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!!!!