|
|
2001-06-13 - 11:29 p.m. It's late, I'm tired, I don't know if the apostrophe key is working on this keyboard (whoever heard of a keyboard without a working apostrophy key?) [N.B I've gone back and fixed all the apostrophy stuff.) but I'm really really happy because my Aikido practice was, for pretty much the first time since I got to Japan, fantastic. I am not, oddly enough, by nature, an active person. More specifically, left to my own devices, I'm a lazy slob. Which is why this whole Aikido thing has been so good and so weird for me. For the first time in my life I'm doing something seriously active and enjoying it. Of course, this is all aided and abetted by the fact that, in the States, my Aikidojo is very...friendly, I guess would be the right word. Everyone's very relaxed, everyone's obviously there to have a good time, etc., not so much physically as emotionally. Myself, being a relaxed, good time kind of guy, fit pretty much right in, despite the difficult physicality of it. Which was why coming to Japan was something of a shock. The people here are very much here to practice a sport, and are not at all relaxed about it. They enjoy it, but they enjoy it as participants, and they take their enjoyment very seriously. And the thing about it is that I've never been good at sports. I was one of the legion children picked last at sports (if you ever counted up all the kids picked last at sports, and then compared it to the number of sports games played by those kids, I'm certain the numbers wouldn't add up somewhere) and I was picked last for a good reason: I was terrible. It's sort of a vicious cycle. You're bad at sports. You play sports, and feel bad because you're bad at sports. You don't really improve. And your range of sports as a kid is pretty limited. Baseball, basketball, etc. All bad sports for kids who are bad at sports to begin with, because it puts them in the position of "weakest link on the team." And by that time, even individual sports don't really help. My parents put me in Aikikai when I was really young, which should have been perfect for me. Looking back I don't understand why I didn't really take to it, but I do remember telling my parents that I didn't want to do it anymore. Once you've lost (or maybe never gained) a love of physical activity, it's hard to find it (or gain it) again. And so I grew up with this sort of basic blind terror of anything that reeked too much of strenuous activity. And I'm sure I still have it. But it's nice to know that at least for now, at least here, it's gone. It sounds dumb, but something about today (we didn't do anything out of the ordinary) just failed to terrify me. Maybe it was just that we did drills on things that I know, so at least I have some understanding of what's going on, but for the first time since I've gotten to Japan I walked out of that place feeling like I'd really achieved something, really learned something. Anyway. I know it must be pretty boring to read, but it's a big deal for me. It's a bit like finally feeling welcome at the dojo, finally feeling like I'm not so much of an outsider. It's been so easy for me to kind of...keep my head down and just hope that practice would finish soon, and it's nice to be past that stage, at least a little. After practice, the kid that I'd been doing drills with came up to me and gave me a high five. I don't think anyone has ever done that before. It's weird. Oh, and to top it all off, after practice we went out to dinner on the club's dime. They were feting a new student, and they invited us, or possibly we invited ourselves, I'm unclear on the point. The dojo itself, in case anyone was wondering, is a beautiful space. I can be effusive about it now that I belong there a little bit. It's a big wide open room, flat, with a strip of polished wooden floor running around the outer edge and green and red plastic tatami-like mats covering the floor. There are two pillars, with padding on them, and there's a mirror at one end of the room. Along one side of the wall hangs a portrait of Tomiki-sensei, a certificate which I assume is the dojo's permit to operate, and a long indecipherable scrawl, all three of which are framed. Everything is done in shades of industrial-complex-workout-room, except for the picture and the three frames, which seem more than a little out of place. There are shelves lining the wall closest to the door, and a shelf of little cubbyholes for your shoes. I've been dead-tired all day, which is weird because I went to be early last night, but I guess I'm still getting over my jetlag. On Monday night Oren and I left work and ended up wandering around Shibuya-cho for most of the evening. Imagine a place where giant beautiful angels live on the sides of buildings, having taken human form long enough to tell you that what you really want to do is buy whatever it is that they're selling before dissolving into whirling clouds of neon light and product placement. That's Shibuya. It's where money goes to die. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a deep and perverse appreciation for the mechanics of consumerism. There's something about the flat plastickyness of a TV ad or a movie star that stirs something in me. It's a fantasy, and I've always been interested in fantasy. And Shibuya is where fantasy gets writ large, in huge neon letters across the sides of buildings. In Shibuya you can't escape the neon, the noise, or the people. It's a weird camp twist on life, where a doorway isn't just a doorway, it's a "TOTAL SALES OPPORTUNITY!!!" made so by the flashing signs which hang over everything, directing you one way or another. Now, the fantastic contradiction of all of this is that the current asthetic (which has been prevalent for a few years, long enough to make an architectural impact) is such that cool things are things which aren't popular (popular used as base, or common.) Everyone, in the new ad world, is an indivitual, with fiercely individual needs and desires, just like everyone else. So the trick is to find ads that project into a huge crowd the illusion that that particular ad is made for ONLY YOU!! It's disconserting, but beautiful in its' own way. Anyway, I'm off to bed, bone tired but really happy for the first time since I've gotten here.
|