Not Loose Enough.

I was pretty flat this week. I think there was a major competition on for the Judo team on the weekend; and so there was no training between last Saturday and this Thursday. I had no way to release my stress. The time that I normally spent training I spent playing Super Metroid in my room. Learning Japanese is hard; it burns me out mentally. I can't get anywhere on the limited vocabulary I have, and I can barely understand others when they speak. This creates more incentives to hide in my room. Without judo, I question my desire to come here and learn the language. I feel it will take more time than I have to be at a level where I can communicate. When I feel like this; I begin to think that studying Japanese is pointless; as I'm only going to forget everything I learned once I go back home. Without judo as a constantly present goal I figuratively fall on the floor like I don't have a spine.

I bought a bicycle on the Monday; it was stolen on the Friday. It was pretty cheap. It was only a second hand mama-chari, it cost me maybe around $80. Still, it stung to lose it. The bikes had keys which I could use to lock it; like an idiot I left the keys dangling in the keyhole. The most irritating thing about it was that it disappeared after I parked it outside the budokan. I think there is a 95% probability that a judo student took it. I usually spend about 15/30 minutes after each training doing my yoga ball thing; and so it probably got taken then. It is a pretty unremarkable grey machine that looks identical to all the other student bicycles. Because the bike is too small for me, I only ever ride standing. It hurts for me to sit on the seat. I figured if i don't use the seat; i may as well turn it backwards it so i can identify it as mine. It isn't really plausible that it would have been taken by accident. Whoever took it would have seen that the seat was backward and would have had to have turned it back around to ride it away.

There is a guy, he gives me trouble sometimes. I'm not really sure why. Maybe its because I'm his kohai; or maybe its just because he is a splinter in my neck. He asked me once what the English word was for counting gunshots; I tried to explain in Japanese that in English there aren't really many counter words. I was standing on the yoga ball after training last night, and this guy walks up behind me. He kicked the yoga ball twice. Not hard, but not softly either. Only recently did I regain the ability to stand on the ball; and so it made me considerably nervous. I was facing the wall, away from him, because I was throwing a medicine ball against it. I had to stop while he did this. It was an stressful, but interesting experience. I felt his force leave his foot, radiate up the ball and into my feet. I knew if I fought it, the force would shock my feet into unbalance, and I would fly off and land on my back. A few weeks ago I fell off  onto the wooden floor; it hurt like hell. I couldn't sleep because of the pain that night. I let his force wave through my feet, my knees, my hips, my back, my neck, and out through the top of my head. The movement probably looked a little bit like those inflatable plastic people that they have outside of car dealerships. He kicked it again; I did it again. He gave me a sardonic compliment; I recognized the word "circus". I raised the medicine ball above my head, held it like a javelin, and looked at him behind me. It was only 3 kilos; and wouldn't really do much to him. Still, i think he got the message and moved on. An experience that has tainted my otherwise awesome time here has been repeatedly hearing people choke out the word "senpai" through a strangle applied by another student.

I don't, and will never be able to do judo like the other students in the club. So I cannot hope to use normal techniques. I had to adapt what I had learned to my own strange physique. This has its advantages. Moving the way I do, I can give better players than me the weirds. It gives me a small, but noticeable mental advantage. But it also makes me conspicuous, and so I'm pretty much inviting this kind of treatment. Most people do not give me any trouble. Pretty much everyone has been very welcoming. And If some people speak about me in Japanese either behind my back or in front of me; I feel that it doesn't really matter. I feel that my life experiences are so different from most others, that any negative comparison is contextless. Apples and oranges. And anyway; I wont be here much longer. I have to train as hard as I can to get the most that I can out of this place; and experiences like this help me progress. I want to extend my mental and physical boundaries; if others help me in that then we are cooperating.

I'm starting to figure out how my judo could work, and more frequently how it fails. I cannot enter the blast radius within a Japanese's players (usually) shorter arm span. If I do; I cannot hope to leave it standing. They are almost invariably stronger than me and better at grip fighting. My arm span is longer than the average Japanese, and longer than the average westerners for that matter. If I can stay outside of their range, but within mine; I have a chance at success. There was a Venezuelan player I used to train with who was quite good at this. He would keep you at a distance that only he could cross with his length; and so when I was against him I spent most of the time at a disadvantage; unable to bring him in into a distance I could do something with. The rest of the time I spent picking myself up from an untidy heap on the floor. I couldn't bring the game to him because he could always push off it or otherwise avoid it. My "corpse whip" technique works a bit like this. Im getting a surprising amount of use out of it. Its surprising in that it has any utility at all. It has its limitations. I rattle players with it that are lighter than me. It doesn't work so well against players that are my own weight. It takes me just as long to recover my own balance after doing it it as it takes them, and so all it does really is provide a temporary stalemate. I tried it on a maybe 120>kg player and couldn't move him. I tried something else pretty experimental; all I ended up doing was accidentally punching him in the mouth. His tongue was bleeding and he wasn't happy about it. He threw me on my head. I figured I kind of deserved it for trying techniques that I wasn't completely sure were safe to use. If the players here are willing to bear the consequences of my weirdness I have to be grateful.

