Defences against Kenpo 2

Now that I have had several minutes` exposure to Kenpo fightin`, I have had an opportunity to test my previous theory about defenses against Kenpo, and have discovered that it was, essentially, correct. However, this is not to say that Kenpo is defenceless or has nothing to teach - quite the contrary. Of the two chaps I spar, one has a very solid defensive style, and the other is very fast. Both of them have a wide range of techniques, and because of this and their experience they are quickly starting to identify the biggest weakness in my style - the complete lack of variety. Kickboxing doesn`t offer much variety, which is a great strength but also a bit of a weakness once you know it. These boys have started to notice that I only attack from certain angles and in certain ways, and they are beginning to adapt.

This is of course my fault. I trained at a school with an extensive array of kung fu opportunities available to me, and when my instructor beat me up he didn`t use much kickboxing at all. I should have learnt some of that kung fu! (well, I did, but many many many years ago, and never for sparring). So perhaps while I am here I will be able to learn a few more diverse techniques from kenpo, diversify my sparring tactics a little, and thus improve my style. I probably should have done it years ago but I have a bit more time now, and since I have to engage with the kenpo club to use their bags, it seems the ideal time to do a little learning.

For example, I have repeatedly tried to use my jab-cross-hook combination against the boys I spar. They are not so good that they can just see it coming and avoid it entirely while beating me up (as my instructor did), but quite often they use a certain sort of powerful sweeping defence on the second punch which shifts me off the line of my attack and completely cuts off my ability to follow up with the hook. Since this second punch is probably my best attacking technique at the moment (thanks to years of master classes with Professor Mick), this defensive technique has completely screwed my best punch and also threatens to cut off one of kickboxing`s better technical details, the rapid combinations (although having said this, if they don`t get that kenpo defense going in time they are completely blown away by the whole concept of the three-punch combination, and things go badly for them). I could have learnt this defensive technique in Sydney, but I stuck to kickboxing - so now I am going to have to diversify.

I am hoping that this diversification will go two ways, however. The kenpo training style does not involve long periods of repetition, and one thing I have particularly noticed is that they do not have many drills for training defensive techniques rigourously. Here I am particularly thinking of focus-pad sparring, where one person punches pads and the other throws in random attacks, kicks and punches, to ensure defensive techniques are well drilled. Once they are more comfortable with me and I have convinced them I am not trying to teach kickboxing, and when I have a few more language skills, I will try and introduce this training concept to the more senior students. I might also try and introduce a separate fitness class, for my own benefit mostly ... we shall see whether the kenpo kids are interested in a few new training techniques, and how much the sparring will benefit from them...

I like to ride my bicycle...

Queen are a popular band in Japan. My first Japanese friend, Hiroki-san, loves Queen and thinks Freddie Mercury has a very powerful presence, all of which is true. But I think this is not the real reason they like Queen. I think the real reason they like Queen is the song after which this post is named, which is probably about shagging a camel or something but which on the surface appears to be a hymn of praise for that dinkiest, cutest, quaintest of things, the Japanese bicycle. Nobody here rides a mountain bike, or even anything which in Australia would pass for a bicycle. Instead they have a piece of metal on which wheels are attached, and an english slogan emblazoned. For your edification I here present a picture of my bicycle (which I won in a lottery). From this distance you cannot see it, but the lower of the two crossbars has emblazoned on it the English slogan "Yes we can!" This bike is so cute, so adorable, that every time I approach it at its parking spot I have to say to myself "Yes we can!!" The sight of a stream of people pouring into uni on these bikes, all sitting very properly because one cannot lean on the handle bars, wiggling precariously about the road because of the tiny wheels, is really rather adorable and terribly, terribly civilised. I have been given cause to think that in the old black-and-white pictures from world war 2 in Europe even the most terrible scenes of devastation could be rendered almost prosaic by that most 1940s of images in the foreground: a pretty lady, hat and gloves on, riding a bicycle just like mine. Every day in Japan has just this atmosphere of quaint, polite 40s society because of these bicycles.

Just to confirm that the technology has not changed since that time, if you look very closely at my bike, you will see just the tip of a dynamo light sticking out under the basket on the far side of the front wheel. That`s right ... a dynamo!!! No need for batteries here, I power the light as I ride! Could it be any cuter?

