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.
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