and sometimes children get scared and start crying. Should that happen, I would like to remind you that we explain everything we are doing here on stage, so in order to allow everybody in the audience to hear what is being said, please take crying children up the stairs or down the side aisles, away from the stage. We will refund your money. Finally, I know you are all here for sightseeing today, so some of you will have brought cameras to take pictures or videos. During our show, video recordings and picture taking is – absolutely fine! Please take pictures and videos at your heart’s content while we perform our cool ninja tricks. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”
The last remaining type of full time ninja, a striking oxymoron. A professional show biz ninja! After the young announcer, an older ninja enters the stage, striding forward with the stern look in his face and feel in his walk that marks a warrior about to risk his life in battle. On stage are three mounts, one on the left holding a large bamboo stalk, one on the right holding a rolled up bamboo mat mounted vertically and pointing to the sky at about half the height of the stalk. The third one, in front, holds four of the same rolled up bamboo mats as the one on the right. The ninja kneels down on a small bamboo mat in front of the four rolls and gloomily joins his hands, assembling them into different shapes, both index fingers pointing up, the rest of the fingers interlocked. The middle fingers wrap themselves around the index fingers. It goes back down as thumbs and little fingers join the index fingers pointing to the sky. Ring fingers are trapped and held down by middle fingers, the hands fold like in prayer, the fingers interlock with the fingertips invisible on the inside, the right hand slides on top holding the left hand’s index finger, hands slide apart forming a circle with the tips of the thumbs and the index fingers touching, and finally, the right hand forms a round pillow for the left to rest on, fingers joined. The Buddha gesture. Going through these shapes of his hands, he chants hoarse syllables to go with each one. Rin-pyo-to-sha-kai-jin-retsu-zai-zen. It is the kuji-no-in, the nine letter spell. An incantation the ninjas used to calm their minds and prepare themselves for their dangerous missions.
He puts both his hands in front of his face like a mirror and blows. Then, he makes a soundless clapping movement, then another, his hands going further apart this time before they touch in the middle, and a third, even bigger one. After a last moment of silent concentration, he takes the long, bent katana that is lying by his side, holds it up on his open palms and gives us a slight bow. He puts the sword through the opening by the side of his hakama, and solemnly rises. He walks to the middle of the three mounts, draws his sword and holds it up in the air for a moment. Then, with a guttural sound, and effortless, light movements, holding the sword with a single hand, he cuts through the giant bamboo stalk, then turns to cut through the bamboo mat, once, twice, three times. Slices of bamboo are scattered on the ground. He steps forward and faces the four-bamboo-mat arrangement. He holds the sword in both hands and pauses for the space of a breath. Then, with another kiai shout, the sword slices clean through the four rolled mats from right to left. He takes a small cloth from the natural pocket between the crossed front parts of his kimono upper body dress and the sash that holds it together, and wipes the katana with a single elegant sweep. He tilts the saya, or scabbard to the side and swiftly re-sheathes the long, heavy sword. He takes it out from his belt again, and presents it to us with the same bow as before. In the martial arts everything begins and ends with rei, respect, often expressed in this bow.
After holding our breaths for the duration of this intense performance, we are now reminded that we are here to witness a fun holiday action show and relax into applause.
“This,” says the ninja, “is a katana, a Japanese sword. What you’ve seen right now is called iaigiri. You’ve seen me cut through this bamboo stalk here. If you don’t cut these at exactly the right angle, they go flying off into the audience. You have to cut the stalk at a 45 degree angle, and luckily today it worked.” Relieved laughs get stuck in throats, swallowing hard at the thought of what would have happened otherwise. The ninja smiles. “These makiwara,” he points at the stumps of the bamboo mat rolls, “are tightly rolled up bamboo mats, fastened with rubber bands and soaked in water for a week. They offer about the same resistance to the sword as a human neck. So you could cut through four necks in one go. It is no problem at all.” Good to know.
“So, ladies and gentlemen, this was the katana, the Japanese sword. Next, we will present to you the ninja sword.”
He takes a shorter sword from one of the sword holders at the side of the stage and holds it up. “As you can see, this is shorter than the katana. But the main difference between the two is that as opposed to the curved katana, this sword is straight. In the warring states period, the samurai trained with katana, and were adept at the art of cutting things, and people, as I’ve shown you. But that was the only thing they knew. So the ninjas used a straight sword, made for thrusting, so they could defend themselves against the round cutting movements of the katana. Ideally, with this straight sword, they could just move straight forward and land their stab before they were cut by the samurai’s round movements. But the ninja sword has some other useful features. The tip of the scabbard, for example, is pointed.” He shows us the pointed end, shaped like a small pyramid. “This could be stuck into the ground. The ninjas could then put their feet on the tsuba, the ring that separates the hand grip from the blade, and use the sword to climb up walls. They would take this long string attached to the sword between their teeth, so that when they got to the top, they could just pull the sword back up towards themselves. But what am I talking about, we will show you how it works!”
He exits, and some action promising music storms in, pushing ahead through the speakers in clear, shiny brass; trumpets wearing winged combat boots. The two young ninjas, on the other hand, roll ahead quietly in their air-filled jika-tabi, boots cleft between big toe and the rest of the toes like Devil’s feet, making it easier to grip the ground and whatever materials need to be climbed, while proceeding quietly across complicated terrain without making a sound. The ninjas are back-flipping and rolling across the stage to the wall on the right, where they stick their ninja-swords in the ground, take the long, black strings between their teeth, and climb up, until they sit on top of the 10 ft wall and pull their swords up to join them. And in professional show-biz-ninja fashion, they give their performance a clean finish by simultaneously showing us the V for victory, or, more commonly, Sony digital memory. Picture taking is ok. The ninjas are used to more daunting tasks than performing in the presence of flashing cameras.
Next, we witness the throwing of the ninja star, or shuriken. One of the young ninjas comes out and shows us a little pile of 6 ninja stars. “These are real ninja starts from the warring states period You have probably seen ninjas in movies, with a pile of them in one hand, throwing them like Frisbees, one, two, three, four, five… . That is certainly cool. But ninjas didn’t actually do that. It’s impossible to throw them like that. And they’re really heavy. One of them weighs about 200 grams, so the ninjas maybe had one or two. And they only used them when they really thought they were beat, and there was no other way out. This was their last defence. They used poison and spread it across the points of the ninja stars. So they didn’t actually have to pierce through any vital organs or arteries. These stars simply had to scratch an enemy, and he would suffer paralysis or whatever it was that the particular poison resulted in. But I will show you. These,” he holds up a ninja star with four equally shaped points. “Are juji-shuriken. Cross-shaped ninja stars. Here we go.” He hurls the star at the wooden wall on the left side of the stage, and with a loud clunk, it gets stuck in the wood. There are some marvelling “Wow!”s and “Ho!”s. “This time,” says the ninja, “I will throw two of these at the same time.” Again, he swings his arm and hip like a baseball player, and clunk! Both ninja stars land in the wooden wall. Applause. “And finally,” says the ninja, “the most difficult technique. Three ninja starts at the same time. This time, I will use roppo-shuriken. Six-point-ninja stars.” He holds one up, and we can see the thinner points that make the ninja star look like an ice crystal or a flower. Zonk! All three ninja stars land in the wooden wall, and the crowd erupts into cheers. The ninja bows and exits. Enter the older ninja from the beginning.
“These clothes I’m wearing.” He points down his black ninja-costume, complete with a head dress that goes down the neck like that of a medieval knight, or a nun, studded with golden crosses in front. “Do you think the ninjas actually wore those? Ninjas were spies. It was their job to gather information. So if they had dressed like this, everybody would have known they were ninjas, wouldn’t they?” Surprised exclamations and muttering in the audience. “What I’m wearing here is for period dramas and ninja shows only!” Laughter. “Real ninjas took on whatever shape was most suitable for them in their current spy business. They could look like doctors or craftsmen. Here in Iga, a lot of ninjas dressed like farmers, because there were a lot of farmers here. And sometimes, they pretended to be street performers to perform lucky tricks and charm the gods into gracing people with their good favours. See for yourselves.”
He exits while some circus-like music floats from the speakers to introduce something like an acrobatic clown stunt, or a horse-number with a moustachioed horse whisperer with a whip. But it is Tomonosuke, the young ninja with the pony tail we have seen in the introductory part of the show, who comes a-running, stops in the middle of the stage and pulls a traditional umbrella with wooden spikes out of his belt from behind his back. He opens it dances with it for a few counts. Then he shouts: “Yo!”And balances the edge of it on his forehead, handle pointing towards us. We clap. But this is only the beginning. From his chest pocket, he takes a small wooden box. “And now, for everybody’s health, happiness and good fortune, I will make this box roll! Watch!” With another “Yo!” accompanied by the kind of outstretched body tension opening a gymnast’s competition routine, he throws the box onto the umbrella and makes it roll round and round it, as if it was nothing. Smiling brightly, he is moving across the stage, looking up at the box on top of the umbrella, watching it dance like somebody he has just fallen in love with. He moves to the left side of the stage, the box rolling and rolling and, with careful movements, turns the handle ever so slightly, watching the box dance.
“The people on this side are clapping very hard for me. I will give you some extra rounds of health and good fortune. May the gods bless you and your families!” He moves to the other side of the stage, and the box keeps rolling. Finally, he makes it fly off the umbrella and back into his hand, with a courteous finishing bow. The audience shows how impressed they are with a good round of applause. But still, Tomonosuke is not finished. “Do you know the famous ninja Somonosuke Sometaro? Actually, I know one of his tricks. What I will balance on my umbrella now…” he swaps his big umbrella for a smaller one. “is this.” He holds up a five hundred yen coin. “Money. So this offering to the gods will make everybody’s money roll in. Watch. Yo!” And he throws the five hundred yen coin onto the umbrella and makes it roll round and round and round the umbrella, smiling at his beloved dancing coin, which he seems even more fond of than his previous dancing partner. We watch in stunned silence as the spectacle unfolds with awe-inspiring ease. Again, he moves back and forth on stage, rewarding those parts of the audience who offer the loudest applause for his art. After a long fight with uncountable rounds disguised as a beautiful dance for us, Tomonosuke catches his coin and bows. “Thank you.” And we clap and clap and clap. He leaves us mouths agape, and in comes the katana ninja from the beginning. “This, ladies and gentlemen, was my son. I’m proud of him. If you don’t start learning this trick when you’re five years old, there is no hope.”
He then demonstrates on one of the ninjas we have seen up on the wall flashing victory, how the ninjas employed a rope with knots on both ends to apply joint and wrist locks, and inflict the same kind of damage on an opponent at a distance that is used for close-n fighting in many modern martial arts including judo, karate, and aikido. This weapon-less fighting art is called taijutsu or hobakujutsu. The other ninja evades a few of his attack, jumping over the rope or ducking away underneath it, but finally, the older ninja catches his leg, and next, wraps his rope around his sword and manages to take it away from him. They then keep fighting without weapons, and the old ninja throws his young foe onto the ground, turns him around, gives him a few good punches to the face, and finally stabs him in the stomach with a spear hand, a juicy enter-the-dagger sound effect slicing through the flesh-dense suspense in the air from the sound effect box. Another appropriate and well-timed sound accompanies the re-traction of his hand. But it is not over yet. While the soundtrack ends in a lamenting trumpet sigh, the old ninja props up the young one against his knee and makes a stern face at his own hand, the instrument of pending death. Which then reaches for the foe’s chin and turns his neck until it cracks with another effective sound. This is the end of the performance. We clap.
“Hey,” Says the old ninja to the young one who is still sitting with the grimace of death on his face, his neck in an uncomfortably cracked looking position. “We’re finished. It’s over.” The young ninja wakes out of his nightmare and happily bounces back up on his feet.
They bow. “Today,” announces the older ninja, “You have seen many of the things we do in the ninja business. But this was only a fraction of what we CAN do. So if you would like to see any more fascinating ninja tricks,” The younger ninja has professionally disappeared for a moment and now re-enters the stage. “Buy the Ninja-village’s original DVD and watch us do a lot more than we did today!” The young ninja holds up a DVD for people to look at and start wanting.
“I hope you enjoyed the show. The exit is on the right side of the stage. Have a wonderful day in Iga. Thank you very much.” He bows and we clap and slowly rise from our seats.
After the show, we walk through the ninja museum. We look at a variety of different shaped ninja stars, try out a real ninja rope ladder, and admire a 60 kg sack of rice the ninjas used to lift up with two fingers to train themselves for missions. They kept their weight at 60 kg or less, so they could hold themselves up by nothing but their thumb and index finger.
When we have taken in all the information we can about ninjas for the day, we walk back to our little Toyota Vitz and explore Iga. We find a small restaurant that serves Ninja Udon, a big bowl of too soft, fat, white udon noodles in soup, with a ninja-star shaped piece of nori dried seaweed on top and some hidden pleasures near the bottom: a big, sticky piece of o-mochi, sticky rice mass, an egg, vegetables. We eat and talk.
We discover a nearby temple and pray in front of it. A god responsible for people’s education and academic refinement resides at this address, and I decide to pray. I-san shows me how to rinse my mouth and wash my hands with the wooden ladles by the well. A dragon resides over this purifying well. Then we walk across to the gate to the gods and pull the big knotted rope to call them. I get a few coins from my wallet and flip them towards the bars that separate them from their givers and declare them property of the god asked to render services in return. My coins jump across the bars and are rejected at first, but I insist that the gods take them and clap and pray for the good of my continuing education and intellectual development.
B-san swiftly turns himself into a ninja and poses invisible for a few good ninja pictures in a historical setting. He has some important messages tattooed onto his body that need to be transmitted by dusk or he will pay with more than just a few coins. His jumper turns into a ninja mask, and the pillar that supports the open mouthed lion dog into the perfect hiding place. “You look more like an Al Qaida fighter than a ninja,” muses I-san, adding a more modern viewpoint to the topic of the day, while I shoot my furtive model repeatedly out of the shadows, flash!
We walk back through the eternal circle breathed across this space by the lion dog with the open mouth and the lion dog with the closed mouth, the shrine’s own guardians, breathing in and out, giving birth and killing, barking and biting, talking and shutting up, forever and ever, until, in no time at all, we get back to the car.

We decide to visit the birthplace of famous Haiku poet Matsuo Basho. You may remember his famous poem. A frog jumps into an old pond. Splash.
We drive for a few minutes, stopping by a street map that shows us the way. The entrance of the old Edo period house is so low, I-san, who is unlikely to have suffered this kind of difficulty before, hits his head on the top beam of the door frame. This leaves the two foreign giants to get through the midget door. “Please be careful,” a woman calls from the darkness inside the house. Another ninja? A caring, considerate ninja at our service or here to kill us with the tempting trickery of kindness? “Don’t hit your heads. The entrance is very low.” B-san passes through the gate with an elegant Praying Mantis stance, and I duck through behind him. There is only half an hour left, but the house is not too big, so we decide to pay the 300 yen and have a look anyway. We pay the friendly woman in the ticket booth who apologises that she doesn’t speak any English, and walk through the old, well-maintained lower rank samurai house.
There is a fireplace inside a cupboard-like niche, a pan on top of it. A mill stone. The kitchen. A beautiful little garden, leading across to a tatami room with sliding paper doors and a small table as its only piece of furniture. The back of the house which stretches alongside a broad corridor, reveals some wooden doors leading to the bathrooms, remindful of the showers in the village marshal’s house Jacky Chan as the Young Master unknowingly visits to take a shower, because he has had a messy encounter with a swamp while eloping from the marshal’s custody. Marshal’s beautiful but deadly daughter lets him in, and he sings derogatory songs about the marshal while rinsing himself down with a wooden bucket behind the same type of wooden door we have here in front of us in Basho’s house.
There is a spacious loft at the very backside of the house which I would choose to sleep in if I were allowed to live in this beautiful, wabi-sabi Japanese minimalist old house. We walk across to the other side, where there is another, bigger garden. Here, we spot some tall, big-leafed banana plants. They were imported to Japan during the Edo period when Basho lived, and his disciples planted one of these trees for him when they gave him a hut. The name of the tree, Basho, consequently became his pen name. We stroll back towards the midget entrance and thank the woman in the ticket booth for her kindness and consideration. Everything is closed by now, and the day is coming to a close. So after a quick stop at a souvenir shop specialising in cookies with ninja pictures burned into their surface, various rubber ninja weapons, and pottery, we make our way back, with a different sound track for the way home, the green landscape around us getting greyer as dawn brings about the world of the shadows, finally giving way again to the lights of Osaka.
We return B-san to his bicycle. He is off to proofread a friend’s novel. I-san and I embark on a lazier way of entertainment and meet Y-chan, T-chan and their British boyfriends in an Irish pub in Umeda. Cranberry juice and talk, and repeated flashbacks of the Ninja-mura experience. Until the time comes to go home and sink into my pillows and into an ever deeper world of shadows, to emerge from it, bless the divine pleasures of Golden Week, whenever I have had enough, and my eyes will open up in freedom, to see the light again.

