Judo Tournament

Woke up at 6AM yesterday to go to a judo tournament yesterday and... well, my club got its collective ass handed to it. The first guy lost in the groundfighting (far left. He's the one making funny faces and lying on his back), one guy won two matches before losing to a joint lock (at right, reading the information booklet), and two of our girls lost to good throws.

I didn't get any particularly good pictures of Reika's match, but you can see at left Shoji Erica losing about five seconds into her match to a nearly perfect tai-otoshi. Ironically, that's Erica's best technique.

I don't remember exactly what happened in the other two matches, but Tasku used his zombie-style gripping technique. I dunno if it works or not, but it sure is fun to make fun of. At right.

Last up are two random pictures of some nicely (not quite perfectly) executed throws that had no relation to my club members at all, but look cool anyway.

If you look closely at the second one, you'll see that there's one foot and one face on the ground.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but it was a pretty big tournament by my standards. I figured it would be, at most, 60 people or so. I think they had that many people in each of the four divisions. There were two weight classes (big vs not) and it was separated by gender as well (figure it out). I thought the white stripe in women's belts was to indicate that they had achieved a partial rank, but it's apparently so they can tell the difference between women and men. It pleases me to know that they need help in this endeavor. There were plenty of really cute girls, by the way.

I took a couple of panoramas so you can see more than just two people at once, and I think they really help to show the scale of the event. I'm not certain how they're lined up, but they didn't seem to have any problems finding their places. I already counted the edges, and it's a 21x12 (ish) square, which would put them at about 250 people. Surprisingly accurate with my 4-times estimate from earlier.

Judo Goodness Plus!

Today was really good.

I got a perfect score on my doom kanji test and managed to one-up Valentina in the process. She finished before me, but made some silly mistake and missed a single point. It's petty, I know, but she's just so good that it's hard not to be happy.

I had a long lunch break, so I was able to come home and prepare a lunch with fresh veggies and stuff,

We finished up Princess Mononoke in Special Japanese today, and I only made a complete fool of myself a couple of times. By halfway through the class, the teacher was finishing about half of her sentences with a pointed look at me and a "Do you all understand?" I managed to get a couple of really good answers in, though, and she stopped by the end of the class.

I got some tasty mochi at the store and ate them. They were tasty.

In judo, I got to try a bunch of new stuff and was really excited and energetic the entire time. My partners were all worn out and half-dead while I was like... er... I don't know how to say it in English. It was good, anyway.

The best part of the whole day is when one of my throws did that thing that happens when you do something right. It was on the smallest girl there, but if I could replicate this throw on someone larger, it would've worked just fine.

If you've ever been golfing, or even just to a driving range, you know there's a certain sound that has a very distinctive quality, and you only hear this sound when someone hits the ball perfectly.

This was kind of like that. My throw was smooth, effortless, and graceful. It just... was.

No work on my part whatsoever. Just "Hi - you seem to be on the ground." My partner felt it, too, and laid on the floor for a second saying "No way..."
I think I should mention now that this throw came from a one-handed grip that was exactly backwards from normal, and without any setup.

Just bam, and there was judo.

Some Pictures; a Review

I took this picture a few days ago and it was kind of random. This guy is the faculty adviser... for world peace. I'm not kidding. My schools motto, by the way is "Pax Mundi Per Linguas" ("World Peace Through Language"), so I guess it's not really too surprising that we have someone like this guy working there.

Anyway, these girls are a part of Habitat for Humanity here, is how I understand, and that's one of the many programs he controls, I guess? Anyway, I had my camera with me and offered to take a picture. I didn't mean to upload this, but it was in my "Put on the blog" folder because I use it more as a generic export folder.

At left you can see Sara (in pink), Sou Jong (with the white hat), Park Mingji (sitting, looking away), and Paul (the, uh, only guy). Sara and Paul are exchanging contact information by IR transfer, easily the most common way of doing so among the people I know. I have a hard time imagining salarymen huddled under an umbrella, trying to get their phones to connect, only to end up exchanging cards anyway. I think the card exchange is important for them. I don't have IR on my phone, but it's called 赤外線 sekigaisen ("outside of red waves") if you want to know.

The next few shots are from a birthday party for some friends at Kyodai I was at Sunday afternoon. On the left are the three birthday girls and a bonus girl, since the group was one short of all the women at hand with the birthday girls.
They didn't all have the same birthday, but it was one of those "let's celebrate a couple of birthdays at once" things. There was cake. I'm still alive.

On the right we have a great example of my progress on Operation Take Pictures of People While They're Eating.
The title's creative, don't you think?

