6 June 2007

Jon Lovett

Part two

Wednesday

In the dormitory above the dojo there are four cubicles for visitors and "deshi", the live-in students. My cubicle is next to that of the deshi Takahashi san. We first met when I came to the dojo two years ago and he had just started his Shidokan training. I'm awake early, partly due to jet-lag, but mostly due to Takahashi's alarm going off at 4.00 am.

The alarm can't be ignored, it is a very loud racey electronic jazz tune. Amazingly, Takahashi sleeps through it and it goes off again a few minutes later. Eventually he gets up and heads off to work. The deshi help clean the dojo and attend training everyday, but are self-supporting. I eventually struggle out of bed and go to the dojo to practise kata, do some stretching and crank out 100 press ups, 100 sit ups and 100 back raises. I break the press-ups into sets of 20, I've never been able to do more than 30 in one go. Then I head off to the University.

On my must-do list is to work out how top up my 1000 Yen reusable train tickets. It costs 170 Yen to get to the University, which means I have a collection of tickets with various amounts of money left on them. Apparently, if two tickets are put in at the same time, one ticket will transfer its money to the other one. I have lunch at the University: rice, miso soup, seaweed and tofu. Tofu is a block of soft soy bean curd and it is really hard to eat with chopsticks. Too much pressure and it falls to bits. Not enough pressure and it slips out and lands on the table.

I'm back in the dojo by 5.30 ready to start training with Reku-san. We do five, three-minute rounds, of pad work. He uses hand focus mitts for the punching exercises, he wants me to be more accurate and try to hit the large white spot on the mitt. I stop training early today at 8.00 pm as my fingers are sore from sweaty bag mitts and my shins bruised from working on the bags.

I pop over to the supermarket to get some sushi for supper. My Japanese is slowly coming along, at the check-out I can recognize when I'm asked if I would like chopsticks to go with the sushi and am able to reply, yes please, "Hai, onegai shimasu."

Part 3 : Part 1