Karate Kids

2007-05-09T11:08:00.000+09:00

At 7.50, I meet Ike-san and his son in their big car. They have brought my protective gear, and we drive down the sunny motorway towards Takarazuka　at the end of the Hankyu line, where today’s competition will be held. “Did you bring any lunch with you, Anna-san?”
“No, I didn’t, sorry, but I will be ok.”
But his son is hungry, so we stop at a combini on the way, and I buy a tuna salad, diet coke and coffee for an extra caffeine dose, and some maki-sushi rolls for hunger pangs. Whenever Ike-san talks to his son next to him in the passenger seat, he starts speaking a different language - Kansai-ben - and I don’t understand him anymore. But today, I catch bits of their conversation. “How many people do you have to get through to win?” “Quite a few.” “Yes, the primary school kata are quite crowded. Gambatte ne.” Then Ike-san articulates clearly again, so this must be directed at me. “It’s nice to see your kids win. For you it’s the first competition with us today, so just enjoy yourself. Experience what it’s like.” “Yes, I’m looking forward to it!” Although thinking about my last competitions in Japan four years ago, when, fight after fight, tiny girls’ punches flew at my face out of nowhere and scored me into frustratingly quick defeats, I do not hold high hopes of winning anything.
When we arrive and drive into the big parking lot next to the sports centre, we meet T-Sensei who has already arrived with his dentist assistant wife and two kids. At about 6 years of age, his son Leo is the most amazing kicker I have seen in the dojo. But today, he is not in good shape. We have found the rest of the group and realised that we are in the wrong place. The gym we are looking for is a few hundred yards away. But the cars are parked, so we shoulder our protective gear and bags, and walk along the big street and across the bridge to the actual venue. Sensei’s little daughter bravely runs along holding his hand, her pig-tails bouncing, hairclips sparkling in all colours of the rainbow, but Leo is walking about twenty feet behind everybody else, falling ever further back. “Leo!” his mom calls. “Gambatte ne!” Then she turns to me. “He has a cold today, so his spirit is down a bit.” “Is he in the competition?” “Yes, he’s fighting and doing kata.” Poor Leo. “Leo is a cool name. He must be strong,” I comment. “Well, we’ve given him the name because we want him to become strong.” She smiles into the summer breeze. “Leo, Gambatte ne!”
We arrive and place our things at the side of the big dojo, near the entrance. The hall is full of people in dogi, and people in casual, who have come to watch. The keen mother from our dojo is one of them. She has arrived earlier than everybody else, to give her son the opportunity to adjust to the competition environment. She is rather large and does not look like an athlete, but her ambition for her son to win far supersedes that of her son, who is nimble as a Quiddich broom and does some breathtakingly precise kata, yet his mothers’ smiles seem to be reserved for greeting other moms and the Sensei.
We are called together by Sensei, who reads out our names and numbers. Sensei reads out our numbers from the competition booklet, and his wife hands out stickers with red numbers for kata – luckily I get to pass on that category today – and black stickers for kumite. I am number 9, but kumite is not on until afternoon.
We all line up according to categories, and listen to the Master of Ceremony giving us a short speech, telling us this is the 13th Takarazuka Karatedo-Senshuken-Taikai and he is happy to be able to welcome us all here today. Everybody’s efforts are appreciated, and don’t forget karate should not only be something we do in our free time but something we apply and rely on every day, and whatever we do.
The opening ceremony finishes, and the kata start. I am not fond of long waits before competitions, but as it can’t be helped, I relax and spend a rather pleasant morning watching the kids do kata in the A, B, C, and D courts of the hall. Some of them win a few rounds, two get through to the finals. The kids’ kata are impressive. Sensei directs a lot of attention towards training the kids, and today it shows. Ike-kun wins a few rounds, too, but the category is crowded indeed, so there is no trophy for him or his dad today. Ike-san loses his first round in the kata, but it is more bad luck than lack of skill. His kata looks tidy, but he is paired with the person who goes on to win it, so he doesn’t get chance to prove himself against more even competitors. Competitions are partly luck. Especially kata competitions. Only perfect skill wins every time. Everything up to that level is controlled, in varying proportions by the fortuitousness of the day.
At twelve a’clock, we have a lunch break, and I sit down on the floor where we have assembled our things to create a little Shorinji-ryu camp, and talk to Mo-san, a new acquaintance. She has started karate because her son did it, so she now has a purple belt. She lives near my house and invites me to come over some time, for tea and manju, and a chat. “You will win the women’s kumite, won’t you.” she says. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. I will do my best.” “You’re a good fighter.” Today is the first time I have met her, so she is obviously judging my fighting prowess by mere appearance. Or, more likely, just being polite. She trains on Wednesdays, when I can’t train because, like every day, I am working until late. “Well, I’ve heard some rumours from Sensei.” She says and smiles mysteriously. I think she is trying to encourage me, which is much appreciated. But all I’ve heard from Sensei is: “Your kicks are weak! Your punches are weak! More back kicks! More turning round and back fists! This is not Shorinji-ryu kumite!”
Finally, after the primary school first and third year fights are finished up to the final round which is saved for last in every category, the referee in court A calls up the women’s kumite participants. All the referees are wearing hakama, big samurai style skirt-trousers, like the blackbelts in aikido, a sign of advanced skill and authority on the subject of a given budo, or martial art. Sensei has given me shin and chest guards, and Mo-san and Mi-san help me tighten the latter, adjusting the straps in the back. A little girl from our dojo I have exchanged some smiles with before comes running up to me, gives me a stern look and touches my forearm. “Gambatte ne, Anna-san!” she whispers, and I want to win the competition just for her. I walk up to the group of women that has already assembled at Court A. The referee calls out our names and tells us what side of the fighting area to go to. I get put on the red side first. Once we have all been assigned a side, we stand in two lines facing each other, perpendicular to the referees in front and the dojo front on the other side.
The referee calls out: “Shomen ni rei!” and we turn and bow to the front. “Shinsa-in ni rei!” We turn and bow to the referees. “Otagai ni rei!” We bow to the other side, our opponents. We sit down, and the first two women are called up to fight. On my side, a little woman runs around behind us, tying red ribbons to the backs of our chest guards so the judges know who is who when we’re fighting behind the helmets. The other side is white and will be fighting without ribbons.
Ike-san comes up and tells me: “The women who do kumite in competitions do that because they’re strong.” What am I doing here then? I wonder. “Just relax. You can win.” I relax.
Then, I fight. It is only during the fight that I realise I must have done something during the last few days to seriously tire out my legs. I try to kick the girl, but I’m slow to pick up my legs, and when I manage to pick them up, I still don’t score. “Weak! Your kicks are weak!” I hear Sensei’s voice from somewhere nearby. I somehow manage to push the girl forward and out of the fighting area. She is not allowed to leave it. Leaving it three times results in a warning. I am determined to get in some sort of attack, but since my legs are not much use today, other than covering some distance and feigning attacks to prevent attacks from the other side, all I am left with is my right reverse punch and scary kiai. I shout at the girl and hail some punches at her. “Your punches are weak!” I hear Sensei’s voice. I pull back my right fist and whip it forward into the girl’s face, pulling it back all the way to the side of my hip. The referee stops the game and I am awarded a point. During the rest of the fight, I get even more tired but can’t stop trying for more, so I somehow manage to land another punch and win the fight. After that, I am put on the white side to fight my next opponent. I sit in seiza and take a breather while the next two girls fight. The next fight is similar. I am not in good shape, my kicks are useless, and I have to pull myself together even to land a proper punch. Maybe it is my voice that scares my opponents. Something seems to keep them out of my way. They don’t get through to me. This is what saves me. My point score is everything but impressive. I win the next fight with one point, another punch. Sensei encourages me to concentrate on my punches today. “Your kicks are weak.” My kicks are weak indeed. This is a sport. It has a bit of a fighting flair, but it is played to win. So I open the next fight with a bold face punch immediately following the referee’s “Hajime!” starting signal. It scores, and I win another fight. This is the last fight before the finals in which I will be fighting a girl who is at least as tall as me and has made her previous opponent cry with a punch. I am looking forward to the finals and regret that there is another long wait before they start.
I leave the court, kneel down in seiza, and take off my sweaty helmet. Gradually,
the world takes on normal dimensions again, adrenalin and the fighting mind giving way to everyday perception. I lift my head and feel like I’ve been woken up into a dream. Right there, in front of me, half the children from the dojo including my lucky fairy, are sitting neatly lined up, staring up at me with their mouths and eyes wide open, speechless and completely awe-struck. The view of the day, and quite possibly week, month, year. More than all the cool kata postures and mid-fight-kick-flights I would love to capture this moment on camera today, but it is not the kind of moment that could be captured on film. People don’t look like that at a camera. They look like that at me. I’m so surprised by this unexpected show of undeserved admiration that I bow to them and laugh. When I look at them again, their faces are still frozen in silent admiration, so I can’t help laughing again and say “Let’s all give it our best now, come on! Minna, gambarou yo!”
“There you go,” says Sensei. “You’re in the finals. Great. Three of our people have made it to the finals! When you fight later on, just be confident, and concentrate on punches, and high kicks.” High kicks? O well. Gambarimasu.
Several people from my dojo congratulate me, and I walk around aimlessly, until I find what I’ve been looking for: some fresh air in front of the gym. I walk around breathing for a while, then watch some other fights and take pictures. Finally, it is time for the finals. All finalists line up in the same way we have lined up for the single categories before. The kids start, youngest first. There are kihon, basics, then kata, forms, then kumite, fighting. I and the big girl fight second to last, before the men’s kumite. She has a long reach like me, so it is not easy to get to her. Luckily, she is not a kicker, either. Otherwise, I might be in trouble trying to escape her long legs, but she is relying on her punches, just like me. I try a few attacks but can’t get through to her. She stays too far away. “Your punches are weak! Try again!” calls Sensei. We both have a good go at each other at the same time. I can feel blood in my mouth, and when I look at her, I can see her head jerking back up from the impact of my own punch. The referee stops the fight but awards no score. “Attacks landed at the same time. No score.” We keep fighting, and unfortunately this time it is her who lands the first punch. It is a good, strong punch, and she gets a point. I try again several times, kicking, punching, but the fight ends there. She wins. We shake hands, and I walk off the court, happy for the nice fight, sorry to disappoint the kids, and Sensei who has given me a new dogi for this competition.
I grab a drink, and we all line up just like in the beginning of the competition, divided into categories and facing the front. The referees read out everybody’s name. It takes a long time, and we stand there waiting to be called up to collect trophies and participation certificates. I am surprised when they give me a big gold and blue trophy for not winning the finals. The referees smile at me and shake my hands. I get a certificate, a trophy, and a box for the trophy.
Everybody is happy when the competition is finally closed with a last short “Good effort and let us gather for this occasion again next year!” and we gather our things and make our way home. We are quiet in the car. It has been a long day. Silently, Ike-san and Ike-kun munch on the chocolate I have brought for everybody to enjoy. The contents of a large easter parcel from Mum that has arrived late for some reason. I thank them for taking me along and part with the usual. They must be tired.
Otsukaresama!
Back home, it is time for a shower. But it is early days, still, so once refreshed, I grab my new bike and cycle off towards some good company and food to enjoy the evening with. But whatever follows is another story for another day. Ossu!

Knock, knock!

2007-05-03T10:35:00.000+09:00

There is no Easter as we know it in Japan. The few Japanese Christians that exist sternly put ash on their foreheads and wish each other a happy resurrection. No old Pagan fertility celebrations of death and resurrection involving eggs searches and fast-breaking gluttony . What a cultural coincidence, therefore, that on good Friday, Shihan chooses a chick and egg topic for his morning speech.

“Knock, knock! Goes the parent bird’s beak on the outside of the egg. But not to break it. The egg has to be broken from the inside. The chick has to do it. With its own soft beak. A task assigned by nature. But the parent bird has to plant the idea in the chick’s head.”
After you have planted a seed, fertile ground grows for ideas. And if you don’t plant any ideas, it will go to waste, barren land from which no sustenance can spring.
“Without the parents’ knocking, the chick would never think of breaking the shell. The parent knocks, the chick responds. Parent nurtures child. Effort brings forth effort, until finally, the chick hammers its way through the shell and smashes into the world, and parent and child meet for the first time.
This is sottaku dōji. Both kanji in sottaku have a mouth on the left side. The first one has the kanji from “graduate” on the right. The second one the kanji for “pig”. Dōji means at the same time. Parent and child put forth their parental and filial spirit at the same time and meet where nature is at its purest. This kind of mutual stimulation, respect, attention, and response is what we are aiming to achieve in aikido.”

An irimi-nage demonstration follows. “So if he delivers a parental yokomen-uchi, I take it in with all the filial curiosity and attention I have and respond like this, bringing the technique to life between us.” Uke lands on the floor in an elegant wave-shaped ukemi. Then we get to try. Parent and child. At the same time. If only I could do it. If pigs could graduate.

We move in circles, spinning, with nothing but the ground and the sky for reference, guided by faint knocking sounds. Chronological order, dear reader, is an order not adhered to in Anna’s world. I am confessing here, now, with nikon in my heart, and an arrow at my throat, hoping to have you confused into forgiveness in the midst of the blurred chronology of chick and egg and what comes first. I am, like the voices on the train each day, sincerely hoping for your understanding and cooperation. In filial piety. Yours truly. Chick.

Enter Golden Week

2007-05-01T20:09:00.000+09:00

My last working Saturday before Golden Week、the first week in May, is a pleasant waste of a day. Saturdays are usually my busiest days, but I get three lesson cancellations. For others, Golden Week has already started. I use part of my long break to go out and buy a bike, something I had been planning for this month. There are two big bicycle shops in Juso, along the big, busy street near the school, bikes lined up outside with big price tags on them, while inside the shops, most of the small space is used for fixing older two-wheelers.
Most new bikes have big baskets attached to the handle bars in front. They look slow, and for me the baskets are superfluous. I carry things on my body. Finally, a black beach cruiser jumps at me and says “¥ 16,400”, which, in beach-cruiser Osaka-ben, and in combination with his blinking black curves and sparkling smile, means: “Buy me!” The frame is a size 26, slightly on the small side, but with the saddle as high as it goes, it fits me. In fact, riding it is like cycling in an armchair, it is so comfortable. I can feel the sunny day’s breeze in my face as I pedal him a few yards down the road and back to the shop. I buy a cat eye for the dark nights we will spend together, and a lock that turns out to be too long and rather impractical. But in Japan, leaving bikes without a lock is not a big problem. In many respects it is a surprisingly safe country, built on the pillars of people’s impressively, and at times frustratingly unwavering obedience.
The TV in the GEOS lobby is there to show Disney videos for students’ pre- and post-lesson entertainment. Today, I’m the one who opens the school and decides what to watch, so it goes without saying that today is Mulan day. The manager has left for Thailand, so M-Sensei and I spend the last day at work on our own. I bring her back some salmon onigiri, a bacon sandwich, and a chou a la creme from my bicycle shopping trip and sit in the lobby humming along to “I’ll Make a Man out of You” again and again, mainly to watch Mulan try and fail and try and fail and try again until she finally takes he big, muscly troop commander down with a spinning face kick and climbs up the 30 ft pole, and joins the others performing a 6 ft staff kata that illustrates the end of the song in an impressive synchronous flying side kick. “Let’s get down to business…we must be swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, with all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon!” Finally, the last class is over, and we complete our paper work.
After we have switched everything off, locked the door, and appeased the talking security system in the downstairs entry hall, we decide that, however adverse the circumstances, the beginning of a week of freedom has to be celebrated. M-Sensei is flying to Australia the next day and hasn’t packed. I am in a hurry to get to karate training and have a competition the next day, meeting time 7.50 a.m. But freedom is special. And a party is calling, although its voice is still faint, and we have to figure out what direction it is coming from. M-Sensei wants to go home and get changed. I agree to contact her as soon as I know more.
So I call Herrn T, who is usually somewhere in the vicinity of the next party, and take my beautiful, gearless cruiser for a first ride, heading up the road past the GEOS building, straight for Toyonaka. I find my way asking people. It goes straight most of the way and is not complicated but takes slightly longer than expected. I finally arrive at karate training, where I’m chased around by T-Sensei, attacking two pads held up by my friendly basics coach, first for two minutes, then another two, and then another. My breath sounds like a squealing biycle tyre, and has not quite gone back to normal
when we start doing kata. I don’t know many kata yet, so after I have joined the group for Seisan, I get to kneel down in seiza and breathe while the others perform the rest of the syllabus.
“OK,” says Sensei, “Tomorrow will be an early start, so let’s finish here.” It is five to ten, and class usually finished at ten. We all bow “Ossu!” and erupt into the usual post-training bustle, carrying pads, gloves, and helmets into cars, getting changed, paying bills. I pay for the helmet and gloves I ordered for the competition, and Sensei gives me a big sparring mitt for free. I have asked him to order one for me so I can practise kicks and a wider range of punches outside regular sessions, but he sends me a text message saying that he has just bought a new one, so I can have his old one for free. I pay for this and next months’ training, and the grading on Thursday. Then, when I’m about to shoot off to the changing rooms, Sensei hands me a big paper bag.
“Here’s a little present for you,” he says. Surprised, I thank him and bow. Then I make my way to the changing rooms and sneak a look inside the bag. It is a brand new dogi with the Shorinji-ryu karate crest and my name written across the sleeve. I don’t know how, with my pitiful once-a-week Saturday evening appearance, I have earned myself enough credits for this kind of generosity. I bow to Sensei’s generosity and my new dogi and decide to fight extra hard at tomorrow’s competition to show I might actually be worthy of such a precious gift.
I-senpai deposits my chunky equipment in his chunky car, and we agree to meet by the car vendor next to my house at 7.50 the next morning to go to Takarazuka where the competition will be held.
We all say good bye and Otsukaresama desu, and, hearing the voice of the party siren more clearly now, I’m off to a Toyonaka park next to a Shrine, freshly discovered, I am told. It feels good being out and about on a bike. It takes me wherever I want whenever I want, and the evening breeze blows the favours of late spring into my face and through my hair. B-san meets me half way to the park, where Herr T and two bottles of red wine are waiting. The park is a good discovery. The wine a good companion for celebrating the beginning of a short period of freedom.
M-Sensei has changed her mind. She has a lot of packing to do and does not feel inclined to make her way back from Kyoto to join us tonight. She is sad about it, though, so I try to make her feel better, telling her that it won’t be the last time we will get a chance to enjoy the freedom and fire of a warm night together.
We sit, drink and talk, and with good company and conversation, and sips of Cabernet and Merlot out of two shared bottles, the lightness of freedom sinks in through my veins and takes root in my system, pumping away still when we hop onto our three two-wheelers and make our way home to dreamland.
I put out my dogi and pack my gum shields. Everything is ready. Time to sleep and turn tiredness into energy, wine into force, nervousness into determination. Freedom, I will fight for you!

Birthday Barbecue

2007-04-25T11:59:00.000+09:00

“Come early!” says Its-san to Herrn T and me. B-san has to work that Sunday, so he will be there a bit later. I somehow manage to at the same time prepare two birthday cakes and sit at my desk writing, when I get a call from Herrn T. I listen to him with the phone tucked under my chin, cutting strawberries, writing kanji with chocolate ink, spraying cream, typing away. “We’re ready to go. Are you?” My octopus arms start working faster. “Ten minutes!” I need to take a shower, get dressed, finish the cakes, and find the kind of ending to my writing that allows me to be happy with what I’ve done and look forward to what I’ll do next.
After that, I grab my Mary Poppins all purpose bag, pile the left-over beer that’s sitting in my fridge from the last Leopalace battling binge into a bag, balance the birthday cakes on my hands, and take the key from the holder with my teeth.
Its-san’s silver Mercedes is waiting in the usual spot: the bento-ya-san (lunch box shop) round the corner. I hop in and deposit beer, cakes, and bag, and we’re off to Its-san’s house.
It is a sunny day, perfect for planned barbecue. B-san has finished work early and arrives shortly after we do. He puts the barbecue together, then we all go inside to help Its-san prepare and put out the food. There is enough to feed the biblical 5000 without employing miracles. We spread thin cuts of meat on big platters, carry out bottles of sauce, pile jumbo sized Frankfurters onto plates, take apart hotspring-steamed chickens, and set the table outside, working away at the beer piled up in a tub of iced water. R-chan is running all over the place. She is excited, Its-san whispers in my ear, because the boy she fancies is coming too, today. There will be about ten people. Neighbour looks down from the balcony. “B-san, what shall we drink today? Or would you like a smoke?” “I only ever smoke cigars.” Neighbour comes out with a pack of cigarillos.“Or does anybody like wine?” he says. “Well,” I join the wine talk, “I lived in La Rioja for a while, and when I was there, I drank nothing BUT wine. The wine is Spain was so cheap and good…but since I left Spain…” but neighbour leaves no space for nos. “O yes, Spanish wine! I have some of that!” He disappears and promptly returns with a 1997 crianza from Castilla y Leon. It is more of a beer drinking day, but it would be rude to refuse his offer, especially because he says: “This is my hobby. I collect luxury things to relax.” But the wine has to warm up, it is too cool, so for now, we stick to the beer and the sun, and start putting meat on the barbie. Its-san brings out yaki-soba and big shiitake raised by her mother in the countryside. There is more hot spring chicken with mayonnaise and salt.