Also, I enjoy surprising people and warning them just a tiny bit before I trigger the shutter, which resulted in this next picture (left). I guess her shoes were rubbing her ankles, and she was headed out into the rain, so she was going to put on more suitable ones. I don't know her name.

At right is a picture from my judo club. Last I heard, these two broke up, so I don't know what's going on now, but it looks to have taken a turn for the better.

The girl on top is Takako, and the guy on the bottom is Aki-chan, whose massive umbrella I accidentally stole. He said it was okay and that I could keep it, because he had already bought another one. They're both a lot better than me at judo. Like, Takako weighs half as much as I do and she kicks my ass. When I took this picture, we were all pretty much just messing around, 'cause time was about up.

Last is a picture of everybody screwing around a little later after practice. Far left is Ryohei, the team captain. I was talking to Aki-chan earlier after I nearly broke his spine, and he said that it's everybody's wish to throw Ryohei just once. My dream is to throw someone. I aim high, you know?

Behind him is Aki-chan. On the right is Takako again, and Keiichiro is on the far right with the wooden sword. Keiichiro has really good English and has no problems talking with me at conversational speeds. He also speaks some Chinese, I think.

And with that, I need to get ready for class.

Fireworks

There were a couple judo club parties I wasn't invited to over the summer, for one reason or another*. At one of them, they did some fireworks, and they got this pretty cool shot. I saw it and asked Ryouhei to send it to me, and he did. Here you go:

*I'm kind of on the edge of the network of people, in a way, so it's entirely possible that I simply couldn't be contacted, or was forgotten about. Only one or two of the club members has my contact info, so...

Artist's Rendition

Here's an artists rendition of me doing judo:
Actually, it's something Gabe did for a book, pulled almost-but-not-quite shamelessly.

Underpants Judo

Today was my last day of judo until school starts up again in the fall. There's just no point in going when it's this hot. I mean, the dojo's pretty nice and has fans, but nobody feels like doing anything, so we all just sit around. And it consumes my entire evening or morning, depending on the day.

Today was so muggy that two of the guys took off their clothes and were jumping around the dojo in their underpants. One guy started taking those off, too, but then his girlfriend hit him and he stopped.

It's pretty muggy here.

Birthdays

Today or yesterday is my birthday, depending on how you look at it, so I'm taking the opportunity to slack off.
There's an Olympic judo guy (I think?) coming on Thursday and I'll try and get some pictures, and I should have some pretty ones from the weekend.

Happy Birthday, flamy goodness!

Judo "Incidents"

I was doing randori* (free practice) with Erica today and managed to force a lefty osotogari ("large outside trip", literally. Anyway, she's apparently bad at ukemi (falling techniques) to begin with, and particularly bad at them with her right side, which is the side the performs ukemi against this particular throw when it's done left-handed. In addition, I lost my balance and went to the ground as well, and wasn't able to support her fall properly. Install, I added to the weight hitting the ground.
Anyway, the point is that I totally nerfed some poor girl and we ended up sitting out the last few minutes.
Oh, and add that to the fact that I was joking around, tried to grab her eri (collar-ish area) missed, grabbed her left tit, and it totally looked like that's what I was trying to do. I apologized three (maybe four...) times, but she didn't seem to react to it at all.
[Edit: "it" here, refers to the squeezings, as opposed to my apologies. I'm not sure she understood what I was apologizing for. "I'm sorry I groped you on accident." isn't something we've covered in class that I recall. And you all know I would recall that if we had.]
On the bright side, I don't think I hurt anybody else tonight. I usually get someone with something good each night.

Frivolity?

I'm not certain the title is a word, but spellcheck isn't whining so this is what you get. Strangely enough, it doesn't like the word "spellcheck". Not too surprising, I guess.

In any case, today was another shopping day. I got four liters of various kinds of juices, two trash cans (we have to separate our garbage into "plastic" and "everything else") duct tape, another foam thing for DDR, zip strips, bungee cords, lunch (which was tasty, if disturbing. Don't ask.), and ibuprofen, because it's handy and I didn't have any. I broke two $10 and a $50, but I have most of the $50 still in my wallet and $20 in change in my change-thingy-that-is-not-a-purse.
Very little of it was frivolous, though I suppose none of it was completely necessary. I made a list before I went and the only thing I bought that wasn't on the list was the zip strips.
But seriously: can you not buy zip strips? I apparently can't.

I was surprised by the quantity in the ibuprofen box. It's less than you'd think for $5 if you were in America, but it seems decent here.