The Student Life

When I first came to uni in 1991 I arrived a fresh-faced boy from the country expecting university life to be full of interesting, well-educated people who shared my interests, with whom I could sit about drinking copious coffee and discussing the universe, amongst whom I would feel part of a community of like-minded individuals. In short, I expected an intellectual and community life within which we would be united by the common interest of intellectual endeavour and learning in all its forms. Instead I met a bunch of stuck-up private school idiots who considered it unfashionable to be intelligent, spent their lives drinking beer and trying to fuck other people`s girlfriends, and thought an intelligent discussion was a joke about how much they vomited on the weekend. It was not until third year that I met like-minded people - a bit late, since one promptly buggered off to Sydney, but better late than never, as Stalin might have said to Eisenhower.

Here in Japan, however, things seem to be a bit different. I have become steeped in a very enjoyable type of student life, which seems to revolve around common interests and university clubs, to which people are intensely committed. The anime club, for example, advertises itself with a full-size picture, drawn by the members, of the Full Metal Alchemist, which they display in the rain where it can be slowly ruined. The Christian club have an angelic bunny ascending to heaven, hand drawn, on their poster. Every day club members are out handing out fliers for their club, or giving performances. A week ago I stumbled upon the dance club, 6 men and 6 women, all dressed up in 40s style white suits and fedoras doing a michael-jackson style performance to a jazz song, for the entertainment of the students at lunch. The best part of this club life, though, is the early evenings. I walk through the university after kenpo to go to the kenpo clubroom where we gather before dinner, or to go to the gym which is behind the uni. On these walks through the campus I pass multiple groups of students, all members of some club or other, performing their club activities in the open. On one particular balmy spring evening I passed three groups of students from the music club, performing choral performances on the lawn, before entering a narrow path bordered by hedges, on one side of which the archery club were practicing in a little shooting range. These archers were resplendent in their traditional clothing of black hakama pants, white gi and special headdress, standing poised on little podiums with their bows drawn, waiting for some invisible ritual command before loosing their arrows. Once I was safely past their range I reached the clubroom, which nestles in a little clearing in the woods behind the uni. Here a group of men from another club had gathered around a bench and were cooking a little dinner of nabe, and as I approached they all clapped their hands, exclaimed "Ittedekimasu!" and commenced eating. This is the student life in Tottori!! I can`t wait for summer when the evenings will be long and still, redolent with the smells of summer and buzzing with the song of cicadas and singing insects, and all the student groups will be out of doors as much as possible; then, weary from training, cooling down in the evening and hopefully walking with Japanese Kenpo friends, I hope to find the community life which the universities of my own country could not give me.

Kombat Kulcha 1

This is to be the first post of many describing my experiences with the martial arts of Japan, both participating in them and (hopefully) teaching, at least once I arrive in Matsue. These posts may contain more than a little technical detail and martial arts nerdery, so I apologise in advance to anyone who is bored, offended or otherwise put off by the tedium. Note the title to avoid future such faffery. The picture with this post is the gym I train in, taken before I graced the bag to the right of the room with a little bit of martial kindness.

Before I mention my experiences of Kenpo I should perhaps digress to discuss in more detail my reason for choosing the most obscure of Japanese arts over the other, more prevalent ones. I had originally given up all hope of finding a decent set of kicking bags in this tiny town, and so decided that just to keep my mind in the right vein I would take up a Japanese art. This way I hoped to meet young Japanese people, have something resembling fun, and at least try to remain linked by some tenuous thread to the more violent elements of my Australian past. I decided originally on Kendo, but when I was walking through the university the evening before I was due to visit a kendo class I heard some yelling in a gym, and decided to investigate. Ascending stairst to the gym I found the most enticing of sights before my very eyes - a group of martial artists engaged in exercise on a floor covered in mats, and behind them two (count them! two!) bags hung on ropes depending from the ceiling. Oh glorious vision! Half of the room had no mats, and on this half the kendo people were engaged in sadly bag-less swordplay, accompanied by much yelling, screaming and banging of feet. If there are 2 things which really bother me in the martial arts, they are yelling and banging feet on hard floors. My decision was further improved when one of the white-coated troopers in the foreground detached himself from teh group and came over to speak to me in very poor English, in very diffident tones. The very next night I went to my first Kenpo lesson, and was welcomed with open arms.