We have already made a small dent in the beer reserves when the rest of the guests arrive. In a big shiny family sized Porsche. And spilling out of the Porsche comes a petite woman with brown long hair and a lot of make up creating a natural look, wearing expensive clothes and accessories resulting in a professionally casual Sunday barbecue look. Then her children. A girl slightly older than R-chan. Herr T’s jaw drops when he sees her 13 year-old legs growing out of high-heeled shoes into tiny shorts, and drops further when he sees her 13 year-old face. Also, there is R-kun, the boy R-chan fancies, so she runs away embarrassed and opens a separate party at a small table nearer the house. When she comes over to give me one of her skilled massages, I recommend her skills to R-kun, but R-chan erupts into a shocked laugh and runs away again. The situation is further complicated by B-san telling her to come kiss him which makes her scream and run like a Porsche into the topmost corner of the house. Tentenki, says Its-san, the two of them are enemies.

Ravelling in Sunday afternoon sun, cool cans of beer, and idle conversation, the afternoon crawls ahead like a big tortoise, comfortably rocking us with each step, like the earthquake that has shaken me in the kitchen with my cakes this morning. Balloons get stuck in a cable high up, so somebody calls a squad of fire fighters to come and get them down. Bemused, we watch time, money, and effort put into something so unnecessary. You know you’re in a safe country if a fire engine has to roll up to save a bunch of kids’ balloons that have become entangled in a cable. Sunday afternoon entertainment. An opportunity to take pictures. We extend the picture taking session by modelling in front of the Porsche, and then posing a trios on a wooden barbecue bench.
Another mother joins the mothers’ section of the party with her three-year-old son S-kun who impresses with his mohawk and silent cool. He is so cool that I let him sit on my lap for a while and teach him how to light a lighter. He chills out there for a while and then returns to his tricycle that takes him through to the other side of the table. And to B-san who lets him fly around the porch. Slowly, somehow, it gets dark. Herr T tries to talk to the mothers, and the mothers try to talk to Herrn T. Skilled conversation making, but at some point people leave, and we end up in the house. Somehow, a fight erupts between Herrn T and me, which goes on and on and ends in an exhausted draw. More fights follow. B-san vs Herrn T. Anna vs B-san, and finally, when we emerge from the sweet, blinding world of painful wrist and arm locks, bones piercing soft tissue, and suffocating strangles, gathering bruises along the way, we realise that only Its-san and R-chan are still there, everybody else has left. R-chan wants to take a bath, so whatever male is left in the house needs to leave. I’m welcome to stay whenever, but I decide to leave the battlefield, too. It’s never good to linger too long, especially when the enemy has left to disappear in unknown terrain. Better to know where and follow.
The usual three thank Its-san, who gives us a bag full of beer and hai-chu to drink at party number two, and we walk away through the mild night and the narrow roads of night-grey buildings.
Until we find some cherry trees on an island in the middle of it all. Sandwiched by houses and the shadows of industrial monsters, the glow of the blossoms creates an island of night light, and we sit down beneath the pink impermanence, drinking in the gold we have been given. But sitting down never lasts long between the three of us. We have a tree climbing contest, including bets who can and can’t make it from one tree to another, holding on for long enough to show he can hold on. And as we ravage the trees, swinging around their stable, supple branches, jumping from fork to fork, landing in the undergrowth trying to fly, it is raining blossoms. Hanafubuki. They land in my hair. Randomly. One of them is not so random. Source shining sweet, breeze blowing, surface rippling in shimmering shocks. It still lands in my tangled hair, but this will be remembered.
We walk to my house, a new old battleground re-discovered, where we keep on fighting, talking and drinking, and finally, battered, sinking into a deep new sleep.

Long Things

2007-04-16T12:22:00.000+09:00

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!"

Nikon, Kansen, and Mushin

2007-04-14T04:12:00.000+09:00

Its-san gives me an early lift to Shosenji. It is a beautiful Friday morning near the end of the cherry blossom season. Thunder and lightning are forecast for the night, but the mild morning hints nothing. T-sensei is standing by the pond in the middle of the garden when we arrive and waves hello through the sun. His little boy is sitting next to him, in the middle of this idyllic little paradise, watching the glittering surface of the dark green water.
We walk into the dojo’s little entry hall, take off our shoes and sit down in seiza to greet the dojo with a bow, our best greeting to anyone, always, says Shihan. B-san and Herr T are already engaged in bouts of tenchi-nage (Heaven and Earth throw) as we walk past to get to the changing rooms. I say Herzlichen Glückwunsch. Today, Friday the 13th, is young Herrn T’s 22nd birthday. He has brought me a little plant, considerate enough to notice the lack of greenery in my battlefield room and use some of his flying blossom life to change that. The round little plant is waiting for me on top of the fridge next to the changing rooms, and I say Danke to Herrn T for this surprising gift of green.
Right on time, as usual, B-san takes us through our warm-up routine, and Shihan enters to lead us through the next 80 minutes. Today’s training begins with a speech:
“The objective of aikido,” he announces the title of today’s lecture.
“One objective people usually have in mind when they train aikido is that they want to turn their aikido into good budo. Really good budo. It is an objective like going to the shop to do your shopping. But as for the shopping, when you come back and have bought whatever items were on your list, the objective is achieved. So in aikido, there is another kind of objective. It is called ‘nikon’.”
A detailed explanation of how to write the kanji “ni” follows, and the result in my slow mind looks somewhat like the “ni” used in “baggage”, but a conversation with Its-san after training reveals that it is likely to be less known, as apparently she, too, was unable to follow the mental calligraphy. Both word processor and mobile phone yield nothing but hiragana and katakana renderings. It must be another one, then, of the obscure words taken from the world of Zen and budō that Shihan teaches us, together with their obscure writings, and deep meanings.
This problem will be researched in more depth and published at a later stage. Today, the explanation of the word’s meaning must suffice. Enter Shihan’s speech.
“’kon’ is now. So it is about now. Not about some future thing we are trying to reach but about what we are doing at this very moment. If you are sitting there like that, then sit, for sitting’s sake, and just sit. Here. Now. This is not about training things to form them in a certain way, not training to aspire to a certain kind of posture or shape, but training to train well here and now. So keep that in mind.
Also,”
Enter the second concept of the day,
“there is kansen. This has the ‘kan’ from sightseeing. And the ‘sen’ from arrow. This means,”
Shihan makes a sudden jab at his own throat and mimes a face troubled by impending death.
“You have an arrow at your throat. You have the point of an arrow at your throat! If you are in that situation, you don’t think about anything else. You are either going to get out of it, or you’re going to die! That’s all you think.”
He leads us to the dojo entrance and points at the inscription on a large wooden board above the door. “Kansen”, it says in old writing order, read from right to left. “I carved out this word and coloured in the carved out characters to put this over the dojo entrance. And actually, I didn’t want it to be there just for decoration. When you enter the dojo, this is what I want you to think.”
Again, his hand turns into an arrow at his throat, his face into fear of death.
“You have an arrow at your throat. At all times. Try to train with this in mind.”
Respectfully, we re-enter the dojo and throw open-handed arrows at each other’s throats, diverted by swift taisabaki and flowing bodies moving from moment to moment, arrows at their throats in their minds.
When we sit down to finish with seated kokyūnage, we are introduced to yet another concept.
“When you do this, be mushin.” Says Shihan. No heart. No thought. “But mushin does not mean you are letting yourself disintegrate into useless idleness of the mind, carelessness, or unattentiveness. Mushin is simply a combination of pure kansen and pure nikon. Feel the arrow at your throat. Right here, right now.”
So sitting down, we have difficulty breathing with the arrows at our throats, trying to carry out kokyūnage, the breathing throw.
We finish our session and clean the dojo, followed by bouts of walking on hands, in which Herr T excels, and other experiments. When Its-san and I walk out, as she has kindly agreed to take me to the Midosuji line so I can reach Shinsaibashi for today’s Big Jump Training session number two, B-san and Herr T are on the mat again, putting things into practice. Its-san preserves it on video. To study. And learn.
Mushin. Kansen. Nikon.

Blossoms and Beer

2007-04-14T03:53:00.000+09:00

“Today,” says our Shihan with the blue eyes, “we have a new arrival. A guest from Germany. T-san. His mother is German, and his father Japanese. His father has a Zen temple near Munich. He will be here for a couple months to study and train with us. Translate. Ask questions. Welcome him.”
So, of course, after training I am sought out by and welcome the young Herrn T, named in Japanese after the Eastern sun, and in German after a certain Wagner hero with the same initial. What a truly cultural cross.
Our initial introduction is brief. As usual, I have something to hurry to after training. Work on a Friday, rare weekend excesses on Monday night. But we talk again. And train. And drink. And ask questions. And translate. And I humbly partake in bits of his wandering life on what can be counted as yet another rare weekend excess, letting myself get swept away and off the daily path of bread and butter, or rather, the more troublesome path of rice and miso soup, and into whatever next adventure awaits us by the roadside. Like pink blossoms taken by the wind. Dancing. Beautiful.
Kung fu training in Osaka Castle Park. A spontaneous tour through the Kyobashi shōtengai, shopping sreet, and strange little alleyways where people queue for fresh tuna. Red light establishments cast a soft glow on neighbouring ramen and sushi shops. The tour is kindly guided by N-Sensei. We pick up six-packs of beer and some appropriately salty snacks for a spontaneous cherry blossom viewing party on the way back to Umeda. We cannot resist the sweet baking smell of oban-yaki, warm, filled cakes, either. Six with white, four with red anko, sweet bean paste, land in a paper bag, and we make our way to Sakuranomya, a famous cherry blossom spot.
We lose B-san, however, or rather, he loses himself, this time not in a fight with the subway minotaur, but in the big maze that is Osaka outside the train lines, and respecting the impossibility of finding Sakuranomya from wherever he is lost, we cut our hanami short to meet in Sone, and continue the drinking and merry making, eating and fighting in my humble Leopalace flat.
Sensei and our new kung-fu addition M-san leave, and the three of us brave each other and the beer, contemplating different missions that could be started from the balcony, talking, drinking, talking. At some point we have to go for more beer at the combini round the corner. And some whiskey, while we’re at it. It is a night of flowing sake. The cherry blossoms conjure up nights like this by the dozen. Well, one dozen or only slightly more. People leave the office. The pachinko parlours. The hostess and ramen bars. The kaiten sushi restaurants. People get drunk. Are happy. The world remembers that this is where the sun rises, and its soul gets absorbed in a passing dream of beauty too beautiful to be passed. Then, after the blossoms have wreaked this brief spell of magic, they sail down in gradual bouts of pink, gentle rain. Hanafubuki. And people sober up with sore heads. And return to the office, the pachinko parlours, the kaiten sushi restaurants, the hostess and ramen bars.
But tonight, we are in the middle of the cherry blossom dream. It is everywhere, even where you can’t see the blossoms. Beer keeps flowing until sleep calls. In the morning, from the loft, my room is a battlefield on which the dust has not quite settled yet. But waking up, gradually, we start stirring, moving, fighting again, tidying up. We count 23 empty cans of beer and clear the battlefield to embark on a new adventure.
Namely Its-san who is waiting for me by the bento-shop next to my beautiful highway motel home in her Mercedes. This afternoon I will provide some interesting foreign company to her daughter R-chan. B-san cycles away towards the highway horizon, and Herr T is swept up into the car with us by another bout of spontaneity. So we spend some pleasant hours at Its-san and R-chan’s, slurping banana milk shake, studying kanji, speaking English, and Japanese, and German, making plans for the next occasion we might all enjoy together.
Its-san’s and Herr T’s birthdays are next week. Friday and Saturday will be birthdays. Sunday will be my day off, the perfect day on which all three happy occasions can be combined into a barbecue party outside this very house. Agreed.
And finally, in the evening, we all meet at the temple dojo once again, drawing the circle, dancing the dance, living the dream. Training aikido.

Baseball and Beer

2007-04-02T16:15:00.000+09:00

Today Miy-san picks me up in the morning for a spontaneous shopping stroll around “Diamond City”, a big shopping mall next to Itami Station, another part of Osaka I have never set foot upon and probably never would, if it wasn’t for all those nice people who know their way around and, bit by bit, help me expand my mental map of the city.
We both love tea, and Diamond City is the place to get it. The tea shop is small but has teas of all types and flavours under the sun, displayed in small round tins you can pick up, to let their tempting aromas tickle the insides of your nose and decide which one most suits your palate. Inspired by the quiet Monday morning shopping mall atmosphere, bathed in shades of vanilla milkshake and Hello Kitty, I go for black tea that smells of chocolate chip cookies and green tea that smells of vanilla and strawberry.
Our tea mission accomplished, we explore the rest of the mall, combing through a sophisticated 100 ¥ shop that sells kitchen paraphernalia and stationery, walking past the pet shop where Miy-san has bought Happy, and, of course, a pet clothes shop where I see dummies wearing the same clothes I have seen on the wan-wans (woofs) in Inōkashira Park the other day. Miy-san walks into a jewellery shop, something I would never do on my own, but as I’m with her, I have a look and promptly find a crocodile shaped hairclip I cannot help buying. As soon as I see it I start thinking about a name for it.
Finally, we land on the top floor in front of the cinema, and Miy-san tells me she wants to see “Dream Girls” again. A wonderful film, she says, that makes you want to sing. So we decide to watch it in the evening. Then we go for a bowl of katsudon, deep fried pork, egg, cabbage, and brown sauce topping a big bowl of sticky white rice, and it is as satisfying as a seal.
Then we leave, and Miy-san takes me to Itami Station from where I embark on my next adventure. B-san has kindly invited me to join him for some free high school baseball at the huge Kōshien baseball stadium. This week, he tells me, there are games every day, with all the best high school teams of Japan competing against each other. All games are televised, and people across Japan watch as high school students pitch, bat, run, and sweat on Ōsaka’s Kōshien diamond.
I take the JR line to Kōshien-guchi, but when I arrive and try to find B-san, it turns out that Kōshien-guchi Station is about 30 minutes from the Hanshin line Kōshien Station, which is right next to the Stadium. As the bus has just left, and I don’t want to wait another twenty minutes, I decadently take a taxi and, five minutes and ¥ 900 later, arrive at the McDonalds next to Kōshien Station to meet B-san, who has only just emerged victoriously from a fight with the fearful minotaur of the Ōsaka underground. But he appears unscathed, wearing sunglasses and a big rucksack. We walk across to the Stadium and find some seats from where we don’t only get to watch the Narita vs Kōryo game but also the cheering teams on either side, which seem to be conducting a separate kind of tournament. A whole block on the right is all purple, with a brass band and intricate cheerleaders’ formations jumping and waving rhythmically. There is a similarly impressive turnout on the left, colouring the opposite block red. Both sides take turns clapping, singing, moving in patterns through various formations, playing boisterous brass music to keep their teams going, and breaking into spontaneous bouts of cheering whenever their teams score. As I am completely baseball illiterate, I have to ask B-san and watch the score to see which team is winning. Both teams are very close, and they have to go into second innings before the game finally ends 2:1 for Kōryo.
After the game, B-san tells me, everybody in the losing team always cries. Tender dreams of being spotted and becoming famous baseball players may be crushed as we watch the teams line up and shake hands to the sound of a male voice booming the national anthem through the speakers. Next, Hokuyo from Osaka are playing Kagoshima-sho who have travelled a long way from Kyūshū.
But I know nothing about baseball, and the great thing about sitting in a big stadium on a sunny free Monday with professional cheers all around is mainly that it provides the perfect chill out spot. In wise foresight, B-san has brought beer and sun screen, and as the sun screen dries into white residue on our faces, we sit slurping beer, occasionally applauding the players, enjoying bouts of idleness and exchanging stories. A skunk caught in the garage and shot at with a pellet gun, spraying everything as its muscles relax, spontaneous real estate tours in Osaka, religion, aikido, English conversation sharks, yakuza, smoking, drinking, and quitting, the red pill, and the blue pill feature in our conversation across this pleasant stretch of afternoon idleness. But idleness seldom lasts, especially in this country of short weekends and long working hours, so we leave for another fight with the minotaur, as I have to make my way back to practise kata. Karate competitions and gradings are coming up, and I have to drill the moves into my body - my mind will forget them under pressure.
So after an hour of kata training next to the baseball field behind my house (it is locked, and the fence is much too high to be climbed), I’m off for Monday night aikido training, where everybody sweats practising flowing bouts of open-handed strikes to the side of the head, averted by circular counter-movements which in fast repetition turn into a dance, equally nerve-wrecking and relaxing as blade-shaped hands drop like swords only inches away from faces, and bodies move into and out of line, drawing semi-circles into the air and onto the white mats. I get my timing right once, which is a success to be elaborated on in the future.
After training, Miy-san picks us up in her car, and we arrive slightly late for Dream Girls which, featuring the amazing voice of Jennifer Hudson, does indeed make you want to sing. After the film, we pop into a McDonalds for a coke, and to translate Diana Krall’s “Devil May Care” into Japanese for Miy-san, who loves singing this song but doesn’t know what she is singing.
“No cares or woes, whatever comes later goes, that’s how I’ll take and I’ll give, Devil may care.” Now she knows and comments: "What a cool song!"
I voice my concern over the issue of what to call my new crocodile while I take him out of my hair and look him in the eyes as he opens and closes his mouth. “Pacman!” Miy-san aptly suggests, but although the way he moves his mouth undeniably resembles Pacman’s, I still have a feeling he looks more like something else, something I know but can’t quite put into a name yet.
When Miy-san drops me off next to my house, I can’t believe I will be facing another week of 10 hour days. But the next weekend will surely come, and the red pill is still sitting in my pocket, waiting to be swallowed.