What usually happens is that me and my partner will grip battle; and then I will go for the overhand grip; because that will be all that will be left to me. Then they launch me. If I try to use my strength to evade the throw; they use their grips in such a way that my body gets contorted into awkward positions; then I cannot use any force. If i try and throw them from a short range; they slip underneath it and throw me from behind; usually in ura nage or some other backward technique. The only times that i get any success is when I fire an attack in from outside their range; unbalance them from a distance, and while they recover their balance drop in for a sacrifice. I can only do this by being as loose as I possibly can. Any amount of strength I use; they can exceed. Any amount of speed I use; they can outrun. But i think I have one advantage; I can slide around the mat like junkfood sliding down a wall. Its ugly and ungraceful; but using gravity automatically leads you to the spot of least resistance.  I think standing on the yoga ball has taught me some things about balance. You cannot use strength or force to balance; if you lock up your muscles in a reaction against a direction of unbalance; you end up pivoting off your base like a ruler balancing vertically on one corner. It just doesn't work. if you want to stand, you have to slop and flow with the movement of the ball; or it will slip from beneath you. Gravity seems to me to be the great leveller in judo. You can't do judo without it. I think judo is basically a set of preliminary techniques to the final and most important factor; to make a uke fall. A players skill and condition will benefit them when moving in any horizontal direction. Everyone here is more skilled than me, so I have to concede that I will always be outmaneuvered when moving horizontally. When moving down; everyones speed seems to be capped by gravity. You cannot move yourself any faster downwards than you can fall, unless you tape your feet to the mat, or use uke as an point to push off. When I shut my body down and only use enough force to stand; I have less between myself and gravity than my opponent. If people try to push up on me to position themselves under me; I can sometimes slop off their force, and so I can deny them any anchor for them to push off of. By keeping my balance as loose as i can, i can sometimes fall into position for a throw if I time it right, and get in first. Pretty much the only (limited amount of) throws i have gotten here so far i have gotten by moving like this punching bag.

http://i.imgur.com/Lipwcyr.gifv




The problem is; when I get sucked into the nosebleed section of grip battling; I have to move and react like my opponent to counter them. I can't do this as skilfully as them; and so I only leave this position after they ippon me. But I am beginning to see that another way is possible. Today; I went against a 100kg player. I tried gripping him; I couldn't get anything.  I tried everything I could think of. He didn't need any grip breaking techniques to rip my hands off his lapel; he could do it with a simple push. So I gambled; and abandoned my arms to his grips. I let him grip me; and let my upper body hang off me like it was paralysed. I twisted in for ko uchi gari and dropped into it. I felt his balance cupped in my right foot. I had swung my bodyweight into him using my right shoulder, and had him going backwards. The problem was; I barely ever get footsweeps, and so when I am in the position for them I never react properly. Every time I try I usually just make the movement without actually committing to the completion of the throw. This time I did the same thing and paused for a slight second. He recovered enough to take the movement and smash me into the mat backward with ura nage. It was a pretty awesome throw. It was also a good learning experience. I had the advantage; and lost it because of a moment of doubt. Unbalancing a heavier player at all without strength is an achievement in itself.  I need to pursue this further by committing to being completely relaxed. I did something similar to another player by shaping sukui nage. The head judo body changed the rules sometime ago so that leg grips are no longer legit, so I tried to do it using only my shoulder and the back of my elbow. I got his balance, but didn't commit enough to get the throw, and so he stood off it and watched as I stumbled and fell.

I woke up for training this morning feeling sore and unenthusiastic . I couldn't read Japanese well enough to know that today was going to be a technical class. It turned out that one of the teachers who had arrived to instruct the class was Yasuhiro Yamashita. I was pretty stoked. Its amazing that I even get to see him at all; let alone participate in a class that he was teaching. He spend about 30 minutes talking about o soto gari. He's pretty much the the ultimate authority on that throw. I wish my Japanese was good enough to understand his explanations. I got like the vaguest gist of what was going on. I drilled his approach on someone in uchikomi. It felt good; I would have to drill it a lot; but notwithstanding the language barrier I could see it was good advice. Later, I had a round of randoori with a russian player. I tried Yamashita's skipping o soto gari, he kept flinging me backwards.