Some things which happen in martial arts gyms at the university which do not happen in Australia, and which I have observed over the course of my three lessons so far are:

they share a gym. Usually there are 2 classes going on at once, and they rotate through the matted area over the week. The third art sharing my gym is aikido.

the arts are shrouded in ritual, more so perhaps than anythign else in ordinary life in this country. They bow when they enter the gym, engage in complex ritual introductions to the class which can include bowing to shrines, each other, sensei, pictures of the founder, etc; and in the case of kenpo, bowing in the direction you came after a long series of exercises

they all seem to share a common goal or vision. When one martial art is engaging in the ritual of commencing its lesson, the other group cease what they are doing, move to the side of the gym and wait in silence for the other class to commence (this can take several minutes for aikido!) When one group is gathered informally outside of the lesson area and the other group comes down from the stairs to leave the gym, they exchange a ritual greeting

they all share a close social life as a group. After my second lesson they all went to an onsen (hot spring) together. They invited me but I was tired, I have a tattoo (which they confirmed is a problem here) and I had homework to do, so I desisted (as a consequence of this tattoo issue, one of them is going to find an onsen which accepts tattooed thugs, and we will go there)

Another detail of martial arts training here which I consider rather backward and definitely very eighties is a phenomenon I have chosen to call testing rather than training. In this phenomenon people who are not actually inherently very tough (such as young university students) engage in training activities which require considerable toughness. As a consequence, they fail to succeed in the chosen activity, desist rapidly, and thus fail to train themselves for greater toughness. The classic example of this in my gym is the sparring. Sparring, for those of you with no interest in martial arts who have made it this far through the email, is practice combat in which one fights another member of the gym, usually at less than full power, usually for a defined period of time with various sorts of rules depending on what one is aiming to achieve in the lesson. In my Kenpo gym the senior students spar without any protective gear, i.e. no mouthguard, no groin guard, no shinpads. As a consequence they drop like flies within a minute or two of commencing the sparring, and they restrain themselves from proper technique in order to avoid injury - head punches are severely restrained, leg kicks are very light, and often leg checks (the process of stopping a leg kick on the blade of the shin) are performed improperly to avoid the pain. If these kids wore protective gear - particularly shinpads and mouthguards - they would be able to spar for longer and harder, and they would slowly build up the hardness of their shins, get used to defending against hard head punches, etc. The guys at the gym have very little resistance to solid leg kicks, because unless one is inherently very tough one has to train the property of hard shins, resistance to pain etc. Without protective gear one cannot train these properties, only test them.

So on my second kenpo class the assistant instructor decided to test my properties of toughness, etc., and it was during this experience that I developed my theory of testing vs. training. I had already told my classmates that I am a kickboxing instructor in Australia, since I wanted to use the bags outside of class and wanted to justify this rather extreme request. I think they wanted to find out whether this was really true, and perhaps also find out what kickboxing is all about (they watch it here but no one at my gym has ever done it), so the assistant instructor came up to me mid-class, gloves on, and said "let`s spar!" I had no protective equipment of any sort except 10 ounce gloves, but for some stupid reason (possibly due to the cheerful nature of the request, and my general sense of safety in this country) I agreed. There were to be no blows to the head, and they had already clearly selected a referee, so I felt fairly safe (with a no headblow rule very little can go wrong). The sparring commenced with the instructor launching a massive, fulll power kick at my leg, and I was so stunned that they even do leg kicks in kenpo that I didn`t even see it coming. After that the whole business was on in earnest, and I am proud to say that I smashed the guy. After a minute the fight ended with him　nursing a huge purple bruise on his shin and another on his arm (thanks Mick for the old mid-section switch-kick tactic, works a charm). The nature of the gym, the Japanese personality and the general atmosphere here was such that he was merely cheerful about having copped some big blows, and was cheerfully telling all and sundry that I have strong kicks and hard shins.

It would appear that from this minute-long baptism of fire I have been accepted into the gym; on Friday I requested permission to do more sparring, this time with all my protective gear on, and was rewarded with four 2-minute rounds against 2 of the senior students (one of whom was the chap from the previous week), both of whom thoroughly enjoyed the experience (and neither of whom complained about my use of shinpads!!!) It would also appear that, even though I am considered to have soft shins at my Australian gym, here in Japan I am hard. 14 years with shin pads is considerably superior to 2 years without!