Big Jump

2007-04-01T13:18:00.000+09:00

The Tokyo Bay Hilton is the most impressive hotel I have ever stayed in, and my girl colleagues agree. It is luxurious. But we are here to work. To learn, so we can contribute better to the company that is so generously granting us this opportunity. More and more suited GEOS employees stream into the lobby and climb the broad staircase up to the first floor, some familiar faces from previous training days, one person I met in my London interview session. Many of them assemble in the smoking area in front of the big room that is at this very minute being prepared for our training. Smoke clouds the entrance while inside, handouts are being laid out on tables, name cards put up and organised by shishas. Waiters are polishing a big, silver hot water dispenser and lining up jugs of iced water on a table in the back.
We talk and get to know each other. There must be over a hundred people, maybe more, don’t quote me on numbers, but we are a big group, and we are only an infinitesimal part of the whole ginormous company. The cream of the crop, we will be told several times today. As our small talk evolves into conversations, however, it is nice to notice that the cream of the crop consists of people just as normal and open and unblemished by corporate pressure as me. Everybody is young, from different backgrounds, with different ambitions, but everybody shares the wish to do something special with their lives and the world, and some pleasant qualities like the gift of the gob, a willingness and skill to communicate and be friendly, and a hopeful smile that, beaming through yawns, displays professionalism, and, occasionally, shining through eyes from somewhere higher up and deeper down the soul, reveals interesting and radiant personalities behind the suits.
We are finally told to sit down at the long rows of tables, behind our assigned name cards. First, we are greeted by M, whom I know from my initial Tokyo training session. She quickly passes on the word to P from Urawa School, who takes over the lectern and asks us all to rise as we quote the “Shaze Shakun”, that encapsulates our company principles to guide everybody’s daily efforts and provide a corporate culture to live in and adapt to.
“Through our global network of language centres, we shall promote international understanding and cross-cultural communication,” intones P. Then, we all tune in with our half-awake Thursday-morning voices and mumble: “Meet the Challenge.”
The next part makes us all the more credible. Like an encouraging military marching chant, P starts every phrase with the word “Credibility.” Then we finish together:
“Credibility – comes not only from what we say but also from our appearance and attitude.
Credibility – comes not only from what we say about our lessons, but also by providing a friendly, enjoyable and academic atmosphere.
Credibility – comes not only from words but also by a cheerful, friendly smile: be sincere, look sincere.”
Sincerely, we all drop back down onto our chairs.
And there we sit, listening to speech after speech, with short 5 to 15 minute breaks in which we hurry down to the Starbucks in the lobby for more shots of coffee as it becomes more and more difficult to stay awake through this all too sedentary stretch of a day. There is of course some interesting information we get to hear. A lot of it, we already know. Some of it is new. GEOS has over 500 schools in Japan, and about 50 abroad. If we make an effort, we can become teacher trainers, managers, sub teachers, or textbook researchers, or we can go to one of the overseas schools and become teachers or managers there. We are the cream of the crop. We are the future. And if we reach our monthly targets straight through, we might even get to go on an overseas trip to get to know one of the GEOS overseas schools, in Vancouver, or Oceania.
The centre piece of the day is our Kaichō’s speech. He arrives with a little entourage, a bald wardrobe of a man watching over him from the right side of the room as Kaichō adjusts the microphone and speaks. His bodyguard? He is important and rich, our Kaichō. We are all lucky to be in the same room as him and hear his valuable speech. A completely different experience from watching it on video in the lobby of our schools while hastily preparing for our next lessons. Not the content, of course, just the atmosphere, and the fact that here we have the luxury of devoting our full attention to it. Although some of it goes into nursing our coffees to spread them over the duration of this stretch of afternoon.
Kaichō speaks good English. He is a very serious man. No jokes. No laughs. In order to sell the apple, it must be delicious. So he prefers spending money on employees’ training to spending millions on TV commercials. We must improve our teamwork. He draws a dot on the whiteboard. This is our goal. Then he draws a horizontal line underneath the dot and lots of arrows pointing away from it into different directions, none of them reaching the dot. If everybody works without looking at the goal, we cannot achieve what we want. He then draws a second dot and a second horizontal line underneath it. This time, all the arrows are pointing from the line towards the dot. The result looks like a volcano. “This,” says Kaichō,” is teamwork. We must reach our goal. You are young. You just started. You take up information like a sponge. So please make an effort.
We all clap. By the time we leave the sponges in our heads are so full that their content starts trickling out of both ears. We go for dinner in a big room fitted with round tables. Again, we are organised by shishas. “Higashi Kansai”, says the sign on our table. I get to sit together with my new friends D, a very funny Kansas City man, T, an extremely pretty, pleasant Vancouver girl originally from Vietnam, with a special touch of unassuming professionalism about her, and P, a beautiful West-London girl with Indian roots that radiantly shine through her name and smile. We eat salads, bread rolls, broccoli soup, croquets, meat, fish, gratin, and a yoghurty cheese cake garnished with fresh fruit for dessert, served one after another on a big, turning plate in the middle of the table. D, who has assumed a leading role to make our shisha feel like a real team, asks us all to tell some funny or embarrassing stories. I tell everybody about Hoover, my talking seal hero from Boston. S, my gentleman fellow trainee tells us he went out with his students and toasted to them, fatally using “Chin-chin!” instead of “Cheers!” which, in Japanese, denotes a certain male organ that is better left unmentioned in the company of one’s students.
Then, in a Tokyo Bay Hilton pub quiz, we are asked questions like “What does the GEOS acronym GSI stand for?”, “Murasaki Shikibu wrote which famous book that may well be the first novel ever written?”, and “Who was president of the United States when Neill Armstrong first set foot on the moon?”
Under the name “The fearless Talking Seals”, we enjoy the wonders of teamwork, as our knowledge pours into the empty boxes on our quiz sheet, and finish second, together with two other teams.
Finally, we have to clear the room, and spill into the corridor, exchanging more anecdotes, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. P and I throw our bags into our room and celebrate our stay at the Hilton by jumping up and down and across the three beds we share with C, another lovely English girl.
Then, sadly, the group splits as scattered group movements break it into a Hard Rock Café group and a group that can’t be bothered going so far and ends up in the Hilton Hotel bar. So we sit in the dimly lit hotel bar, little waterfalls making the wood glitter, large glass bottles and a giant bowl full of lemons, elegant lights creeping out behind flat, wooden pillars – the place exudes elegance. We are led to a table and borrow a few more chairs from a neighbouring table to accommodate us all. Then, we take a look at the menu and try not to run straight out again as we see the drink prices, which go up to just under ¥ 4000 (£17/€ 25) for a single drink. The cheapest drinks are coke, sprite, fanta, and oulong tea at ¥ 700 (£ 3/€ 4) a glass. Oulong tea it is. Other people order the relatively cheap Guinness at ¥ 1200 (£ 5/€ 7,60), but it turns out to be about half a pint. Undisturbed by the slight drawbacks suffered as a simple GEOS teacher when socialising at the Tokyo Bay Hilton Hotel Bar, however, we continue our round of stories, mirth, and merrymaking, and nurse our drinks, making the drinking less and the talking more intoxicating as we give each other advice on how to become better servants to the divine company who has honoured us by taking us in and giving us a never-ending array of fascinating opportunities.
S suggests reciting the Shaze Shakun in front of the mirror in the bathroom every morning and evening, N, an eloquent American girl who will soon become a “split” and work in two schools, suggests removing all male plants from the office, as they disturb the fruitful development of ideas, and ruin the creative atmosphere in the school. I feel tempted to pull out my notebook, but my brain willingly agrees to take notes for me this time.
We are an exciting mix. Former Chicago bartenders, Haruki Murakami fans and aspiring writers, psychologists, law firm employees, farmers, and marathon runners. I sit next to J who is from Alaska and now works in a school in Okinawa – what a change! At least in climate. As for population numbers, the two places seem to be similar. She has about 20 students and lives by the beach. It sounds appealing, compared to our school, which has about 80 students, out of which I teach about 60. Other schools have many more than that, still. Also, there is affectionate, smiley, utterly amiable P, who reckons god is a gas, which leads to a round of follow-up jokes, bringing the deep conversation about god and belief back to a level more typical for a light post-training drinking session. But both the deep and the shallow end are pleasant to swim in. We leisurely paddle about in the hotel bar light-lit water, cooling our heads and warming our hearts, learning more about people with similar and very different experiences, learning, growing, dreaming. Until finally, it is time for last orders, and we are forced upstairs and into bed. But I am not too angry, much as I love conversing with my wonderful fellow teachers. The very best part about work are the interesting acquaintances made along the way, and there is no shortage of them. But at some point, the idea of a nice, clean, warm bed opening up its quilted arms to take me in becomes more and more attractive, and it is a special kind of ecstasy sinking into the Hilton hotel bed after last night’s short, light sleep at the Asakusa capsule hotel. Capsule one night, Hilton the next. Big Jump. Living the dream. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Swirly World

2007-03-30T01:46:00.000+09:00

I leave my capsule early and follow the instructions carefully written on a piece of paper for me by the woman at the ticket information office in Shinjuku the day before. I have to change trains three times to get from Asakusa to Maihama. Three different subway lines, then, in Hachōbori, I change onto the red JR line that takes me to Maihama, where I will be meeting the other GEOS teachers from Higashi-Kansai, our area or “shisha”.

When I arrive, I notice that this station is not only close to the Tokyo Bay Hilton, where today’s inaugural session to the Big Jump special teacher training will be held, but even closer to Tokyo Disney Land. The spacious area in front of the station is full of high school girls with ornate Mickey Mouse ears on their heads. People in casual holiday outfits are streaming out of the station, enjoying burgers and iced oulong tea at Becker’s café, some carrying big paper bags sporting Mickey and friends, full of newly acquired goods from Disney Paradise. I, on the other hand, am wearing a grey skirt suit and cherry blossom pink lipstick and, as usual, constraining tan tights and black shoes with heels. My hair is professionally tied up. I wish I could let it lose and enter into this swirly world that pervades even the space outside Disney land.

I still have two hours until I’m meeting my crew, so I walk across the wide sand-coloured space and past the big fountain and settle at Café Mono. When I order a “sakuratte”, a word composition containing “sakura” and “latte”, I am served a creamy pink concoction in a round white tea cup on a white saucer, crowned with a swirl of white, stiff and fluffy cream, red stripes lining the crown, and a real cherry blossom topping it off. There is roll bread, a type of muffin with a similar looking surface. A mouth watering world. Even the chairs look like pots of recently stirred, creamy honey, excerpts from a tray of freshly baked, smoothly twisted cinnamon buns. The triangular stand-up menu carefully details how to eat roll bread. Carefully separate the ruffled cardboard cup from the edges and – voila – you’ve turned it into a little plate. Everything is ever so convenient in this swirly world. A sweet, swirly world. In a cup, on a plate, on a chair. Everywhere.
Not the vortical swirls of every day misery, of corporate structure and profits and sales I will be sucked into later on, but vertical swirls, rising towards the sky around an invisible, creamy axis that shows only in the end, a pert tip pointing towards the sky, beaming with the constant aim of swirling the world upwards on the invisible, creamy sustenance of hope, imagination, and the effort to realise them.
The café is full of girls, most of them in pairs, waiting for the shopping village to open, gorging themselves on sweet, creamy drinks and swirly roll bread. The windows have patterns in them, and colours, so you can see the world through different shapes, squares, circles, wavy stripes, and the spaces they create together, hugging, crossing, overlapping, intersecting. The sun is shining in, aiding the warm sparkle of elegant, European-looking lamps, white crystal shades, black, ornate fittings. Disney songs flow from the speakers, rendered in bells, like lullabies from a musical box.
But as the end of my sakuratte approaches and I eat the cherry blossom, which breaks the creamy sweetness with its salty taste, I am unpleasantly awoken to the fact that I cannot stay forever in this swirly world. I have to get up and leave, and meet my co-workers from Higashi-Kansai. At least I’m not the only odd one out anymore when my equally suited colleagues arrive and join me outside the gates of Maihama station, most of them new faces, pleasantly asserting their individuality beyond their grey and black suits. We exchange first greetings, small talk getting bigger as we take the monorail train to the Tokyo Bay Hilton. So close to work, we desparately hold on to the Mickey Mouse shaped overhead handles and longingly look at Tokyo Bay through Mickey Mouse shaped windows. There it is, the Tokyo Bay Hilton.

Guest Photographer

2007-03-29T11:23:00.000+09:00

You may have noticed that I changed the pictures on my “Cats and Dogs in Inōkashira Park” log and that the new pictures are much better than the previous ones. If not, have a look now, especially because I know most of you are here for the pictures, not my writing.
One more reason for you to read THIS, as it is introducing my guest photographer on this blog: Paul Leeming. He also took the picture of me and my seal, and I’m sure I will be using more of his pictures as they will increase the visual quality of my blog considerably.
As opposed to myself, Paul actually knows a lot about technology and its use in creating visual and audiovisual art. He also HAS the technology and the skills to do it. Here you can see him with his camera with its big image stabilisation lens, which is only part of his bigger set of accessories.
Taking photographs is not his only talent. He is also a film maker. In the summer, he will become the proud owner of a Red One digital cinema camera which he plans to use as well as rent out to expand on his existing film business. His two sci-fi short films “Eve” and “Birth” will be on Australian TV this month, and have been accepted into the National Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in June.
So if any of this has made you curious, and you want to know more about Paul and his work, see his films, rent out his camera, or work with him in any other way, please let HIM tell you more and have a look at his website at http://www.visceralpsyche.com , yeah?

Capsule Hotel

2007-03-29T03:03:00.000+09:00

From the outside, the Riverside Asakusa looks seedy. The walls look white turned yellow, the lights advertising capsules for ¥ 3000 (£ 13/ € 19) a night are flickering on and off. Whatever. If it has a capsule for me to sleep in, I’m happy. I go to a nearby combini to get a drink, a tooth brush travel set, some green tea mushi-pan (chewy, steamed cake) for the next morning, and a dodgy manga to make all this a truly Japanese experience.
Then I brace myself and walk up the narrow winding staircase to the entrance of the capsule hotel. A friendly man with unusually big, brown eyes greets me in the lobby. The place is much cleaner and much more welcoming than expected. There are cereal bars on the counter that can be bought for a hurried breakfast, or midnight meal, a large lobby with sofas, vending machines, lockers to lock your shoes away, slippers to slip into. A man sits on one of the sofas watching TV and having a smoke. The place reminds me of a youth hostel.
The man at reception greets me in broken English. “Sleep in a box?” he asks. I reply in Japanese, which makes him happy. “A, you speak Japanese. That makes it easier. You’re on the eighth floor. Only for women that floor. Please give me the key for your shoe box.” I hand him my key and pay for the night. He gives me another key. I take the elevator up to the eighth floor. It opens into a room with a large wash basin and mirrors. Soap for washing your face, lotion, and moisturiser are supplied, neatly lined up in clean looking light blue bottles. There is a toilet where I find a notebook. I open it. It has the same sentence scribbled all over it, again and again, on every single page from beginning to end. This must be an important message. I take a deep breath as I start deciphering what I take as a sign from the God of capsule hotels (there are 8 million gods in Japan, so there must be one responsible for capsule hotels, too). His honourable message reads:
“I’m raising my heart to be free and wide as the sky. To be taken by nothing. To learn living without ties.”
I clap, not to ask for favours from the gods like people do here, but in a more Western fashion, to applaud the God of capsule hotels and thank him for his time and consideration, to leave this notebook here for me, behind the toilet door like a toilet cleaners’ log book, yet filled with such unexpected pearls of wisdom.
I wash the sweat left behind by a Tokyo adventure off me and brush my teeth. I lock away my things in one of the L-shaped lockers before the toilet and walk past the sink and mirror into the capsule room, remindful in its space saving fashion of a ship's interior, capsule beds lined up on both sides, bottom beds and top beds. People have made these capsules their homes for the night, putting out knickers and socks to dry, carefully arranging pairs of slippers before their doors. At the rear end of the two rows, on the bottom, I find my capsule. No 8018. It has a screen that can be closed to partly shut out the light outside that must burn through the night to welcome other guests who may arrive at any time under the moon. Inside my capsule, the sheets are white and soft. There is a radio and a TV. Watching it costs ¥ 100 for half an hour, and ¥ 500 for five hours. But I have my manga, so who needs TV. There is a light inside the capsule, too, that can be dimmed and brightened. I am content in my capsule, but keep reading my manga and cannot sleep because the light is coming in through the little wholes in my screen. More and more strange manga stories. More and more dotted light on my pillow. But I need to sleep, so the dots of light turn into sheep, and I start counting. Good night little seal. Good night, Anna. And finally, my consciousness is sealed for a few hours, light earthquake like vibrations leading into a haphazard chain of light little dreams, too light to be remembered by the time a full, bright morning pours in through my blinds and tells me to leave my capsule for the Tokyo Bay Hilton.

A Seal from Kabuki-chō

2007-03-28T09:54:00.000+09:00

Kabuki-chō is Tokyo’s entertainment and red light district. We take the orange Chūo-line to Shinjuku and get out at this busy station’s East exit from where we enter the streets of Kabuki-chō. This is the big metropolitan Tokyo we know from photographs in travel guides. Big screens with flashy commercials on them look down on us from huge buildings, like a group of Cyclopses, making us feel small in a moving concrete canyon. The large round space in front of the station is much busier even than holiday Kichijōji.
As tomorrow’s training will be all work and it will be a strenuous task trying to stay awake through seven hours of speeches in a warm room, making a respectable face, taking notes, downloading information, today I have set myself a fun task. I want something to play. And it has to be a seal. Kabuki-chō is my treasure hunting ground.
The first shop front flashes large breast-shaped pillows and an elephant head covering the crotch of a plastic male body. The shop turns out to be a maze, much deeper and bigger than the small entrance suggests, its merchandise a strange combination of clothes, home appliances, make up, and bizarre toys.
We might need something seedier to find my seal. Around the corner, we find a small shop called “Wild One”. It is nothing but a small corridor, a wrinkly mama behind the counter with short hair and a serious make up overdose gluing the pores of her face shut. Looking around, I can’t find anything resembling a seal. There is a penguin.
“Excuse me,” I finally ask her. “Do you happen to have a seal?” “Seal? Hm.” She is unfazed by my request and slowly gets up from her seat. “I don’t think we have a seal. As far as cute things go,” she says with a voice marred by years of smoke, guttural noises, and other dirt passing through her throat, as she combs through a small glass shelf at the entrance, “We have a dolphin and a bee. The dolphin is ¥ 4000 Yen, the bee ¥5000.”
She shows me both, but I have to disappoint her and tell her I’m not interested in bees or dolphins. I have come to find a seal. And it will be a seal or nothing. Of course I know that the latter is the more likely outcome, but you have to try if you want to succeed, and trying itself is fun.
We wander about gazing at the variety of shows and massage parlours, the suited men standing in front of them to invite people in. Cheap shops, expensive shops, none of them spelling out explicitly what happens inside them. They have pictures of scantily clad girls on them, some in school uniforms, some wearing nothing, some foreign, some Japanese. There are prices for different times. ¥ 6000 and for an hour’s “course” (whatever that may entail), ¥ 10,000 for two hours. The most explicit message we find, written in English, is “Only Japanese”.
Finally, an inconspicuous grey plastic curtain along a darker alleyway leads us into another shop. This one seems to have no particular name. The words above the door are content-related and simply functional. “Adult Toys”, it says.
We go in, and again, the shop’s size is not impressive. But the array of goods in this shop seems to be more extensive than that at the “Wild One”. A man in his late forties with a balding head, hair combed across it in thin strands from left to right, fixed with copious amounts of wax, politely welcomes us and gestures at a wall of lit-up vibrators. “Omiage, omiage!” he says. “Get some souvenirs for your friends at home!” “Actually,” I confess, “I’m not here to buy omiage. I’m looking for a seal.”
“A seal? Well, there are al kinds of things here, so just have a look, you might be lucky.” I comb through the shelves. Again, they are full of dolphins. This time, I find a penguin, as well. Lots of nun-like women that creepily glare at me in semi-see-through colours, filled with pearls. When I think I have looked at every single item this shop is selling and am about to leave, Wax Strand calls from the other side of the room: “What about a fur seal?” “A fur seal?” Within a second, I’m next to him to see whether he is actually telling the truth. He holds up a see through box with a little white thing in it. I take a closer look. Jesus, Mary and St Joseph. It is in actual fact, a seal. Bent 90 degrees in the middle for perfect vibration distribution, its cute little head looking up at the golden gate, its tail fin spreading across the beach of pleasure. On the control, there is a picture of a smiling fur seal, and it says “otossei – a fur seal”.
I can’t believe my luck. “I’ll have that.” I say, and then can’t stop laughing about the bizarre and unexpected result of this impossible seal hunt. “I’ll make it cheap for you,” says Wax Strand. It’s usually ¥ 5000, but I’ll give it to you for ¥ 4000.” He puts in some batteries and checks whether it is moving. The fur seal is moving. He returns it to the box and puts it in an innocent looking red-chequered paper bag for me. Mission accomplished.
It is time for food again. We try to find cheap yaki-niku (fried beef) and ask one of the men inviting people into shops that sell “courses” for help. He lends us the high-tech skills of his mobile phone navigation system, polite and caring, and walking us half the way to the restaurant as another man appears out of nowhere, runs across the street, and wordlessly takes over his post. We find the place we are looking for, but it is full, and we are not willing to wait for 40 minutes. Instead, we find a Wara-Wara and eat a variety of dishes, including fried mochi (sticky rice balls) with cheese and bacon, Okonomiyaki, Hokkaido pumpkin gratin, salad wraps, and fried pork with spring onions. When our stomachs are full, it is still early, so we embark on a last little adventure between our different train stations.
We get off at Ueno, hoping Ueno Park might be lit up and offer another opportunity for taking pictures and enjoying some more relaxing views after the endlessly sparkling and flashing streets of Kabuki-chō. But there is not much light in the park. Mostly benches covered with blue plastic tarpaulins, the little sleeping cells of homeless people. There are animal statues made of lit up wires. The light in the wires changes colours. They are live-sized and, arranged into scenes taken from “The Carnival of the Animals”, offer a mesmerising little spectacle, A reindeer pulling monkeys around on a sled. Big penguins, a giant bear, a peacock. We take more pictures and finally have a last coffee in Ueno before we go our separate ways again.
P is off to get his subway line, I am off to get mine: the Ginza line to Asakusa, where I can sleep in a capsule for ¥ 3000. Walking down the steps towards my train, I whistle happily at the drab, yellow walls. I’ve got a fur seal in my pocket. Capsule today, Hilton tomorrow. A seal in your pocket eats all your sorrow. Come here, Seal, you have talent. You can bark, you can purr, Seal, so purr tonight. I’m taking you to a capsule tonight, just you and me in a capsule tonight, ooooh, just you and me. As I step onto the train, I swear I can hear Seal clapping his fins in my pocket.