In other news, I got another matburn at judo, as you can see.
Apparently the Japanese don't use the same percent system we do, or maybe they just make hydrogen peroxide more hardcore. Somehow. I dunno what the hell it is, but this stuff is not the 3% I'm used to.
This picture was taken after I had rinsed all the peroxide away, by the way. My foot's actually bleached right there now. From about 30 seconds of contact, that's pretty impressive. Anyway, I put some antibiotic ointment on it and a bandage, so it should heal decently, unlike the others that I just kind of left.

Now I'm going to go beat up some hay. With fists. And my head. I suspect that Pepper will help.

Laziness Strikes

I'm not doing anything this weekend, so I was thinking about wandering around and taking pictures some more, but I don't really know anywhere to go.

Well, I'm not doing anything that I haven't already done. Today.
Judo, for example, is done for today, and that leaves me with ten hours to kill, and then tomorrow as well. I'm trying to meet some people who don't work on the weekends, but I think almost everyone does.

Oh! I managed to get a thing that's like a job. Sort of. Except it doesn't require a working visa, I think, as it's through the school. The job is to be a native English speaker. And... that's about it.
It's only once a week for three hours, but they pay $9.50 an hour, so it's pretty decent, especially given the workload.

The class is a Chinese and English class, where the students work on translating from English to Chinese with no middle Japanese step. There's a Chinese girl who's working as my opposite, but I suspect her Japanese is much better than mine.

It's time for food, but I don't know what I'm going to eat. It might be time to see if I can convince Chise to show me how to cook something new.

Judo tips, part I

When you're doing 寝技(matwork), be sure to keep your weight on the bottom of your feet, where it's supposed to be. It's not that you should be crouching, but be sure to keep your toes under you when you kneel. By doing this, you provide yourself with better power, and help to prevent the following from happening:

That's from... yesterday, if I'm getting my days right. I didn't realize how deep of a matburn I had on my feet, and I didn't disinfect it. You can see the results on my left (top) foot with the yellow coloration on the scab tissue.
So. The lesson here is:

Don't use your feet upside-down.
And if you do, fix 'em.

Judo Club, Day 2

This is going to be a little disjointed, as I’m a little rattled from overexerting myself and being tossed around and whatnot. By the way, eating a pound of ramen a half hour before physical exercise is bad plan. Just so you know.

Tonight was my second practice with this judo club. I had to sit out for a while ‘cause I was starting to get a little faint (目が回る = “eyes are spinning”). These guys are pretty hardcore. As in, the girls that weigh half as much as I do are about as strong as I am in the upper body. I may not be musclebound, but I consider myself fairly average for someone my size.

Tonight, I found out why I haven’t gotten a single throw to execute on any one of them without them very obviously giving it to me. I should start at the beginning, though.

Now, my luggage was overweight to begin with, so there’s no way I could’ve packed the amazingly heavy gi into my luggage, even if I had one. So I came here, and they’ve got a box full of various sizes of gi for visitors (and new members who haven’t yet bought their own) to use. All the belts are old black belts, so I’ve been wearing a black belt during practices, which is sort of embarrassing, but you have to have a belt. I figured this was normal, and pretty much everybody was just wearing a black belt ‘cause it’s what was lying around.

Ha. Ha. F-hah.

Turns out that the people there have, on average, been practicing judo for ten years. One of the girls has only been doing it for two years, but she’s apparently good enough that she’s a probationary black belt and I think she’s the youngest, judo-wise, by at least five years.

I’m not sure that got the point across.

TEN YEARS.

Let me remind you (or inform those that don’t know) that I practiced judo almost ten years ago for a little under two years. Against my will. (Don’t worry, it’s fun now)

Needless to say, the only thing I’ve been able to successfully do is stuff that I am probably only getting away with because I’m a gaijin. I gi-choked someone into tapping out once, got an armbar on someone else, and managed to pin one guy once, but that’s all matwork, which is sort of my specialty, and with that said, I was still only succeeding at stuff they’re not used to defending against. Don’t worry, everything I did was legal, even within the pansy American rules.

Now, all of that said, I’ve been pinned twice myself, and I would’ve lost to time one other time, but I’d say that’s pretty damned good, given the opponents. Oh, and a I sat on one guy. Totally BS’d a technique out of nowhere, picked ‘em straight up off the ground, and sat down.

Did I mention I weigh about 50% more than the heavier guys in there?

Anyway, it was fun. They said I can take pictures next time, so you can look forward to them my Thursday, which is America’s Wednesday.

I wanted to get that off my chest, so thanks for listening, assuming you got this far.

Zzzzz….

Chikaku Ramenya?

Judo club is in about an hour, so it's once again time for ramen.
Yum.