Since this session I appear to have become quite accepted; on Friday I was part of the run-of-the-mill beginners section of the class, rather than being taken aside and taught in English, and as a consequence I did my first ever cart-wheel!!!! Without hearing the instructions in English!!! (I didn`t understand them). I would never have believed it possible that I could come all this way, to a tiny country town, and find my kickboxing training barely interrupted, but aside from a small loss of fitness and strength it appears that this may be the case! This has left me very cheered (and quite bruised, I might add, from Friday`s engagements).

So the moral of the lesson is that protective equipment is of more use than just guarding the family jewels, especially if, like me, you are a softy; and also that life is what you make it, and if you approach strangers with an open and cheerful manner you get respect and all the bruises you asked for!!!

The Universal Language

While wandering through the mud and the rain and the freezing cold to the car park with my fellow kempo practitioners, I was describing the temperatures in Australia. Everyone was impressed by the heat of Adelaide summers, and I found myself wanting to point out to them that Adelaide has a dry heat. Of course, I did not have the language skills to say this, and found myself looking for another way of saying "dry heat".

In a perfect world this would be achieved easily using the Universal Language of one-liners from Aliens. In this case I would say "Yeah man, but it`s a dry heat" and everyone would understand that I was corporal Hudson, under the reactor, in the humid heat, and would get it. Sadly though, I have come to realise the world is populated with a sad race of species known as humans who are not nerds, and do not understand the Universal Language.

So what to do in conveying this essential point? My mind roamed for a moment and I settled on a language almost as fundamental to the Universe as mathematics: the language of beer advertising. I said to my Japanese companions "yes, but it is like Asahi Beer: Suupa - Doo - ry!!!" This comment was greeted by affirming Japanese grunts, and the point was successfully made.

Beer! Is there anything it can`t do?

Defences Against Kempo

This is a martial-arts nerd post, based on one hour spent at a regional martial arts club. It would probably be best, therefore, for most of my passing visitors to just avoid it. Here is my secret defence against Kempo:

1. Thai kick the kempo fighter in the midriff. Kempo fighter will try and block your thai kick with the soft inner part of both his or her arms
2. this should immobilise both arms without deflecting the kick at all. You can then do what you like.

Of course, I recommend negotiation in preference to this secret defence.

Martial arts information given on this site is provided without warranty against injury, loss or looking foolish. No indemnity is offered or implied against any of the following: losing a fight to a girl while your mates watch; losing a fight to a bloke while your girlfriend watches; losing a fight to Russell Crowe while anyone watches; looking silly under the influence of too much beer while trying to do something you read about on the internet. Anyone attempting to use any techniques described, implied, stated or not shown on this or any other website is really very, very silly and should just take up soccer.

Surfing the Group Wave

On Thursday night I took my balls in my hands and decided to strike out on my own into the wilds of Japanese social life. Being an adroit social climber (as evidenced by the vast sums of cash in my bank acccount, my many titles, and the huge number of sophisticated society ladies I have bedded), I immediately identified the best way to do this, and acted accordingly - I joined a group. The Tottori University Shorinji Kempo club, to be precise.

Now, some of you I know are going to scratch your heads, some are going to gasp in horror at this choice, and some of you are going to sigh and ask yourselves why for once in my life I didn`t just join the soccer club. For those of you scratching your heads, Shorinji Kempo is a Japanese martial art similar to Karate and mostly radically opposed to kickboxing (stylistically, I mean, not in the sense of two great nations armed to the teeth and ready to fight to the death). So why did I join this organisation? (For those of you who have no interest in justifying a sudden shift in martial art practice, please skip the following bullet points):

1. the University has the only 2 kicking bags in all of Tottori (!) so if I want to keep my hand (and foot, as it were) in at kickboxing, I need to join a club with access to these two precious items. It has been nearly a month since I kicked something properly, and I really, really need to ...
2. the University has no "foreign" arts, so it`s a choice of kempo, karate (ugh), kendo (too much yelling) or Aikido (I bounce too much for this). So Kempo it was ...
3. the Kempo club is composed entirely of young people, who will be interested in social life and foreigners, and may also be interested in getting a bit of kickboxing training on the side

So, I joined Kempo. Yay me. Officially I can now use the bags. There are a few minor details of Japanese weirdness which may yet dissuade me from this venture, but I shan`t bother describing these unless there is a public uproar from the martial arts nerds amongst the audience. I have a week to decide, in any case, if this wierd disciplined form of wierdness is suitable for me. But they have bags, so I`ll eat hamsters for them if necessary.