Cats and Dogs in Inōkashira Park

2007-03-27T02:18:00.000+09:00

The 21st of March is a national holiday: “higan”, the day seven days before the vernal equinox when memorial services are held for the deceased. On the 22nd of March, I am attending the Big Jump special teacher training inaugural session in Tokyo. The plan GEOS has made for me is to leave Osaka early on the 22nd and come back early on the 23rd, on time for work. As this is a work related trip, I get my travel expenses reimbursed. So why not go to Tokyo on the 21st. I ask head office, and am granted my wish. The Shinkansen tickets cost the same, whether I leave Osaka on the 21st or the 22nd: ¥ 28,740 (£125/€183) for a round trip from Shin-Osaka to Tokyo station.
The train is packed, and I’m happy I have reserved a seat. I enjoy a good two and a half hours savouring the next bit of my Murakami novel, taking time to look up kanji and words, writing them on a key-ringed set of study-cards sporting a cute black cat and the wonderfully strange German phrase “Eine boshafte schwarze Katze” (“an evil black cat”). Apparently this character is a Korean invention. I spotted it last week when, panicking about my fatal lack of orientation, I arrived in Shinsaibashi, the en vogue young people’s shopping and partying district of Osaka, about two hours before our local teacher training session. In a shop full of different cute characters featured on a cornucopia of kitchen, home, and office paraphernalia, there was a whole section devoted to the “boshafte schwarze Katze” that does not look “boshaft” at all. It was excellent pre-training entertainment to read through the clumsy phrases printed on stationery, pens, notebooks, and study cards. “Selbst wenn sie sie nahm, war es ein groβes Abenteuer.“ („Even when she took her, it was a great adventure.“)
Sitting on the train, I have to laugh again as I read the words on my study cards. The novel progresses, my Japanese vocabulary expands slowly, and the white Shinkansen Nozomi train with the big round nose gets me into Tokyo in slightly more than two hours.
My plan is to meet P, a friend from my initial Tokyo training days who is based in Tokyo, to re-visit my Tokyo from four years ago and bathe in a tub full of healthy nostalgia, walking around exclaiming “Natsukashii!” at every street corner, and, possibly, buy myself a toy.
I meet P at Kichijōji station, Kōenguchi exit. It is a sunny day, and a national holiday, so the narrow streets of Kichijōji are crammed with moving crowds. P and I squeeze into the crowd and move with it, crossing the busy road with café Stone and KFC, and the next with the bus stop, past the Body Shop and the big O1O1 department store, to enter that old acquaintance of mine, a friendly little street home to stalls selling giant battered octopus, deep fried (bakuhatsuyaki), green tea, coffee, and vanilla flavoured whippy ice cream, sausages pierced by a rib for easier eating, and, at a German restaurant called König, Weiβwurst and Glühwein. The latter seems completely inappropriate on a sunny spring day like today: a guest from cold German Christmas markets where it serves to warm everybody’s heart and soul. Here, he seems lonely and out of place, the spring sun unnecessarily warming him.
We continue down the little road, past jewellery and fashion shops, an Indian restaurant, a shop selling handmade pillows sporting cats. I wonder whether these cute looking cats, too, are in fact evil creatures that curse you with big adventures every time you take them.
I have not been here in over four years, but still I know my way around, and it feels like I’m showing P one of my many homes. Finally, the Starbucks and the big yaki-tori place on the right, the fancy Japanese restaurant on the left, and Inōkashira Park opens up before us. The bridge, the lake, the many kinds of ducks. Salary men in casual garb on their day off, taking the family, renting swan-shaped boats, and paddling them around the lake between the ducks. Ahirun-run-run, ahi-run-run-run. Young people enjoying their spring. Musicians and their instruments. Children. Couples. Dogs. Most of them pocket-sized and flaunting the latest prêt-aboyer spring collections. A sand-coloured chihuaha in a pink jumper with a lacy hood. A French bulldog wearing a T-shirt that says “Vintage Dog”. A poodle in camouflage. The only naturalist dog we see is a big St Bernhard that looks the size of a bear in comparison to the fashion conscious miniature dogs that seem more common here. He is not wearing any thing on top of his everyday tricolour coat. Finally, we spot the most bizarre pet in the park: a cat on a lead, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt. P gets out his professional camera with its big, long lense and image stabiliser. While P tries to get a better shot of the cat, I comment on its taste in clothes to the proud owners, a young couple, he with a small gap between his front teeth, she wearing a bright pink skirt, hair died light brown.
“O yes, I bet he does like Mickey Mouse.” Gap smiles. “He loves Mickey!” “What’s your name?” I ask the cat, but Gap answers for him. “This is Sō-kun,” he says. “Yoroshiku onegai shimasu. – Nice to meet you!” When we’ve got Sō-kun on digicam, we move on to take pictures of other things.
On the boat-free side of the bridge, there are fountains colouring the air rainbow between us and the red temple on the other shore. Flowers coming out. The golden hour starting to turn the world into honey. We leisurely stroll about, blending into the crowds of people, taking pictures. We eat pork and boiled egg, and sticky fried rice in lotus leaves at the little café in the park. A random man asks whether he can take a picture of us, and we model for his shot.
When we cross the bridge back, there are two new musicians sitting on a bench by the river. One young man with features that could be Japanese as well as native South American with a guitar. An older man wearing a hat playing a snake-skin shamisen. They play Shima-uta, the old Okinawan song, and I have to go talk to them. In no time, the shamisen finds its way into my hands, and Hat corrects my posture. For a while, I improvise on Japindian’s friendly chords. “Do you play the guitar?” he says. He speaks perfect English. “Yes.” “If you play guitar, it’s very easy.” P takes pictures, until we move on again. When he takes some shots of the German restaurant for me, I buy us two giant cones of green tea whippy ice cream which we kill on our way back to the station. Next stop: Kabuki-chō.

Jazz and Happy

2007-03-20T09:44:00.000+09:00

First Miy-san and I agree to meet at 10 in the morning. But then, Miy-san realises she has a dentist’s appointment and asks whether we can make it around two instead, and she’ll contact me again that day. Around 11.30, she sends me a text asking whether we can make it one. Of course we can.
Unfortunately sending money to my German bank account at Sone yubinkyoku takes ages. On top of that, a woman with bad breath chats me up and asks whether I want a free credit card on my account. I do, actually, as that will mean I can withdraw money even when the post office is closed, which I can’t at the moment. The restricted ATM opening hours in this country are rather annoying at times. I tell her I would love a free credit card, but unfortunately I don’t have time right now. It only takes five minutes, she only needs to take my name and address, she promises.
Of course it doesn’t take five minutes. I’m juggled back and forth between the woman at the counter who is not used to the procedures and makes me fill in one sheet twice because the first time she doesn’t realise I was supposed to put my address into the boxes in romaji, not kanji, and the woman with bad breath who is a salesperson and has therefore lied to me about the time it takes to get a card. I’m not sure what use it will be to her if I sign up for a free credit card, but knowing how things work in the world of sales since I involuntarily entered it working for GEOS, I assume she gets commissions. When the counter woman sends me to the ATM outside to withdraw the cash I want to pay into my German account (why under god they can’t take it off my account directly, as they are the institution where I have my account, I cannot fathom), I give Miyuki a call and apologise that I will be late. Hoping the procedures must be almost over now that I will pay the money, I optimistically tell her that I will be on the next train. Of course I won’t. The ATM spits out a brick-thick bundle of bills that make me flinch in horror. Have I entered a zero too much and just bankrupted myself into a myriad of debt? No. The ATM has simply given me 80,000 Yen in 1000 Yen notes. Fine. I hand over the 55,000 I want to pay into my German account plus 2,500 Yen administration fees. This is always the same sum. It doesn’t change, no matter how much or how little money is transferred.
The woman with bad breath needs to know another zillion details. How much would I like to borrow on my credit card? What do I want to make my one time withdrawal limit? Am I working for a company? Which one? Which branch? How many other people work in that branch? What is my annual salary? I feel tempted to use bad language but I don’t have the vocabulary, and of course I’m always polite.
Finally, she asks me whether I would like a post office money bank, a post office alarm clock, or a post office note pad for a present. I choose the red, old school alarm clock. “There’s a battery in it,” she tells me, “So please just pull off the seal.”
I run to the station. It is raining buckets, but I have the black umbrella with me the kombiniya-san from Friday aikido class kindly presented to me on a morning when the rain caught me by surprise after aikido training, in my working clothes. On the platform, I call Miy-san again. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m in a book shop. See you soon.”
I take the Hankyu Takarazuka line to Ishibashi, two stops behind Toyonaka, and find her engaged in what must have been a long bout of tachiyomi (standing up reading). He hair is almost as curly as mine. Naturally. Rare. She smiles, and we walk through the rain across a big street, turning into a quiet residential area. One of those little Japanese neighbourhoods with blue roofs and little shrines and flower displays, where everything looks the same, but everything looks very different at the same time. They are cosy but scary to a direction illiterate newcomer like me. Hōko-onchi - direction-unmusical, say the Japanese. I always get lost in this type of neighbourhood. But this time, I have Miy-san to lead me, with her flowery umbrella and her curly Japanese hair.
Finally, we arrive at a two-storey tall building with a slant roof where some steps lead up to a second floor entrance. It is an average house, but somehow it has an unassuming kind of elegance about it, just like Miy-san. “This is it,” she announces, and we climb the steps around a corner up to her family home. I marvel at her grace as she holds her black and white chequered handbag, disposes of the flowery umbrella, and unlocks the door. There’s a pair of guest slippers waiting for me from the guest slipper stand. White, soft plastic slippers.
A minuscule dog with bulging eyes and light beige spots on short, white fur comes a-running and madly wags its tail. He madly slides around the floor in circles and jumps up at me in enthusiastic curiosity and excitement. But he doesn’t bark, which I appreciated greatly. “This is Happy,” says Miy-san, while she walks into the kitchen that doorlessly opens up on the left, across from the sofa and armchair area living room on the left. Happy indeed. I play with Happy and take him up for a cuddle. I’m not usually a fan of dogs smaller than a kitten, but Happy deeply impresses me with his non-stop enthusiasm and happiness. I wonder whether Miy-san does this to people and dwarf dogs alike, with her mere presence. On the left stands a large electronic Yamaha piano, complete with two main keyboards and a foot keyboard for the base lines. And a multitude of buttons with different functions that remain obscure to me, even when I see Miy-san use them later on. You get books that come with floppy disks that give you the right rhythm and the keys the right sound for whatever sound spectacle you want to create on it. I’m deeply impressed when I hear her reproduce perfectly the sound of the “Pirates of the Carribbean” and “Terminator” title themes.
“Take a seat!” says Miy-san, while she takes up a glass teapot. I sit down on a bench at the longish kitchen table and play with Happy, who can’t get enough of it. I am served hot black tea with orange flavour in a very English looking cup and saucer, complete with blue roses and golden edges. Happy keeps trying to kiss me on the mouth. When I direct him away from it, he licks my neck instead and tickles me into fits of laughter. Finally, Miy-san restrains her hyper little pet and puts a little lead on him that goes across his chest, as if he was a little reindeer. “Now he thinks he’s being taken out,” she says, smiling cruelly, and puts the loop of the lead on one post of her chair. Happy sits there and breathes, without spite. We have some scrumptious, moist sweet potato-cakes, shaped with a big spoon probably, but pointed on both ends. She shows me her “aesthe” room, the room where she makes people beautiful. You get a full “aesthe course” for 4000 Yen. “I would love one,” I tell her. “Great, I will prepare the room then,” she says. But then, somehow in the middle of her preparations, we land on the long piano seat and sing. Miy-san is a virtuoso electronic piano captain. She presses buttons here, and turns little wheels there, plays three keyboards all at the same time, and gets the sound of a whole jazz band out of the machine. It’s very impressive. She gives me the books she studies from. Her singing teacher writes down the songs adjusted to her lower pitch, and Miy-san listens intently to the CDs, to learn how to pronounce the lyrics of which she claims to understand nothing. Pure sound-imitation, but that makes her pronunciation better than most of my students’. No wonder, really. After all, sound imitation is the key to good pronunciation. But it is still impressive to learn such long combinations of foreign sounds when their sequence and intonation must seem utterly random, and void of meaning.
What songs do you know? She asks, and I go through her books and pick a few. Cheek to Cheek, we sing, and Lullaby of Birdland, and Summertime. Happy sits tied to the chair in his little reindeer outfit, his eyes bulging a little sadly now, and sings, too. His size does not allow for dog-like howls. He sounds like a budgie. Also, he is not as musical as Miy-san. Finally, there is a song I don’t really know, so I start improvising. “Hamotteru!” She exclaims happily. We’re singing in harmony. If I practise I can make up better melodies, I tell her, and she is all fire. “Let’s do it!” she says. Let’s practise, and then let’s have a concert here! And invite all the aikido people, plus the Sensei and his wife. His wife really likes jazz, too!”
“Excellent. Yes! Let’s!”
We sing and sing, with Happy chirping along, and Miy-san plays her charming chords and handles buttons that exude sax and trumpet, and brushing drum sounds from the speakers. ‘S Wonderful, Mr Gershwin! What are you doing the rest of your life? Let’s fall in love, why shouldn’t we fall in love. When you walk, let your heart lead the way, and you’ll find love any day, Alfie.
Her son K-kun returns with two friends, and they take Happy into K-kun’s room and play with him.
Then Miy-san calls the kids into the living room and serves juice and chewy rice sweets. The two of us get tea instead of juice, and the strawberries and little purple potato cakes I’ve brought for snacks. The three boys savour the sticky rice balls on sticks and their juice. And finally listen to Miy-san and me sing a few more songs. They are all very well-mannered little boys and listen with big eyes and genuine admiration to the sounds we produce with our voices and the Yamaha piano. Miy-san shows me a poster she has made for a school choir performance. It is a perfect little elf, singing out swirly notes. Clear influences of manga and art nouveau. Finally, K-kun’s two friends leave, and I Miy-san and K-kun give me a lift to Shōsenji, where I train aikido with Jazz lingering in my heart, head, and body, guiding me, swinging me stable in the essential effortless flow of movement the Shihan preaches.

Translating the Word of God

2007-03-13T10:29:00.000+09:00

“Rather interesting,” said Seal, savouring the first sip of the coffee I had made him. He had an Oxford accent.
My heart was drinking the world the furry creature had brought in with him, and it was filling up from all sides like a sponge.
The moment he suddenly showed his round, black eyes at the window, he made me open what had been closed for a long time, and now my bedsit was breathing heavily, air wafting through the room in waves of pressure lifting the insides of my stomach like a swiftly rising elevator, and my heart was drinking desperately, lapping at the substance oozing out of Seal’s presence.

There he was, giving me that opening look through the glass, warranting immediate access, already inching in, fins pulling furry fat across the window sill, sliding onto the floor, moving across the carpet in his awkward, zig-zagging seal walk, stopping in front of the sofa. He turned his neck to look at me. And again to look up at the sofa. I walked across and, sinking into the white folds of his neck, lifted him up and put him on it. He sat there, fins on his belly, breathing. In and out came his furry belly. In and out. His eyes were zonked, staring straight ahead at some indeterminate point. In space? Time? Or was there another dimension he knew and was seeking to stare into my flat little world with his big round eyes?
“I wouldn’t mind a drink,” he finally said snapping out of his zonk.
“Coffee?”
“That would be fabulous.”
I made coffee and served. He savoured.
“I have come to talk,” he said.
“Have you?” The situation’s components registered. Conversation with Seal. Immersed in and pervaded by unknown substance. No escape.

“Yesterday,” said Seal, “when you left the library, you bumped into my car.”
“Your car?”
“Yes. A black Subaru Imprezza. Which happens to be quite dear to me.”
I imagined Seal with his streamlined, finned body trying to drive a Subaru Imprezza but finally decided to take my response from a different angle.
“But I don’t drive.”
“That bears no relevance.”
He took another sip of coffee and smacked his tongue on his palate.
I stalled. “But how could I have bumped into your car? I was on foot!”
“You bumped into my car. And it is dear to me.”
You’re out of your mind, Seal, I wanted to say. But then I remembered I was talking to a seal and didn’t say it, and said instead:
“I’m awfully sorry. But I don’t remember.”
“That is a common occurrence.”
A common occurrence.
“Would you mind me searching your memory?” asked Seal.
I looked into his big, black eyes, and they forced me away from the content of our talk into different territory. When my mind got back, I had already spoken.
“You are free to search every nook and cranny of my memory.”
“Wonderful,” said Seal and slid down the sofa. “Where shall we do it?”
“Where?”
“You need to lie down comfortably and take off your clothes,” said Seal.
Seal certainly had the odd baffling trump up his fin.
“That is the only way you can search my memory?”
“I’m sure there are other methods,” said Seal wriggling towards the mattress that was my bed, “But this is the one I know.” He gave my bed a quick once-over and said: “This seems to be a good place to do it.”
I took off my clothes, jeans, socks, polo shirt, pants, and folded them into a neat pile on the chair next to my bed. Seal waited next to the bed, unimpressed by my progressing state of nudity and its stark completion. I lay down on my stomach and closed my eyes.
“Are you comfortable?” said Seal.
I was as comfortable as I could be.
At first, his fur was light on me, with no weight whatsoever. Was this his fur? There was something hovering along the edges of my entire body simultaneously. Gradually, it closed in on me and made circles starting from impulse points in the middle and spreading pressure evenly in concentric circles around these points, overlapping, and moving away from the initial pressure points at the same time as closing in on them. One pressure point was the next one’s outermost circle. As circles and points began spreading through my body, I stopped thinking in a linear fashion, and what had been a tool for thinking cause and consequence broke into ceaseless circling and pointing, constantly starting from nothing and everything, returning to everything and nothing.
When my mind re-surfaced, Seal was in the same position as before, facing the bed, looking me in the eyes.
“I found it.” He said.
“Found it?”
“Yesterday, in the library, you told Carol to come back, because you could fix it. Then you took out a book. ‘Translating the Word of God’.”
Seal was telling the truth, wherever he had found it.
“But I did not bump into your car.”
“You did. You bumped into my Imprezza, and it is dear to me. I would much appreciate your cooperation in correcting your mistake. Take back 'Translating the Word of God'. Tell Carol the truth. You can’t fix it. That will fix my Imprezza, and I shall not bother you again.”
You didn’t bother me, I wanted to say. But as Seal wriggled towards the window and somehow managed to clamber up and out, my voice dissolved into fits of crying, and I couldn’t stop till I fell into a bottomless sleep.