I have had this problem troubleshooted a thousand times before by a thousand different people, and they all say the same thing. It happens because I neglect to do anything with my lapel grip. It sucks knowing why you are failing, and yet still not be capable of uprooting the bad habit and fixing it. I knew if I hadn't got o soto gari in my 7 years of training; i wasn't going to magically get it because I listened in to a famous judoka's opinion on it. So I tried my idea. I went in again for the outside o soto gari; my opponent went to counter with a backward throw. I dropped my hips like I had just been shot with a tranquillizer dart. Gravity vacuumed me onto the side of his hip. From there i got my foot behind his left leg; and threw him backward in the momentum of his counter. It was pretty cool. My glory was also very short lived. He threw me at least 5 times more before the round was over. If I walk out of the club having thrown anyone once; no matter how dirty; I leave happy.

I am trying to focus all of my training to manipulate and harness gravity. I can't catch up with the physical training that everyone has done here. Gravity is the only plausible area I think I can expect to be competitive in. Having said this; I don't really want to stick to sacrifice throws. It makes me too predictable.They are high risk and usually low return. I think there are plausible avenues i can take to use my falling body weight and remain standing after a throw. I don't have the skill to do it yet. But I want to develop it.

The Corpse Whip

I was well enough to go back to training this week. I feel good. I haven't had an alcoholic drink in maybe 2 weeks. I feel much better mentally. If I tape my knee up tightly and put some deep heat on it, I don't feel any pain in it at all. For about a month; I had to sit out and watch the other players train. It was boring and demoralizing; but it was a good way to learn. I watched the other students throw each other in randoori. It gave me ideas; it was a good learning experience to see how skilled players use their techniques; how they fail in using them; and how they adapt them to their own purposes. For the most part; Japanese people have low slung hips and short arms. They have upper bodies like crabs and hips like bulldozers. This kind of physique is perfect for Judo. I am not built this way; I have the physique of a newborn giraffe. I'm all knobbly knees; wobbly balance, and kneck.

One night, I watched a 70, or maybe 80 kg player throw another in right ko-uchi gari. He got his left foot into position behind uke's, and tried to break his balance over it. Uke jigotai-ed his balance back into stability. Then I watched the attacking player do something cool. He pushed off the mat with his right foot; and let that force roll through his own body toward his head. Like a wave in a bath; this force bounced back off the top of his skull and sloshed back down his body into his left foot. Then he transferred this force into Uke's foot and swept it out from underneath him.  Uke tried jigotai-ing again; but this force was too low to try and block with his hips; and so he fell. I watched a player use his own body like it was a whip, he diverted energy through his body like he was a jelly that had been slapped. I thought it was awesome; and it gave me an idea.

For about two weeks or so; instead of training with the other players I have been doing my own thing off to the side. A lot of the exercises I do make me look like a lunatic. I'm trying to develop a style of judo so unusual that the other players won't have a context to place it in when I use it against them. People look at me wierdly; but divert their gaze when i am looking in their direction. In a way it is liberating. I get that kind of look regardless of what I do. I have blond eyebrows; a weird bent posture, and ghost white skin. I look radically different to the standard Japanese person; I may as well be a martian. If I sat quietly off to the side; I would get these looks. If I started pigging out on horse manure; I would get the exact same looks. Once I accepted that these looks were a natural and inevitable concomitant of coming and training in this place; then all my fear of embarrassment evaporated. There is no point for me to try and avoid it; I must embrace it as an ordinary part of life. And so I feel completely free of any kind of social pressure; because anything I might do would result in the same outcome.

Recently I became capable of standing on a yoga ball while catching medicine balls. During training one night I saw Nobuyuki Sato talking to someone else. I was watching them out of the corner of my eye. He had his arms out in front of him; as if balancing on something; and looking in my direction. I think I heard the word "ii barance". No idea if he was talking about what I hope he was talking about; but I'm willing to delude myself that he was.

Ive been drilling one particular exercise. I kneel in seiza on the yoga ball; and throw my balance forward. I fall over my base and extend my body over the ball. Then I recover my balance by slamming my hands into the yoga ball, and regain control on all fours. If you miss the right spot; you fall over, head first. I like the feel of this exercise; it feels almost exactly like being thrown in tai-otoshi. If you fight the momentum of your unbalance; you fall on the floor and it hurts like hell. If you slosh your body, as if it were a garbage bag filled with water, and cooperate with the momentum of the movement; you can guide it and re balance yourself.