Anyway, so the club members were very nice to me - Toshio-san squatted on the floor for a whole minute trying to sort through Australian animals in his head until he could think of the name of the Australian Rugby team (to much applause when he did), and Imamura-san (who had spent a year in America when he was 5) dredged up his ancient knowledge of English to teach me the various moves. They took me aside separately to do this and were very patient. They were also very glad to have me join their club. I had to watch carefully to see the various forms of ritual which infuse this particular aspect of Japanese life, but the real ritualised fun began when we finished the kempo part of the evening. I was invited to dinner before I could even take a breath, and 15 of us then began a complicated odyssey through the rainy darkness and the mud to get to the carpark, from where we drove to a randomly selected Ramen restaurant. The girls in the back seat of the car stared at me like I had fallen straight from the sky with my second head intact, and all of them wanted me to speak English so they could practice (which is kind of handy for a few more weeks at least). In the car I discovered a new word, taikutsu, which means "having no fun", which is the adjective (?) the kids applied to Tottori.

I know many of my readers may find this hard to believe, but I once had an argument with a friend of mine about a point of theory on which we differed. In this rare moment of conflict my friend was maintaining that there are only 2 forms of order in social systems, heirarchical order enforced from a central source of power, and spontaneous organisation based on the actions of individuals having no thought for the greater good. These kids, who live in a highly heirarchical society (or so I am told) showed excellent forms of spontaneous organisation. For example, when the car came to its destination they all yelled "arigato gozaimashita" (thankyou) simultaneously at exactly the moment that the car came to a halt. At the restaurant they seemed to be able to take tables and make arrangements without any discussion, and when we returned to the car park at the uni after dinner they gathered in a big circle under their umbrellas (I had to be told to join this circle), and then one of them (who I think was a leader of some sort) said something, they all said "hai!!!" and then the group dissolved. All of this seemed to occur without much discussion or prior arrangement amongst very clearly highly individual people. It would appear I have joined a group, in which we are all friends (?!) on account of a shared interest, and because of this shared interest have our own group dynamic, rules and systems of behaviour. I wonder if the rules and the systems have been borrowed by this group from the world around them, or if they just make them up for themselves? I am fascinated by the way young Japanese people function in such a completely organised, socially accomodating way while maintaining a high degree of individuality. Their whole social milieu is obssessed with individuality, yet they conduct themselves as perfectly cooperative elements of a highly organised social system. Fascinating!!!!

Going gangbusters at the gym

On Friday night, as I have mentioned, I sprinted up a hill. Since I was feeling somewhat sadistic, I decided to follow my sprints with a little session on the weights, to really give me that feeling of having actually worked during the week. When I walked into the gym I found myself confronted with a bevy of somewhat suspicious-looking and very large Japanese bodybuilders. These chaps sniggered suitably when I asked them a question about the weight of one of the bars, but they relaxed a little when I started doing decent weights. Their initial amusement aside, these men were helpful and friendly. One was particularly helpful, and here I was reminded of an interesting fact about Japanese - if you can read Japanese you can get the general gist of Chinese. I was wearing my kickboxing singlet to the gym, and all these big boys could tell it was something to do with martial arts from its Chinese characters. The particularly helpful man turned out to be a practitioner of karate with 40 years` experience, and he proceeded (in between spotting me on the bench) to try and prove that his martial art was better than mine. This is hard enough to do in English, since:

1. I couldn`t give a shit, I do it because it`s fun and not in order to kill anyone
2. kickboxing is pretty cool

Sadly, this man didn`t speak English and I don`t speak japanese, so the natural consequence of our linguistic compatibility was that I found myself going through a variety of demonstrations of different techniques (including testing the hardness of shins and knuckles, defences against knees, and various forms of open-hand attack about which I care precisely nothing) in the middle of the gym. While the big body-builders went about their business around us.