I found the book next to my bed. Now I had to take it back I wanted to read it more than ever. My heart heavy like a sponge full of truth, I faced the dark winter morning to meet Carol at the library.

A Beautiful Castle

2007-03-10T02:33:00.000+09:00

I’m having a succession of days that are not the best. You know what kind of days I mean. I stay up late with uneasy thoughts on my mind and holes in my soul, pervaded by the darkness of night, and then can’t get out of bed in the morning, fall asleep again, accidentally switch off my alarm clock instead of putting it on snooze and end up having to run to work, picking up new tights in a kombini (convenience store) on the way because mine burst as I try to speed things up running. At the kombini that’s usually empty, five people are standing in front of me, all wanting to pay their gas bills and buy nikuman (big Chinese meat-filled dumplings) and have them warmed up. I realise I have no money left and run across to the post office to withdraw some, but it is Saturday morning, and the ATM is closed. Relax, it’s not the end of the world. It just gives me heartburn and makes my back even worse that it already is. I’m not even thirty, and I have back pains. Not enough weights workouts, probably. I’m trying to increase my workout number but there is too little time for all the many things I want to do, so I try to do a little bit of everything and never manage to do enough of anything. I have so little time, I hardly get to read. I hardly know what’s going on in the world. I want to study kanji and new words so I understand more of what’s going on in the news I occasionally watch in the evenings. I want to pass the Japanese proficiency test. I want rhythm. I want music. I want, I want, always want what I don’t have. Never mind. I have a job. I get paid. I’m in Japan. I have a place to myself, a world to myself. That’s quite enough. Plod on. Gambare.
To prevent morning haste, which I hate, I get up and go to the gym early and run a number of exhausting, long, fast intervals with only short slower breaks on the treadmill. I have enough time to stretch, shower, and stroll to the station, but before I know it, I’m talking to another runner who, I thought, just wanted to use the treadmill next. But he wants to talk. He is 59 and studied German at university 35 years ago. He can still say “Ich bin Student.” (“I’m a student.”) And he used to run half marathons, but now he just runs 10 km races. I should stay in Japan forever, he tells me. Talk about forever. I try to wrap up the conversation for lack of time. Never enough time. Even friendliness turns into a difficult subject in all this haste.
In the evening I want to go home as soon as possible after my last class to get some sleep. I can hardly suppress my yawns during classes, and it is unthinkable to yawn in front of my students, who are paying a lot of money to get competent, efficient, friendly English teachers, wide eyed and bushy tailed, which by definition, mustn’t yawn. Hagakure cautions the samurai that he should lick his mouth when he has to yawn, in order to suppress it. I try my best to heed that old samurai advice but feel that constantly licking my mouth in class won’t make a great impression, either. I was chosen to go on a special teachers’ training program starting in Tokyo in two weeks, so I have to pull myself together and serve my master single-mindedly. Continue to spur a running horse. Plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.
Somehow, paperwork pops up out of nowhere, and the computer needs some time to recover from an unexpected attack to his carotid arteries, so I can’t log myself out of the system and have to wait, captured in a virtual world of real working hours. When I get to the train station, I can spot the socially inept pervert who told me he had always dreamed of having a foreigner by his side the other night. And I was pretty, and he wanted to go for a drink with me. I don’t want to talk to him again, so I hide behind a kiosk, make sure I get on a different coach, and get off at Hattori, not Sone, so he can’t catch up with me.
I have to force myself out of bed again. But I’m motivated. My first destination today is Shōsenji for women’s aikido training.
Where I’m not told to plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. But purposefully towards a meaningful life. Zazen in its perfect form means thinking nothing.
“So I sat there, thinking nothing for a few days,” says the Shihan with the blue eyes. “And after that, although on the outside, the situation was still the same, I suddenly stopped feeling resentment and started feeling gratefulness.”
“There are many types of prayer,” he says, putting his hands together in front of his chest. “But what matters is the feeling we put into our gestures, not the form they take. It is the feeling that gets through, across language barriers. If it is real gratefulness we feel, we can communicate it to anyone. And rather than thinking about other people, about a single hand, a single direction, think this: you are a beautiful castle with a moat around it. That’s where things happen. Inside that beautiful castle.”

In my children’s classes, we have spent our last three lessons with the three little hippos. First, we made a straw house. Then a stick house. Then a brick house. The wolf couldn’t blow the brick house down, but there are more evil things out there than wolves. Dark nights. Tan tights. Closed ATMs. Alarm clocks. Yawns. Maybe it is time for me to upgrade again. Maybe I should build a castle. Not out of straw, sticks or bricks this time. What makes the perfect form? Let me think, let me think, let me think. And when I stop thinking, I can start building.

The Singing Fists of Shōrinji

2007-03-09T02:39:00.000+09:00

Surfing the net for Shōrinji -ryu karate in Ōsaka, the first hit I get is a dōjō in my neighbourhood. Even though they train on Thursdays 7 o’clock when I’m still working for another three hours, I follow a spontaneous whim and call the contact number anyway.
Enter T-Sensei. Well, his voice, rather. It is a very friendly voice, and he tells me they are training on Saturday nights as well. From 8 o’clock. On Saturdays, I tell him, I work exactly till 8 o’clock. My heart sinks. “No problem!” he says. “We train till ten, so just come whenever you can make it!”
The first time I can make it is two weeks later, because the next Saturday is taken up by my GEOS Juso school welcome party, where I obviously can’t be missing.
The training takes place in Ōike Primary School near Toyonaka Station. I leave work as soon as I can and take the same train I usually take home, only going two stops further. Map in hand, I traipse through Toyonaka in my work clothes, in search of Ōike Primary School. Wandering down a dark alley that, according to my map, should take me straight to the entrance, a stranger walking along with his two little daughters asks me: “What are you looking for?” “I’m looking for Ōike Primary School. Do you know this area?” “Ah, that’s just over there.” As I turn the way he points, I can actually see a door opening up and revealing a light patch of sports hall in the dark. However, there’s dark, a high fence in between me and the light. The man says: “I think this entrance won’t be open now, so you have to go around that way.”
I thank him and go around that way, and find the entrance to the school, only that it looks dark and closed. But I have seen a light on the way, so I try to open the dark gate anyway, and sesame opens up to me. I walk around the side of the dark, dark building, through tiny little paths next to flower beds, and finally find the sports hall. A bunch of kids are sitting with some parents, putting on their shoes after training, getting ready to leave. When I enter, nobody notices me as I bow respectfully to the dōjō. It is huge. There are still several kids and several bigger people sitting around on the floor, with bags and clothes next to them. Some people are training karate in different parts of the hall, doing different things. I walk around aimlessly in the giant dōjō, looking for T-Sensei, or somebody else I might ask what to do next. But I don’t have to go looking. He finds me.
“Ah, you must be Anna-san!” calls an energetic looking man in a black dōgi from the other side of the hall. Sensei’s voice. “I am.” I shout back. He leads me to the changing rooms. “Just get changed in there, and then come back in.”
I get changed, and am introduced to Senpai, who seems much younger than me, but nonetheless a lot better at karate. He takes me through the basic movements of the style, which are stationary moves that include all the main movements. Importantly, changing from kiba-dachi into zenkutsu-dachi, using a lot of hip movement.
Senpai is strict and very good at teaching. In all the necessary detail but no more, he tells me how to adjust and improve my movements to match the style. After we have finished going through all the seven types of moves two or three times, T-Sensei calls everybody together for some pad work. First, he wants to see mine. Senpai holds the pad, and I’m tested on a range of kicks first, not doing great. Sensei watches and nods. “Ah, I think I know what kind of karate you did before.” He assumes a perfect Tenshinkan stance and dashes forward to hit the pad with several perfect Tenshinkan punches and kicks. “Was it like this?” “It was,” I admit, impressed, and Sensei then assumes a Shorinji-ryu stance, which is turned slightly sideways, more boxing-like, and ready to kick all the time, using a lot of spinning flying round house back kicks like in kickboxing. These ones I have to get used to as I’ve never really done them before. “So this is how we do it,” says Sensei. “Hold up the pad,” he tells Senpai, as I am supposed to punch it, and then he adds in a more quiet voice: “I think she’ll be much better at that.”
I can’t wait to have the pad put in front of me and dash forward with the punches Sensei tells me to use. Everyone makes a face. Some people go all quiet and whisper “Scary.” At least there is something I can do, I think, and then the whole group gathers in pairs to do more pad-work up and down the hall. Apart from small children, a wide range of age groups trains together here, from young teenage years to middle age. Everybody instructs and helps each other. Atmosphere A. After training, I am to stand in front of the group and give the obligatory jikoshōkai (self introduction). I can’t think of much to say and just tell everybody I’m from Germany and am teaching English here in Osaka, so I will be here for a while. Please grace me with your kindness and benevolence in the future. I bow. Sensei says: “It is great to have Anna with us. She has come from far away and is training with us. And I want everybody to train hard so you can punch like Anna.” Thankfully I don’t have a tendency to blush. Instead, I bow again, and ask for everybody’s kindness and benevolence once again. You can never ask often enough, especially when you're talking to a group of karate people.

Two weeks later, T-Sensei schedules a welcome party for me. Training kung-fu in Ōsakajō-kōen before and getting confused about which trains I have to take when and from where, I end up making everybody wait for a long time, and the worst thing is that my mobile is out of batteries. They will leave, I think, and I hate myself for messing things up so badly and treating people who are treating me with so much kindness and benevolence in such an ignorant and careless manner.
When I arrive, everybody is standing there, waiting for me. I hail apologies on them, but they just shrug them off, and we walk a couple hundred yards to a warmly-lit, light-wood-coloured Japanese style restaurant in Toyonaka. There are five of us, and a little woman with big eyes joins us later. So we sit and drink beer, and talk. “Please ask us lots of questions tonight,” he tells me, “And everybody else, please ask Anna lots of questions tonight!” So the night moves on as we sit at a long table eating croquets, salad, spicy pieces of raw octopus, spaghetti with mushroom and cream sauce and more delicious snacks, drinking small glasses of beer, and asking and answering questions, learning. Mainly about the individuals present at this party. But there is some country-related talk as well.
Sensei is interested in history and wants to know why Germany, although it lost the war like Japan, has a normal military now. I explain that in Germany, the allies tried to erase the world of Nazi thought that had made the war atrocities possible by replacing all jobs of authority, introducing a new curriculum into schools and in general being strict about cleansing the country from Nazi ideology, so there was no need for a peace clause like in Japan, where article 9 of the post-war constitution restricts Japan’s military to a self defence force not to be used in attacks. I also explain that even though Germany does have a military, every dispatch of it to contribute to UN missions is still viewed critically inside Germany and turns into a major news item every time it happens. He savours his beer and the new information gained.
We have gradually filled our bellies, and start leaving, but Sensei has planned a second venue. Most people need to leave, as for them, the next day is Monday, a normal working day. Sensei, Senpai and I, however, make our way to a nearby karaoke bar, where we order some non-alcoholic drinks this time, and a party set of snacks including crisps, eda-mame (small green beans), and chocolate sticks in strawberry cream.
This is probably the most enjoyable part of the evening. Politely, one after another, we put songs into the machine and sing. While I offer pieces of the English song menu, such as Norah Jones’s “Don’t Know Why” and Dido’s “Thank You”, I get an impressive range of Japanese music in return. I’m surprised by Sensei’s good singing voice as it appropriately whines the traditional Okinawan “Shima-uta” and breathes love songs like “Mayonaka sugi koi” and a song from the seventies called “Anna”, written with the same kanji I use for my name. I’m also very impressed by Senpai’s interesting choice of songs including “Tokyo no hiyori” and “Josei A”, both of which I try to find on i-tunes later that night, but without success.
We sing, eat, drink, and laugh, until the time comes to leave. Sensei refuses to accept money from me and invites me to my welcome party. And to sum up the theme of the party, and create a hopeful start to our joint efforts to become better and better at karate, we have our picture taken together in the karaoke lobby. Smile, CHEESU! And KAPOW!

Jazz

2007-03-08T02:35:00.000+09:00

We are in the changing rooms at Shōsenji temple. For some reason, Miy-san mentions that she likes jazz. Mis-san stands out because of her beauty. Stunning in an unassuming manner. Her actions are graceful like sunbeams dancing in a birch forest, and her smile could open up a tree full of slumbering cherry blossoms. Her comments about jazz prompt me to mention that I am quite a fan of jazz myself. She invites me to a concert in Kobe next Monday. These are the most popular jazz performers in Kansai, and the place is class. It is a restaurant called Sone, and it is the oldest jazz establishment in Japan. Of course I will go. I’m training aikido on Mondays as well, but I can come after that. We exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

One day before the concert, Miy-san sends me a text message saying that she can make a request to the band if there is a song I like. I tell her I like “Cheek to Cheek” but I will be quite happy to listen to whatever songs they want to sing.

The next Monday, 26 February, I train aikido and, after that, take the Hankyu Kobe line to Sannomya, the same station that has brought Manager and me to Nanking-machi only one day earlier. I arrive rather late, and am hoping I will get to hear some jazz that stretches across a long enough time to allow me to lean back, let small amounts of cool alcohol seep into my tongue and flow down my throat, and relax. Liquid and sound equally permeated by the bitterness of life turned sweetness of feeling. Art.
Miy-san masters a rare feat and sends me perfect directions in a mobile phone message. I only have to ask somebody where Benetton is, then I see DoCoMo on the other side. These two shops mark my entry into Kitazaka, an ascending road lined with ramen bars and other restaurants, that leads me across a big street, and after another ten yards, reveals Sone Restaurant on the left.
When I enter, the place is almost empty. Only three or four small groups of people are sitting on the old, elegant chairs on old, elegant tables, on top of old, elegant Persian rugs. The place’s atmosphere gets a 1A, managing to fit perfectly into my European sense of cultural homeliness, while being in the middle of Japan. It is old and elegant. The waiters are well groomed and dressed, and handsome. They walk upright, only bending at the waist with straight backs, but effortlessly like the brilliant bass player plucks his strings. They whisper in my ear while the band is playing, the singer singing, the world swinging. I order ume-shu, but they do not serve that. I've ordered it mainly because I thought it would look prettier in this place than a pint of beer. But, swinging away, the place itself forces me to turn my order into a pint of “super-dry”, cold, sparkling lager.
I am surprised to find Miy-san alone. I assumed she would be going with other friends. But, back straight, legs elegantly crossed, her wavy hair falling across one shoulder, she is sitting all by herself, on a tiny round table, sipping a glass of oulong tea after she has finished her beer. She smiles at me. There is a piano, a big bass, a set of drums, and some energetic female vocals, with eyes beaming like stars, and a body moving like a young cat with the swing of the music. When I sit down, she looks me in the eyes for while, welcoming and greeting me with their sparkle and achieving relaxation on my part within seconds. Her voice is clear and has soul. Rare, bell-like, versatile, with a wide range in which every note swings. And so does the body moving along with it. She is Phillippino but speaks and sings with an American accent.
“We got a request on the telephone,” she says, and the bass player launches into a virtuoso solo that makes me want to jump in my seat. “Look at them,” remarks Vocals fittingly, “They are so in love with you! You are so sexy!” She is absolutely right. His bass play is breathtaking. She starts singing. The song continues as a bass and vocals only performance that takes everybody’s breath away and stops hands holding pints in mid-air, on the way to the mouth. It is “Cheek to Cheek”.
Touched, I thank Miy-san for making my request. She smiles and drinks a sip of oulong tea. After listening to the shimmering lights of Manhattan, and the happiness found dancing cheek to cheek, Vocals introduces her musicians. The young drummer wears glasses that make him look astute and friendly, in teamwork with his winning smile. “I love him,” she says. “He’s young, he’s handsome, AND he’s good at drums.” She makes everybody else in the room fall in love with him, too. Her bass player. Well, we’ve all seen how sexy he is with his bass, and she tells him and us that she wants to dance with him all night long, while he continues making everybody dance and fly from one cloud to the next, puffing out every single one of them, up to number nine, with his smooth, feathery bass pay. Finally, the wonderful man on the piano. She hopes she will get to dance with him next time, and she loves him, too. Ladies and gentlement, there’s a whole lot of loving going on in this room!
Piano launches into a sparkling one for the road, full of accelerating and decelerating notes that tickle the stomach and give rise to goose bumps, leading into a bass-round, piano-polished, drum-brushing finish. We are happy. People leave, and Bass comes back out to clean his instrument. Miy-san knows him, and he comes to our table. We chat comfortably over the rest of our drinks. He performs in all sorts of places, but this one is his favourite. He goes and gets a schedule for us that has all Sone acts on it. Then, Miy-san and Bass get into insider details about scheduling, and I drift off into the atmosphere of the place.
Murakami Haruki is from Kobe. Murakami Haruki loves jazz, too. I can’t help thinking that he, too, used to spend the odd night of ecstatic relaxation time here at Sone Restaurant, and I’m surprised there are no photos to be seen that claim the presence of famous people in the past. But the place doesn’t need it. It is its own best advertisement. And yes, we will come again!
But before that, we will meet up at Miy-san's house and sing together, aspiring to the sounds we have heard tonight, with the aid of Yamaha and whatever we may find inside ourselves that will kindly turn itself into voice. And JAZZ.

Praying Mantis Kung Fu

2007-03-06T01:12:00.000+09:00

After my adventure in Nanking-machi, I am faced again with the difficulty of finding somebody on an unknown train station platform without a mobile phone. Not having my phone, I don’t even have the number I’d have to call to find out. But I remember the memorable mobile e-mail address and ask Manager to lend me her phone. That way, walking in search of a cinema where she will savour her free Sunday afternoon watching “Dororo”, I get the number and, as I will be late, ask for directions to the actual training grounds, so I can find them by myself without making anybody else late.

I see off Manager to the cinema and take the JR circle line to Osaka-jō-kōen, the giant park around Osaka Castle. From the station, the castle is nowhere to be seen. A few stalls selling yakisoba and takoyaki frame the broad path when I leave the station. Crowds of people are enjoying the overcast but spring-like weather in Osaka-jō-kōen this late February afternoon. I heard there were plum blossoms, which bloom in February before the cherry blossoms unfold their seductive pink petals, but I cannot find any on my little dander in search of praying-mantises.

Get out at the only exit, follow the road on the left, and stop when you see a group of people practising kung fu in the park. When you reach the Kyudojo, you’ve gone too far.

It is indeed the Kyudojo that prompts me to walk back and finally spot some martial movements behind a secretive constellation of skinny trees. No more than three people, two foreigners and the Japanese teacher, are practising in a hidden little patch of park, and yet it is immediately obvious that they are praying mantises. This is how you recognise them: they wear comfortable Sunday afternoon clothes, they bend and batter their bodies into long, low strides interspersed with cat stances and twisted squatting positions; their hands change shape swiftly from round fists across flat tiger paws and back to the eating mantis claws that are their own, index fingers touching the thumbs, and the rest of the fingers rolled up.