I had a teacher in Australia show me a way to unbalance opponents by relaxing your arms. He would get his grip on me, then he would loosen his arms until they were floppy. Then he would use his hips to whip them against you. He would use his arms too; but not in a way I was used to. When I grappled with people, my muscles would tense up as if trying to lift something heavy. This made me strong, but also made my balance very brittle, and my teacher often unbalanced me with ease. He would not use raw force. Instead he would use a quick burst of power, like he was throwing a light ball. This power would traverse the lengths of his relaxed arms and unbalance me. It took me a few years to understand how it worked. It felt really powerful, and so I tried to emulate it by using my strength. It never worked. I couldn't understand how someone nearly double my age could be twice as strong as me. It took a long time for me to understand that what he was doing was shutting down all resistance in his arms so that a small force could travel unimpeded from him into me. 

Most of the Japanese people I train with that look to be around my weight are shorter, stockier, and stronger than me. They have a strict gym regime, they have guns. Because they have short arms, they can use their elbows like can openers. They concentrate a lot of power into their grips. Every time I try grip battling with them; I may as well be grip battling with a crab. It's just not a good idea; it doesn't end well for me if I try. So I think I have come up with a way to get around this. I call it "the corpse whip".

I am trying to adapt my teachers balance breaking technique into something I can use to transfer power throughout my whole body. When I start a round of randoori with someone; I start stumbling, and making a show of being unstable. I cross my feet; I lean sideways. My opponent gets wierded out. I grab my opponents lapel. Before my opponent can start methodically prying my grip apart; I shift my feet, and push off the mat. I let this force wave through my legs, hips, then body. Then it arrives into my hands. Then I pitch my balance into them deliberately. Doing this; I gain the power of my body weight and the strength in my arms. Like this, I can force heavier players to adjust their balance to react to me. The key is to shut your body down so that you are only using barely enough muscle to stand. If you are completely loose, any force you or your opponent uses will wave through you like ripples on water. People laugh when they watch me do this. I look insane. But it seems to work.

On Wednesday; I was standing off to the side waiting to get a round of randoori. The other students kept choosing other players. It feels a lot like being back in school, being the last kid to be chosen to join the team for the mandatory PE class exercise. When a team from the UK was here; their coach would yell to the visiting players to run onto the other players and bow them on if they weren't being chosen. I have started doing this; it works. I ran up to Varlam Liparteliani, a visiting judoka from Georgia; and bowed him on. He let me do the round with him. I'm not entirely sure what it is about judo that I love so much; but this has to be one part of it. I love that it is possible for me to train one on one with a European Judo Championship gold medalist. I went against him armed with an idea and the experience of having watched my favorite Jackie Chan movie twice.

Going against such a skilled player was a good opportunity to explore the justification behind my training goals. There is no throw that I know that he wouldn't have trained at least 10 times more than me. I cannot outrun him, I cannot outmaneuver him. My only chance against him would be if I derailed the thread of the round and took him to a place where his experience would not help him. If I try and play the game that he is employed to play, I will certainly lose. My only chance to succeed would be to make him play my game.

The round started; and I started staggering like a black out drunk. He had been watching me while I did this for a few weeks, and so he knew what it was. He smirked through his breathlessness. He was exhausted from many rounds of randoori with the heavy weight players.  I got the first grip; and started repetitively corpse whipping him. It was like the inverse of jigotai; I was deliberately throwing my balance into him to destabilize his stance. He had to move to avoid me; it was working. The corpse whipping itself wasn't all that difficult; but recovering my balance afterward required a lot of speed and maneuvering. I felt exhausted after a few minutes of this. Once my lungs started to shut down; my movements lagged; and he got the overhand grip on me. Once that happened; I was playing his game and had no chance of escaping his throws. He threw me maybe 3 or 4 times in some variant of hip throw.

We stood again; and I corpse whipped him; and moved into a deliberately sloppy seoinage. He stepped off it to his right to avoid it. As he did this; I let my momentum carry me behind him. I stuck my right foot behind his left foot and did some kind of sloppy yoko gake. I fell onto the ground before my momentum had actually traveled though my arms and into him. He had his back to the direction of the throw; and so I unbalanced and threw him. I'm still patting myself on the back over it. It was ugly as hell. I am not sure if he let me do it or not. But you don't get to throw a internationally famous athlete every day. We stood again and he continued to methodicaly wipe the mat with my back. After we finished; he said half to his coach; half to me, "he is strong".

I am not delusional; it is not possible for me to be half as strong as a judo athlete. But I think I am beginning to see how you can get strength, body weight and balance to cooperate with one another. If you can guide them into one unified force; it becomes more powerful than anything you can do with strength alone. It is not easy. But i think it is possible.

I am working on another variant of this technique; if I can get it to work I will call it "the back handed apology". I tried a grip breaking technique in randoori last night; I call it 'the crab hammer". It works but is too unsafe to use yet; but i think it has potential to develop into a good opening for sode tsukuri komi goshi. The yoga ball keeps giving me ideas; so I will keep using it. I want to see where it can take me.