The moral of the lesson, dear reader, is that while there are many cultural differences between Asia and the West, the existence of the Martial Arts Wanker is a universal bond holding our different societies together. On the way home my experiences with this chap gave me cause to think about some other things I have seen at gyms in Japan. I shall therefore present you with a list, a la the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, of Causes for Consternation in Exercise:

1. Gang Members at a gym: I am mildly suspicious that Friday night at the gym is Tottori fascist gang members` night. Something about those big chaps made me suspicious that they might be related to the supposed fascist gangs which supposedly exist in Tottori. Probably they were just big blokes, though.
2. Weird shoe rules: all gyms have weird rules about the shoes you can wear in the gym. You can`t run to the gym, for example, because then your shoes would go from outside to inside. Sometimes you can`t wear your shoes in some sections of the gym. This makes life rather unnecessarily complicated.
3. The bumless woman: there always seems to be a woman in the gym who has no bum. That`s right, no bum. On Wednesday there was a bumless woman who was walking at a zombie pace on the treadmill, which is dumb for 4 reasons: 1) she was so thin she didn`t need to do any exercise, but really should just go home and eat some puppy fat, 2) she had no bum, so how could she walk? 3) she had probably walked to the gym faster than her shuffle on the treadmill and 4) she probably walks more in a day than most people in the west do in a week - so why bother going to the gym just to walk more, slower? On Friday the resident bumless woman (a different one) was doing pointless chin ups in which she wobbled her whole body as much as possible in order to make the chin up as little effort as possible. The bumless woman is often doing a pointless exercise, especially
4. Pointless aerobics: a lot of Japanese aerobics seems to consist of standing still, or lying down, doing nothing. Aerobics which doesn`t even make your cheeks flush is not exercise. As well play cricket, in my opinion.
5. The deceptively strong man: Japanese men may wear make-up, wigs and velvet, but they are stronger than they look. Usually there is a man in the gym who looks tiny and thin, and is lifting a car in each hand. How they pack the muscle in so deceptively continually surprises me - like when the stir fry chef pulls up his sleeve and you see he has taken the sinew from 3 men and stuffed it into his arm, but you thought he was a skinny little man with pimples
6. The strangely-sized machinery: because everyone in Japan is small, the squat rack is too short at its tallest part for me to get under without squatting. In Australia, I have to lift the bar down from the rack and fiddle with things in order to use it. Here I just chuck the bar on top and crawl under it on my hands and knees. But the best thing is the bench press, which is designed to be impossible for one person to use. The pillars for the bar are so close together they brush your ears, and you have to put the weights on both ends of the bar at once or it upends and hits you in the face. Once you start bench pressing you find yourself lying on a knife edge (like Bruce Dickinson in that Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young), because the bench is so narrow. Even the smallest difference in strength between chest muscles, or the slightest error in placement of your hands, and you tip onto the floor with 60kgs on top of you.
7. The end of the weights: who reading this has ever put their little peg into the stack of weights on one of the machines and found themselves near the bottom? In Australia, my weights are only ever a quarter to a third of the stack. But here I am only 3 notches away from lifting the whole weight stack when I do seated rows. Merely by sitting in a plane for 9 hours I have become massive.
8. The 80s machinery: somewhere in every gym will be a piece of equipment so archaic and bizarre-looking one can only assume it was bought off the set of The Exorcist. In Miss Ember`s gym in Hiroshima there is a type of bed one lies on which has separate rests for each leg. Lying in a V-shape on this bed, one turns on a machine which swirls ones hips and legs about. Now that`s what I call exercise!!!!! Bugger sprints, I`m gonna lie down on the swirly-bed and become HUGE.

There is also, of course, the obligatory vending machine and a variety of machinery for taking your pulse, weight and height. Going to the gym to do pointless exercise at a zombific pace which cannot do anything to you because you have no bum has been reduced to a science in this country. Having said that, however, my gym costs me 200 yen for as long as I want, so I can`t complain too much. And the walk to and from is probably worth that 200 yen in any case ...

Through the mist, faster than a speeding bullet.

On Friday evening I went to the Fuse sports park to sprint up a hill. The illustration for this page of our travellers chronicle is the view from the top of the hill I sprinted up. This hill is probably about 200 metres above the ground, maybe less, perhaps not so much of a sprint for some of the hardier members of my readership. Nonetheless, these old bones found four attempts at this hill quite sufficient to wear them down after 2 weeks without exercise. After this I paid a visit to the dome in the centre of the picture, where I did some weights. These weights are a different story, which I shall chronicle separately. The topic of todays lesson, gentle student, is the beauty of classical Japan.