Respectfully and quietly, I approach the group. “Is this the one you were talking about?” Sensei wordlessly asks B-san who has kindly told me about this training ground. “Yes,” B-san replies wordlessly, and Sensei, a small, smiling man with glasses, starts doing something new for me, and I try to join in. We practise a kata that starts with a fourty-five degrees sideways leg movement into a cat stance. Sensei picks up a stick and draws the angle in the sandy ground for us. B-san, an extremely dedicated Canadian martial artist, already knows the kata, and the second student has done kung-fu before, so knows a lot, but still has more to learn than B-san, or so it seems, as Sensei repeatedly asks B-san to watch his movements and correct them. He does the same for me, as I still have to learn everything. I enjoy the multitude of different movements, which are called “dōsa” in this branch of martial arts, as Sensei tells me when I ignorantly use the term “waza” that we use in karate and aikido. To clarify the meaning of a particular dōsa for us, he picks up a stick and writes the kanji in the sand. This is the name of the kick. Sensei’s kanji are very complicated, and I wonder whether any of us can be fertile ground for his valuable teachings scratched into the ground. Listening to his explanations, and recognising the first kanji, however, I can integrate some of this into my dōsa. The first kanji means bullet. And a variety

of other things including “spring off” and “be generous”. Sensei emphasises that it contains the kanji for “arrow” on the left. The kanji on the right means leg, he says. When I look it up later, I learn that it usually spells “thigh”. So your leg becomes an arrow when you kick.

“Pew!” sings Sensei in a rubber-like high-pitched voice, turning temporarily into a plucked shamisen string, and kicks with a springy action that makes lower leg snap forward as soon as the thigh is pointing the right way.

We do lines of kicks and punches, kicking and punching with opposite hands and legs, fists upright, palms facing inside. We always finish pulling our invisible opponent towards ourselves with one hand that takes his arm hostage from the outside, locking his elbow, and then rising through underneath his armpit with the other arm so one arm finishes pointing up, the other pulled back. We stand on one leg like a crane, now ready to move to the other side again with another row of arrow legs, or dog-handed cat-stances, or one of the other ten zillion dōsa I have yet to remember and practise.

Moving back and forth in easy-to-remember basics, however, is not the praying mantis way. There are complicated kata and combinations that will take a while to settle in my mind and body. But I can’t wait for the settling and flowing to start.

Finally, we practise tsurugi. This is a light Chinese sword with a wobbly pointed blade, sharp on both sides. It is never only the sword hand that moves. The other hand elegantly pointing with index and middle finger while the other fingers touch in the middle, moves along, drawing graceful curves in the air that aid the thrusting and cutting of the tsurugi.

Again, B-san knows the kata, and helps us learn it along with Sensei’s explanations.

Gradually, however, it is getting dark in the park, and we have to finish. “Sensei always stays till it gets dark,” B-san tells me. Also, Sensei doesn’t ask for money. “Not until you’re sure you want to do it,” he says. “I just want people to get good. That’s the most important thing.” When you really want to do it. May. When it gets warmer. Then it will be 3000 Yen a month. Nothing compared to this new world I am let into. Sensei is light and smiley. Sometimes he forgets the next move while explaining something and has to start a few movements ahead to recall it. He makes the impression of a slightly scatterbrained professor who is wise beyond caring, happy, and extremely forthcoming and friendly.

After the darkness closes our session, he hands out soft, delicious anpan, and little candy-shaped chocolates to everyone. B-san gives us chewy candy he has brought back from a recent trip to New Zealand. I feel bad that I can’t contribute to this picnic and resolve to bring something next time. B-san cycles into the night, and Sensei, Second Student and I walk up to the Hankyu line station. Sensei has to take the same train as me. He has his own dojo, too, he tells me. Sometimes, to get better, they go on trips to China and learn from Chinese teachers. When I tell him I would like to have his kanji lessons written on paper, so I can study them, he hands me eight A4 pages tightly packed with Chinese characters and smiles broadly. “There you go. Now you have something to study. I thank him. Finally, he has to get off the train, and I have to stay on it. “Come again,” he says with a slightly bowing semi-wave and disappears into the crowd on the platform. Yes, I will.

Nanking-machi 4

2007-02-26T14:59:00.000+09:00

With our bellies filled, we walk back towards the stage, where the Zatsugi, the Chinese acrobatics, show is about to start. Flowing, uplifting music carried by flute melodies, floats from the loudspeakers and gets more and more animated, interspersed with dramatic intervals of gongs and cymbals clanging and banging to the bottom of our ears. Then, a large dragon held by two people, with a huge red and golden head and a wild red mane dances out onto the stage, followed by a smaller one-person dragon, and the two start dancing and playing to the music. A beautiful girl with a cream-coloured muscly back wearing a yellow suit comes out and, with elegantly twisting hands and stretching arms holds out and throws an ornate ball for the two dragons which makes them shake their heads and manes and twist their bodies in happy playfulness.

A giant ball, one and a half people in diameter, is rolled onto the stage, and in an impressive final, the big two-person-dragon jumps on top of the ball and walks it around the stage.

The dragons exit. The crowds are disappointingly silent, and, unable to whistle, I scream and holler, and clap as loudly and appreciatively as I can.

Next, a juggler demonstrates his marvellous tricks to us, including a six-badminton bat juggle, in which two bats are always in the air, spinning around synchronously before they land back in his hands, and the next pair goes up, giving an impression like a flying vehicle with a complicated mechanism of wheels turning in opposite directions.

Mouth agape, we then watch, as the beautiful girl in the yellow suit we have seen before performs a whole arsenal of breath-taking contortions that make it appear like she has no bones and is made of nothing but flexible muscle and shark collagen. Looking around the crowd, I notice a large number of salivitating men, who stand staring, transfixed at the startling possibilities opening up in their minds as they watch. And while this bendy, yellow beam of sunshine stands on her hands and curves her feet into scorpion tails above her back to place them in front of her shoulders, she smiles at us!

When she finishes her impressive performance, finally, the last act enters the stage. This is another beautiful girl, slightly bigger around the waist than the first one, which makes her act even more impressive to watch (see picture): she is riding a three people tall monocycle, on which she parades round the stage. Then, the young juggler comes in and throws up a silver bowl to her. She balances it on her foot, continuing to ride the monocycle moving the pedal back and forth with the other foot. Then, she kicks up the bowl and catches it on top of her head. This continues. More bowls are thrown up, and stacked on top of her head. After the sixth bowl, finally, there is a silver jug which lands inside the bowls, and, last, to top it off, a silver spoon that is balanced on her foot, and then flies through the air to land in the middle of the jug. The crowds should be cheering and hollering, but it seems like everybody has been stunned into silence, unable to offer any audible appreciation except for some faint clapping. The acrobats assemble on stage, and the presenter thanks us nonetheless, and invites us all to have another look around the beautiful stalls and shops here in Nanking-machi, and to watch their group perform again in the future. In this spirit, Happy New Year, everyone! Happy New Year!

Nanking-machi 3

2007-02-26T14:56:00.000+09:00

Finally, we feel like a snack, having been tempted all morning by the multitude of mouth-watering snacks sold at stalls lining the streets, including fried sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, prawns and vegetables in chewy rice paper, noodles in thick, siruppy soup, and an endless variety of sweet and savoury steamed dumplings.

Finally, we decide to give in to the temptation and get two huge trays full of different delicacies, filling our stomachs to the upper edge of our esophagi with prawn, pork, and sweet bean dumplings, chewy sticky rice balls filled with sweet bean paste, rolled in sesame seeds and deep fried crispy on the outside, a large bowl of viscous bean sprout noodle soup, spring rolls and an-nin-dofu, a dessert made of tofu and flavoured with apricot seeds. And we get all that, including hot green tea and free water refills, for ¥ 2,100 (£9 or €13) each.

Nanking-machi 2

2007-02-26T14:52:00.000+09:00

Like children in a sweet shop, we marvel at the hundreds of different mobile phone pendants hanging from thin cardboard walls, lots of them Chinese traditional style motifs such as Yin Yang signs, lucky golden pigs, waving cats, and the animals of the Chinese horoscope; many of them less traditional: cartoon versions of Bruce Lee, Dragon Ball, and Hello Kitty figurines. There are calligraphy writing tools, Chinese shoes and dresses, nun-chakus, and the original outfits Bruce Lee wore in several different films. The latter are to be found in a whole big shop exclusively dedicated to Bruce, the Master. A life-size statue of the Hero himself with his sinewy chest and chiselled arms greets us at the entrance. In this shop, I find a comfortable black kung fu suit for a very decent price. Fancy dress exercises can have truly transforming powers. Besides, they are fun.

Nanking-machi 1

2007-02-26T14:46:00.000+09:00

In an unusual Sunday morning effort, I force myself out of bed at 9 o’clock. I pack a rucksack that contains some books, my camera, and exercise clothes I will need for the second part of the day. Then I leave for Sone station from where I will be taking the Hankyu line to Juso. I work at Juso, but today I’m not going there to work. I’m going there to meet my manager to visit Nanking-machi, the China-town of Kobe. This has nothing to do with work. We both wanted to go and see the Chinese New Year’s Celebrations, so we decided to go together. Two stops towards Juso, I realise that my phone has switched itself off for lack of battery. This is extremely inconvenient. I have two people to meet at locations as unspecific as a train station platform! But if I go back now, I will be late. And too late to say I will be late. So I brace myself and decide to brave the day without my mobile.

I know which line to take to Kobe, but I’m not totally sure whether Manager will meet me at Juso or hop on the train later on, as she lives along that train line. I search for her on the platform at Sone but can’t find her, so I embark on the agreed train (luckily, she is organised and has told me the train will leave at 10.06) at the front and look for her there. She is not there. At the next stop, I get off and get onto the next car of the same train. This, I continute at every stop (it takes half an our and quite a few stops to Kobe), until, upon leaving the train, I see her smiley free time face light up. I have found somebody without a mobile phone!

We take a faster train to Kobe Sannomya and ask two people where Nanking-machi is. It is about 10 minutes from the station, walking next to a long road with a Starbucks and various other shops and fast food restaurants on it. We then walk left, through a short shopping arcade and enter Nanking-machi.

The small streets lined with shops selling Chinese food, tea, stationery, lucky charms for mobile phones, China dresses and kung-fu clothes, are heaving with people. Paths are cordoned off where people are not allowed to stand but have to keep moving, so nobody gets stuck. Security guards in blue uniforms are holding up signs next to the ropes saying “No entry here” and “Please keep moving”. When we enter, there is a little hut on the right, where people can buy and light incense for good luck in the coming year of the pig, and then, in front of a small pagoda, get their picture taken together with four people dressed up as Son-goku, the Monkey King, and his companions Pigsy, Sandy, and the monk Tripitaka. Next to the pagoda is a big stage, but at the moment, it is empty. The calming and exhilarating smell of incense is wafting through the streets as Manager and I embark on a small tour of the shops before the event starts that we want to see.

Saturday Night Overture

2007-02-25T02:45:00.000+09:00

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.

Okonomiyaki World

2007-02-23T01:21:00.000+09:00

Monday is my first time to join a mixed evening training session at Shosenji aikido dojo. When I arrive, only one person is sitting on the mat in hakama, doing some warm-up stretches. Another young foreigner. With bright eyes, he greets me, introduces himself and welcomes me to the dojo with a smile and a few friendly words. I go and get changed. When I get back from the changing rooms, a few more people have started warming up, and I bow and join them. Training is supposed to start at 7 o’clock. At 7.15, the dojo has filled up, and there is just about enough space for everybody to turn and slide and roll the dance of aikido. Some collisions occur, too, and someone’s head gets hurt, but recovers.

First, I train with an older gentleman whose movements are so soft, I can only feel he’s there whenever I find myself flying or gliding to the ground inexplicably. This is a simple tenkan - hand in your face - throw exercise. Next, we practise rooting ourselves. The partner grabs our wrists from the front and pulls them towards himself. We sink our feet and centre of gravity into the ground and counter the pull guiding it towards the ground, neutralising its force with the immutable force of our centre. This time, I train with an energetic young man called Hos-san, if I have read the kanji correctly. He gives me some encouraging words about my strength, but I feel I need to try harder to try less hard.

When I’m training with Tsu-sensei, a very high ranking sensei in the dojo who gives me a lot of useful advice on the throws we practise from ushiro ryotedori, Shihan appears out of nowhere as he does, and asks the sensei to excuse us for a second. He introduces me to Herrn Tho, who has just come in wearing black clothes, carrying a motorbike helmet. We smile and greet each other. Then he kindly lets me get on with my training, and we agree to talk later.

So after a very pleasant, enriching training session that seems, for some reason, to last longer and draw more sweat than the women’s class, we talk. So how long have you been here for? 15 years. Wow, that’s a long time. He is an engineer. But he studied physics. After that, he did research in America and Japan, and is now working in semiconductor research and production. He spent the first 6 years in Tokyo, and now feels quite settled in Osaka. So where are you from in Germany? He asks. “Hannover.” We speak German, obviously, and the female dojo boss asks us whether we are happy to have found somebody to speak our mother tongue with. There are some attempts of German by other dojo members. “Ich liebe dich.” and “Dankeschoen.” and “Guten, guten.”

So, we are both from Germany, we are both from Hannover. “What school did you go to?” he asks. “Bismarckschule.” “Me too.” We marvel in silence at this strange coincidence. “So,” he asks, “Did you go to that 100 year Bismarckschule anniversary party last year?” “No. I really wanted to go, but I was still studying in Bath at the time. But my mother went. She went to the same school. She was actually the first girl in Bismarckschule, and she picked that strange pink-purple colour for the auditorium.” Now, he covers his mouth with one hand and turns away in laughing disbelief. When he turns back, he says my mother’s name. It is a statement but it sounds like a question. Disbelief. My jaw drops and remains there for a while until I can speak again. “You know my mum?” “Yes. We went to school together. And I met her at the anniversary. Now I remember, she told me her daughter was going to Osaka. Now I know why your face seemed so familiar!”

Now I remember, too, that my mother told me about an old classmate of hers in Osaka, and that she had meant to give me his contact details. But obviously, that was not necessary. We just met, anyway, in Osaka, a 3.7 Million city, at Shosenji aikido temple in Toyonaka.

“Are you doing anything for dinner tonight?” he asks. As most days and nights, I have no plans outside work and training. So he invites me for my first Osaka okonomiyaki. We order one type called “mixed” containing pork, tiger prawns and squid, and one called “inaka” (countryside) containing mochi (sticky rice ball pieces) and potatoes. Both are extremely tasty, but as we can still eat more, we finish off with a load of mixed yaki-soba. I drink oulong tea and calpis from the soft drink bar, he orders a pint of beer.

So while two of the renowned Osaka okonomiyaki are sizzling away on the hot plate that forms the middle part of our table, we talk about what has brought us to Japan, and about what we do and want to do, and about my mother, and sister who paints, and his sister who paints, too, and translates in London. And savouring the tasty fried food, we celebrate the strange coincidence and the mysterious workings of the small world we live in. A world sizzling away and producing celestial flavours as everybody throws their favourite ingredients onto the hot plate. Okonomiyaki. We exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses and say good bye, and go our separate ways again, two Germans in Japan, two Hannoverians in Osaka.

Blue Eyes and Water

2007-02-21T03:22:00.000+09:00

My first training is a Friday morning women's class. The women are soft and gentle in both their manners and movements and can teach me a lot in that and many other respects. But our official teacher, a man full of wisdom and friendliness, is Shihan S.
Shihan S has blue Japanese eyes. During my first class, demonstrating a move with N-san, he tells us this:

In aikido we try to move like water. Water can do many things. It can seep into the ground. It can change the shape of rocks. It can enter the smallest cracks and flow from the mountains in waterfalls, and fill pools, and rivers, and the sea. The power of water is used in many budo to describe what we should aspire to. If somebody grabs me, and I say: “No, don’t grab me like this, grab me like THIS!” then that’s my mistake, not hers. It is the attitude with which we meet people that matters to us in aikido. I meet an opponent with the mindset that whatever encounter there will be, it will be harmonious. You achieve this harmony through your own movements. When water hits sand, it seeps into it, between the tiny spaces. When it meets a cup, it fills the cup. When it flows from the mountains, it fills the pools. That is what we have to do. We have to use whatever space opens up to us, without trying to resist any forces met. The forces we meet guide us to the places where we meet no resistance. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Aikido

2007-02-21T02:57:00.000+09:00

As my most attentive and faithful readers will remember, I mentioned aikido training in one of my entries.
Finding a place to train aikido was one of the various objectives I had in mind when I bought a map of Toyonaka area and found a place called "Budokan Hibiki" on it, a name that suggested martial arts training to me. One sunny Monday morning I went there and found that I was right, only that they had no martial arts training when I had time. But a very friendly little man with almond shaped eyes who immediately took over my case as soon as he spotted me at reception recommended Shosenji, a nearby temple where they train aikido. He made two big photocopies of a detailed map for me and drew in the way I had to go.
He also helped me dign up for the gym across the yard in which I now train almost every morning, but that is a different story that goes with a different picture and will appear on a different day.
So one grey Sunday, I make my way to this hidden away temple. There is a large garden, hidden away behind trees, cherry trees, waiting for March and April. There is a roof with a well beneath it, and ladles to wash your hands. A dragon is guarding the well. On the right, there is a wooden house with a glass door. Little badges hang from the roof with writing on them. There is a large rope with a knot and frills for a handle. Here, you can pull to ring the gods. Behind the glass door, I can see an assembly of different shapes and sizes of statues. They are or were once human beings. Now they are standing in this shrine, wearing red clothes, and emanating an air of superiority and transcendence that humbles me. I do not know who they are and why they’re here, but they have crossed borders I couldn’t find on any map, and they know more than any human being walking the planet. I look at the rope but do not dare disturb their peace.
There are rocks, and little decorative columns, and little flights of stairs. I find my way up to the dojo on the right and some houses to the left. At that moment, a car pulls up at the bottom of the stairs leading to the houses. Out walks a man with a shaven head, soft-featured like a Buddha statue, but without the fat. And a small, attractive woman wearing jeans and purple cowboy boots. Both of them are carrying white plastic bags full of grocery shopping. Then their two little boys come out. One is about five and runs straight into the house. The other one is about two. I introduce myself and ask the man whether he is responsible for aikido classes here. He is. He walks into the house to get me some information. His wife stops and talks to me. “Your Japanese is very good.” “No, I still have to practise a lot!” I protest. “No, it’s very kirei (pretty).” I’ve heard that before, but only once, and while being told that my Japanese is good leaves me cold knowing that many people say it upon hearing you utter a simple “hello” or “thank you” in their language, being told that it is “kirei” is actually nice to hear, as I imagine it refers to the respect language I have been practising hard and try to employ when talking to people I want to speak to in a respectful and reverential manner.
While she and I talk, her tiny little son looks at me from the bottom of the stairs. One step is about as tall as he is, yet he starts climbing them one by one, as we talk. After the third one, he pauses and looks at me again. And doesn’t stop. I have to smile at his square face with its big almond eyes. He smiles back. The mother laughs. “He’s happy!” Good thing he is happy at seeing me, rather than scared. When the boy reaches the top of the stairs and holds on to his mothers’ legs, Buddha re-appears from the house and hands me a couple of photocopies. “Can you read kanji?” “Yes, I can. It might take some time, but it is no problem.” He explains to me that there are classes Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday night, and there is a women’s class on Firday mornings. I tell him that training in the evenings is impossible for me except for Mondays, so I would like to join the Monday evening and the Friday morning classes. "I will come on Friday,” I say, and thank him, and ask him for his continued benevolence in the future. I say good bye to the wife and son and walk back towards Toyonaka station.

Tenshinhan

2007-02-20T02:47:00.000+09:00

Today we will talk about recipes. What are ingredients? In this case, the ingredients are: Peanut butter, plenty. Whole wheat bread, two slices. Avocado, 1. Sweet onion chutney, one tablespoon. Tomato, 1. Now, the rest of the recipe. Take one slice of bread and spread the peanut butter on it. Peel and slice the avocado and place the slices on top of the bread. Then, slice the tomatoes and place them on top of the avocado. Next, spread the sweet onion chutney on the other slice of bread and put the two slices together. There you go. This is my favourite sandwich. What shall I call it? Ah. I know. I will call it “Anna’s Delight”. Then it is Hi-san’s turn, and he describes a tasty sandwich in which the bread is toasted and then layered with scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, and three slices of ham.

We take some time matching recipe verbs like slice, chop, pour, and add to the corresponding pictures and finding more things you can slice, pour, and chop.

Then, we need more practice. I describe a recipe to him, and he guesses correctly that it is Spaghetti with meat sauce. I teach him both the dictionary rendering (spaghetti bolognese) for this, teacherly adding that the recipe stems from an Italian city called Bologna; and the actual British vernacular “spag bol”.

Then he launches his description. For this recipe, we need eggs, rice, green peas, crabs, which he mimes with his robot hands, not knowing the word, chicken stock, and a white powder called “katakuriko”, which I’ve never heard before and can’t translate for him. From his description, I gather that it must be some sort of gelling agent. You throw the green peas, crab meat, and eggs into a frying pan, stir the whole mixture, and fry it, but only for a very short time. Then you cook the rice and put the egg mixture on top. Finally, you mix the chicken soup with the katakuriko until it “becomes like honey” and pour it over the rice and the eggs.

I have not had this dish before and cannot guess what it is. Hi-san tells me that this is “tenshinhan”, his favourite Chinese dish. When I hear the word “tenshin” I have to think of “Tenshikan” karate which was named after Kancho, my karate master’s nick name, “tenshin” meaning sincerity. What a nice dish, I think. I have to try and make it. It is quite surprising that Hi-san can cook. F-san, to draw on another students’ cooking skills for comparison, does not know what colour melons have on the outside because he buys them peeled, cut into pieces, and packaged into snack-sized plastic, ready with tooth picks to avoid sticky hands.

The recipe Hi-san describes to me is not named after sincerity. It is named after a city in Northern China. He writes the kanji on the board for me. Both sincerity and Tensin have Heaven as their first character, however, and it sounds tasty, so I feel undeterred in my wish to try and make this.

Finally, my favourite part of the lesson arrives. Unfortunately rather late. I have brought a multitude of ingredients that do not fit together, and cannot wait to play “Ready-Steady-Cook”. I quickly explain the concept of the show to Hi-san and tell him he will now be a TV chef trying to win a cooking contest. The ingredients are as follows:

Potatoes

Carrots

Furikake, wakame flavour

Rum

Green Tea

Rolled Oats

Canned tuna

As our class time is over, this has to be homework: create at least a two course menu out of these ingredients and describe the recipes to me next time. “Impossible!” he exclaims. I promise, I will do the same, and next time we can have a competition who has come up with the tastiest impossible recipe. Hi-san stands in the elevator smiling. I smile back and wave good bye. My manager has taught me this. It is kihon dosa (behavioural basics as required at work). Walk out into the hall with your students, wait for the elevator with them, then, once they have stepped in, stand there and smile, and wave good bye until the door closes. This time, I am enjoying my kihon dosa. On my way home I buy the ingredients for tenshinhan at Sone Hankyu department store whose grocery department is open till 11 o’clock. And spend my walk back listening to pirate music and trying to combine carrots, potatoes, green tea, and rum. When the time comes, I want to be ready and steady to cook.

Calligraphy Lesson

2007-02-18T17:11:00.000+09:00

Saturday 4 o'clock used to be a pure boys' class. Round, energetic R-kun always has several bags of different flavoured crisps with him and, ever since we learned how to describe amounts using ducks (a lot of ducks, some ducks, and a few ducks), uses every opportunity to sing a song about ducks that goes "Ahirun-run-run, ahi-run-run-run.." by which time he thinks of either the answer to what I've asked him or something else to do. He is bright, creative, and pleasant. And exceedingly lazy.
M-kun loves cars and wants to be a formula one driver. Every time I show him one of the horse cards I use to teach them "I want to brush him", "I want to pet him", "I want to feed him" etc, his eyes and torch-bright smile light up, and he says "Horsepower!"
A recent addition to the class is super-intelligent and studious N-chan, who wears a bright pink jacket and smart glasses. At first I thought the combination would bring problems, but it turns out that N-chan and the boys get on great. The boys admire her skills and sometimes focus a little bit more, while she gets some entertainment and some tasks that challenge her, which develop out of their rebellious creativity that has a constant tendency to sway from classroom contents. Such as using the study cards to build card houses. But if they are getting on well enough with our study targets, I let them sway, as long as it is productive and conducive to the learning atmosphere.
This time, I have a great lesson to teach. We are studying the words "English lesson", "piano lesson", "swimming lesson", "dance lesson" and "calligraphy lesson". R-kun does not show up. But N-chan and M-kun are there.
I act out the swimming lesson pulling a swim cap over my teacher's hairstyle, putting on goggles, and air-crawling around the classroom.
Then, my favourite, the dance lesson. I present this word by teaching them a few steps of ceilidh. And when the Dancing Strings of Scotland come streaming into the classroom from the ancient CD-player, we all hop and stomp and fly through the small space in front of the white board for a while. Blessed be the Military Two Step!
When our class is already over, I have a sudden impulse to digress again from the "English lesson" we're supposed to be finishing. I hold out two white board markers for them and scream: "Everybody to the white board! Calligraphy lesson!" Unexpectedly, the two are enthusiastic calligraphy students. Immediately, a wild kanji-writing marathon unfolds on my white board. I show them how I write "Anna" in Japanese, with anshin no an followed by Nara no na. They compete finding ways of writing my surname and agree on using seiza no za (sit) but have some trouble finding another na syllable, their best ideas being namae no na (name) and nana no na (seven). Then they show me how to write their names and several rather rude Japanese expressions such as baka, konyaro and aho. Carefully, I make notes of the complicated kanji in my head, for future reference. I erase aho, however, because it contains the first character I use for writing Anna, and I'm not happy about that.
M-kun proudly tells me that the second character in his name contains one part that means military, or fighting. N-chan consequently finds a different way of spelling his name using ki (wood). Although M-kun is impressed by N-chan's superior scholarly knowledge and watches in awe as she produces complicated kanji with her black marker pen, he now feels inspired to come up with some less flowery ways of writing HER name.
Trying to demonstrate some of his special kanji knowledge, he tells us about a character meaning Tang dynasty, or China that I happen to know very well. "Yes," I say, "this was once used for spelling karate." Not knowing the difference between tenses yet, and probably understanding rather little of what I say to them anyway, they protest that karate is spelled using "empty", not "China", but I explain to them that it wasn't always like that and that it changed around 1920. "Eeee?!" exclaims M-kun. "Nande sensei ha sonna koto shiterunya?" "Why does sensei know about something like that?" "Because I do karate." "HEEEEE?!" "Do you have a black belt?" asks N-chan. They speak Japanese, but at this stage I am looking for communication, and so are they, so I momentarily ignore my ban on giving away my Japanese skills at the school and answer in English. " Yes, I have a shodan." For a few seconds, they clamp their mouths shut and quietly marvel at this discovery. Then, N-chan giggles, and M-kun says: "Wow, that's scary!" I'm happy I'm finally enjoying some degree of respect from them and then have to make myself glance at the clock on the wall. Unfortunately I have to dismiss them as my next class is about to start, and we're already 20 mintues over our actual 50 minute class time.
But they leave with an appetite, which is always the perfect time to leave, and I thank the 8 million gods of Japan for this treat. Although N-chan probably still hates having to pronounce the word "calligraphy lesson", I now have no doubt both she and M-kun will remember it. And as for me, while I was supposed to be giving an English lesson, I actually got a calligraphy lesson. It is the most pleasant feeling of all when, being a teacher, you suddenly turn into a student, and your students into teachers. This is when I get a feeling of communication, education, fruitful exchange, and success.
So, this morning, wrapped up in my quilts on my futon, waiting for the room to get warm, I took out my kanji book and started studying for the Japanese proficiency test I am planning to take by the end of the year. So, N-Sensei and M-Sensei! Arigatou gozaimashita!

More than Words

2007-02-16T01:12:00.000+09:00

Teaching English conversation has a lot to do with words. Words are important. They are like the pieces of a mosaic you get given, and while you are encouraged by convention and habit to put them together in certain ways, you are free to create your very own picture. With your words, you can show people your world, or hide it, mesmerise them, scare them away, capture their hearts with love or hatred, destroy them, or build them up. Words are powerful. But to become powerful, they need to be used with skill. And behind every skill, there must be motivation. There must be a purpose. Otherwise time would be too precious to be used up acquiring it.
My students already have varying personal motivations and purposes to study English-otherwise they would not spend time and money at our school-but I try to create immediate motivation for them to talk in every class. They must want to talk. That way, they will talk. And that way, they will learn.
The song whose title I have borrowed for today's heading emphasises that words are there to express content and lose their meaning if their content is lost. "Don't just tell me you love me," the singer says, "Show me!" So it is content we are looking for. In this spirit, I keep looking for my students' contents. But of course in my case, the goal is not shutting them up to find this content, it is making them speak to find it. And finding it to make them speak.
Today, H-san brought his guitar. Little did I realise when I gave him that homework that carrying a guitar around town on his way to and from work was extremely embarrassing for him because apparently salary men in business suits with guitars are not very highly thought of.
But when he and T-san tell me about this in class, it is too late. He has already taken this feat upon himself, and I am so grateful he has. Because T-san and I get to hear some very skilful, mood-lifting and heart-warming guitar play. T-san is thoroughy impressed to hear her salary man classmate play the Blues. And then, More than Words.
Together, we sing the song Skip the Sweet Potato Chip wrote for Apple, borrowing the melody from More than Words and the grammar item from textbook Sprint 7y lesson 17: Complex Questions.

"Apple do you love me? Or do you love your red skin more than me? Do you want to shove me down from the tree? Love, are you dumping me in the deep sea? Are you waiting to get rid of me? Cause I just heard a rumbling rumour in the sea. Are you using me o Apple? Do you love me? Cause I dont really know. What do you say? Will you love me if I play apple pie crust every day? Will you stay or go away?"

We enjoy the singing and playing and plan another concert for next week. H-san can store his guitar in the school until then. That way, he doesn't have to carry it around, and I can sneak into the storage room in between classes if I'm ever lucky enough to find some time, and practise a little myself.

T-san has brought us a DVD that shows her skydiving in New Zealand, but our school DVD player in the lobby is broken, and I tell her I will bring my laptop next week, so we can watch some of her contents as well. I have a feeling it might go well with her descriptions of climbing rocks, gym walls, and the roots of giant trees.

At the end of today's class, we all create our personal fantasy islands. T-san's island is called Wild Life Island. The capital in the south of the island is Lion's Rock, the second city, south of the capital is Elephant Grass. H-san's island is named Beer Island and immediately makes all of us want to go. His capital is Hops, located in the North of Beer Island, the second city, White Head, lies about 100 km southwest of Hops. So in the end, we have a lot of new words.
But we don't just have words. I have a feeling, and it is a good feeling, that we have more.
More than words.

Valentine's Day in Japan

2007-02-15T01:09:00.000+09:00

In Japan, Valentine's Day has been claimed by the chocolate industry. Most commonly, women give men chocolate. Honmei-choco to the man they love. Giri-choco to the men they work with. Friends give each other chocolate, too. Especially women. This is called tomo-choco.
I was the lucky recipient of some tomo-choco gifts myself. Last friday when I joined my first women's aikido class at Shosenji, a temple in nearby Toyonaka, we sat on the mat together after cleaning the dojo, and munched on squares of crunchy home-made chocolate. Then, one of the women started handing out little bouquets of paper roses. She had made them with her own bare hands and filled them with little chocolate-shaped footballs. Mouth agape, I turned my bouquet round and round and admired the finely crafted petals, while she told us she used to make these in her hometown for a charity event when she was younger and this year, felt like making them again.
Saturday night, C-san, one of my women students gave me a beutiful little box of green tea chocolates. You can see one of the chocolates it contained next to the paper roses in the picture on the right. Today, finally, a very rainy Valentine's Day proper, it rained buckets of chocolate at work, as well. I got chocolate from no less than three women. My favourite: little Hina, who made me cookies with her mum and presented them to me in a Lilo and Stitch bag. This way, I was able to plan my next lesson over a cup of tea accompanied by some wonderful biscuits in heart, mouse, and ghost shapes (see picture on the left).
Finally, I had a special Valentine's class with T-san and K-san, a very nice scientists' couple. Today they spent a romantic hour together, studying English conversation with me. Revising some vocabulary in the form of gradually uncovered word-bricks, they came up with the following little story (the fat words were the bricks):

Once upon a time, there was a red frog. On this particular day, he was wearing his favourite green hat and was walking merrily beneath the cherry blossoms. Wearing his favourite green hat and walking beneath the cherry blossoms, Frog was over the moon. He soon reached a crossroads where he was supposed to meet his girlfriend. He finally succeeded in meeting up with her, and everything was great. Then, however, the winter came, and the frogs suddenly felt very cold outside. But it so happened that they met Mouse who invited them to his house. So they arrived at Mouse's house, and surprisingy, it was equipped with a TV set, so they all watched Disney films together. Very happily, they sat there whiling the winter away, watching Disney films and eating sweet popcorn. But then, suddenly, Mouse turned quite cruel. But this was only because he could hear Cat coming and wanted everyone to run away. But the frogs stood their ground and bravely faught Cat until, after a long, hard fight, they emerged victorious, and all of them lived happily ever after.

I'm very proud of my students for coming up with such a sweet little story. And as a final note on Valentine's day, in the name of T-san, K-san, and the frogs, I would like to wish everyone lots of love, adventure and happy endings in their lives!

Eikaiwa

2007-02-14T00:47:00.000+09:00

Foreigners in Japan usually belong to one of two categories. They are either ryugakusei (foreign students) or ei-kaiwa kyoshi (English- conversation teachers). Four years ago, I was a ryugakusei in Tokyo. Flatteringly, this time around, many people still take me for a foreign student when they meet me outside working hours. But this time I have joined the army of English conversation teachers.
English conversation schools are big business in Japan and are usually the first thing you see at whatever train station you alight. First you will see an advert on the train. Then a poster at the station that guides you to the right exit. Then, from one of the high buildings surrounding the station, the big, bold letters will jump at you, screaming "NOVA", "Aeon", "ECC", or, as in my case, "GEOS", and promise they will open up the world for you if you open up your pockets for them.
People in Japan learn English at school, but it's all grammar and translation, and in order to communicate, which many are keen to do, they have to spend their hard-earned money and sparse time studying at English conversation schools. But they do learn, and the selling point that it will be an enjoyable and gratifying experience for them is not an empty promise.
After all, they have me, and my fellow English teachers. For us, this is an excellent opportunity to become legal aliens in Japan. This, in turn, opens up the world for us: the world Japan has to offer. And communicating with our students, we get to see its multitude of sparkling colours. Housewives, career women, business men, senior citizens, kids from kindergarten to highschool age, university students, mothers, fathers, couples, they're all my students, and they're all eager to talk to me. Great! Manna from Heaven to the story hunter! And of course I am highly motivated to improve their English to increase their story telling prowess.
I work at the Juso branch of GEOS with one part time Japanese teacher colleague and my manager. Our school has about 80 students, about 50 of whom I teach, divided into small classes between one and six students. The lower level students are taught by my Japanese colleague until they acquire a level from which a native English teacher will be beneficial to them.
Of course the job is not all milk and honey.
Some children are extremely difficult to handle, which turns some children's classes into a nightmare, especially because their mums expect you to teach them something nonetheless, which has to be demonstrated after each class.
The working hours are long and not altogether convenient. I am in work from ca 12.30 till 22.30 Tuesday to Saturday.
Also, if you look at today's picture, you can take a quick guess who in the photo is subject to a rather strict dress code. This includes mandatory make up, suit, shirt, high-heeled shoes, professionally tucked up hair, and tan tights every day. I have finally found a brand of the latter that fits me, but even though not having the crotch of my tights between my knees every day is a significant improvement in life quality, I still haven't found a way of extending their life span beyond two or three working days.
As a final little hitch, in addition to being English teachers, we are all part of the business, which means we have to contribute to reaching given motnhly goals measured by the cash every school brings in each month. This means, we have to approach students about contract renewals and conversions to more expensive contracts, and we are supposed to go out recruiting new students in our free time. We have to run campaigns, decorate our schools accordingly, and try to sign up people for trips and homestay programmes organised by the foreign exchange branch of the business.
In my own humble opinion, it would do everyone, including the company, a lot of good to hire marketing and PR staff to carry out those tasks so teachers could spend all their time preparing and teaching lessons, and correcting homework.
But this is how Japanese companies seem to work. Everybody has to make the whole business their own business. And if you do get your head round it and do what you are told, it does become easier and nicer for everyone involved. So, as everybody tells each other all the time: gambarou! Let's do our best!

Osaka

2007-02-12T14:47:00.001+09:00

Welcome to my new blog. The sparkling treasures of the world await you.
My present hunting ground is Osaka, the major city in Kansai, West Japan. With a population of 2.7 million, Osaka is Japan's third largest city. When looking at it from the big, red ferris wheel that is mounted on one of the sky scrapers near Osaka/Umeda Station, its nightlights stretch beyond the horizon in all directions, an impressive man-made sea of shapes and lights that invades the insides of your stomach as they turn themselves inside out with hight-induced heebiejeebies.
Osaka and Tokyo are traditional rivals. People in Osaka think Tokyo is posh and pretentious. Just listen to the Tokyoites! They speak Japanese without an accent, and everyone who goes to Tokyo from other areas in Japan soon adopts the same streamlined Tokyo Japanese. Osaka people speak Kansai-ben, and they are proud of it. Even when they go to Tokyo, as I learned in a TV show last night, only 35% of Osaka people change their accent to fit in. The presenter could not get over it. "That many? Imagine that! 35 in a hundred people from Osaka are traitors!" he was exasperated.
Osaka people also consider themselves to be happy, humorous and friendly. They are known to speak in loud voices everywhere, and to have the best okonomiyaki (cabbage-bacon pancakes usually garnished with katsuo-bushi dried fish flakes, mayonaise, and a special okonomiyaki brown sauce) in all of Japan. I have to say, I can bear testimony to all of these
claims and am enjoying my stay here thoroughly. I just wish I had more time to relish the endless space and possibilities in this city. But today's entry will end here. This time I introduced you to Osaka. Next time, I will introduce you to my life in this city.