Tottori is like a postcard from classical Japan. The walk to Fuse passes through a semi-rural area, which is guarded from the majority of the town of Tottori on one side by a line of low, forested hills. On the other side of the road the Koyama Pond stretches away to the West, its far banks meeting the foothills of the mountains in a welter of pine trees and cherry blossom. At the end of my walk is a T-junction where the road ends at a line of rice paddies, beyond which low hills rise to a cemetery overhung by cherry blossoms. This t-junction heads to Fuse and town on the left, and to the right the road climbs into thickly forested hills. Heading to the gym in the chilly evening this whole scene unfolds before me against a backdrop of low grey clouds shining silver in the light of the setting sun, and tinged occasionally with the nostalgic scent of wood-smoke from nearby houses. The cars on the roads travel at a sedate 40km an hour and are too small, by and large, to disturb the peace very much. Beyond the rice paddies is the futuristic dome of the sports park with its plaza and play areas, and just behind it the hill against which I will test my lazy frame.

Leaving the gym two hours later with the last of the setting sun fading beneath the horizon, I have gentle electronica playing in my ears to provide a suitably modern Japanese soundtrack to the scene. Although I am exhausted and it is fast becoming very cold, I cannot help but catch a hint of a feeling that I have somehow fallen into a different world.

This different world unfolded before me again the following day when I travelled by express train to nearby Matsue to see my supervisor, Kanta. Matsue straddles a river and lies along the edge of a large lake (shinji-ko), and can be reached from Tottori by train on the picturesque coastal Sannin rail line. The day I caught the train it was rainy and misty. The train hurtled past rice paddies and hills and through tunnels, with always to its left the hills and beyond them the distant mountains. Each time the train burst from a tunnel into daylight I would see the Sea of Japan lying cold and grey beyond rice paddies; or a line of low hills shielding me from the steely sea, and nestled in their shadow a few farming houses. Once I saw a pair of farmers walking down a road from these hills, one of them wearing the gaiters and head-wrapping of a previous era.

In Matsue it rained, but Kanta had a cunning idea to complement my weekend of mist and scenery. We visited the Adachi Art Gallery at nearby Yasugi. This gallery has attached to it a Japanese Garden which has been voted best Japanese Garden in the world for 3 years running by the Journal of Japanese Gardens. Pity the poor editors of this journal, who have to visit 650 Japanese Gardens every year to select the best! The garden lived up to its grand reputation, holding in its bounds a serene beauty which even 20 busloads of tourists could not disturb. By now the mist had gathered about the distant mountains in watery folds, and every view of the garden had a swirling backdrop of grey cloud, through which occasionally one could glimpse hints of the distant peaks. The art gallery itself had a wide selection of beautiful Japanese paintings, and between the two things we were kept occupied for a good 2 hours.

After this we rushed to Yasugi station, where I caught the express train back to Tottori. The mist over the mountains had crept lower in the gathering gloom, and now the train flew through wet fields gathered in the lap of the fog-shrouded mountains. I returned to Tottori trailing tattered rags of mist, and snuggled into the (thankfully) warm confines of my little room, to ponder the joys of a weekend in rural Japan.

The Illustrated Chronicles

Here I am in sunny Tottori, hiding in the University library on a Sunday afternoon to escape a sudden bout of dismal weather, and so beginning in earnest the illustrated, new and improved chronicles of my time in Japan, which began just over a week ago in Osaka. For those uninitiated into the Arcana of the MEXT (Japan Government) scholarship (what are you doing reading my blog, fell lurker?), I am spending 6 months in Tottori studying Japanese Intensively, and then I move to nearby Matsue, where I will (in theory) undertake a PhD in Statistics with the illustrious Professor Kanta Naito. The first 6 months of this blog will mostly be taken up with images and stories from sleepy Tottori, with occasional excursions to Hiroshima where the delightful Miss Ember is currently causing untold strife.

Be warned! I reserve the right to make occasional discursions on any topic I choose, without mercy or remorse. So, without further ado, let us begin ...