2010 Karate-do Youth Development Training Camp (Japan)
By Anna Lee & Claire Macdonald
There’s nothing like training in sub-zero temperatures at the top of a mountain, while surrounded by screaming Japanese students of suspiciously ninja-like speed. It sounds like a scene from The Karate Kid, but it’s something we actually got to experience as members of group who went over to train in Japan in January 2010. With our luggage stuffed full of karate equipment and toy koalas, and our passports in hand, we embarked on the biggest adventure of our karate-lives so far!
It all began with quite a fiasco as far as flights were concerned, because the team’s flight was cancelled twice! So we had to stay over in Coolangatta for a night. Finally arriving at 8pm the next day, Osaka was nicely chilly at 7° and immediately we were amazed by all the strange wonders Japan had to offer: most notably their toilets in the hotel rooms (heated! I’ve never felt so comfortable in the bathroom!), pre-packaged rice balls stuffed with condiments and vending machines that serve hot drinks. The streets were very clean, and the people were all politely quiet. Even the traffic was not noisy. Karate training wasn’t the only thing we got to experience while in Japan. While in Osaka we had our fill of shopping, eating and sightseeing (and found ourselves gravitating towards the electronics district more than once, looking for cheap gadgets). We went on a bus tour and visited temple markets, saw Osaka castle, and made our own Japanese pancakes (okonomiyaki) for lunch.
The school we went to, Meitoku Gijuku, is in a little town called Kochi, on the island of Shikoku, a five hour bus trip from Osaka. It is nestled on the top of the mountains, where it feels like you’re isolated from the rest of civilization, a very fitting backdrop for our karate experience! When we got there, the Meitoku karate team was waiting for us, ready to settle us in. We were all very nervous, and made sure we greeted each other with respect, as we were under the watchful eye of the senseis and teachers. The boys went to stay in the Japanese boys’ dormitories; they got to experience first hand what dormitory life was like (which included a lot of cleaning and military-style roll-call!). Since there were only five girls, we stayed in the school’s hotel instead – a Japanese-style room with tatami mats and traditional futon beds. The Japanese girls from the karate team came over to stay with us for the duration of our visit. Apart from the intense training and crazy waking up time, sometimes it got to be like a huge sleepover! In the morning when we woke up it was still dark and we actually had to be careful not to slip on the ice that formed overnight on the pathways to the cafeteria!
While at Meitoku, we learnt some Japanese during school classes, and did activities such as ikebana (flower-arranging), shodou (calligraphy), and we made mochi (sweet rice-cakes). We ate meals in the school cafeteria along with all the other students, including young sumos-in-training, baseball-players, and even some Australian exchange students from Sydney!
A typical day was very long:
AM
5:30 Get up
6.00 Set up breakfast at the dinner hall. We would sit with our clubs for breakfast and dinner.
6.45 Short assembly with greeting, thanksgiving prayers and announcements
7.00 Eat our breakfasts, with the staple of rice or bread, and side dishes of soup, pickled vegetables, sometimes even cold fish and the distinct cultural dish, “natto”, fermented soya-beans.
8.15 Get on a bus to go to school
8.45 - 9.30 Lesson 1 – We too had classes when the Japanese students were at school. Our lessons were language lessons, to get us speaking, as well as cultural lessons, such as flower arranging, calligraphy and sushi making. Eventually, we even got the chance to go to a shopping centre to practice buying things with the Japanese we had just learnt.
9.40 – 10.25 Lesson 2
10.35 – 11.20 Lesson 3
11.30 – 12.15 Lesson 4
PM
12.15 – 1.15 Lunch time! In every class, some students would go to the canteen to fetch our bento box lunches and tea, reminding me of the lunch monitors we had in primary school to get the lunch orders!
1.15 – 2.00 Lesson 5. At the end of the lesson, the Japanese students spend the next half an hr to sweep up their classrooms and all the corridors, looking after their school.
2.30 Bus back to the dormitories; we’d quickly change, grab our stuff and run to training
3.10 Be at training. The Japanese team were there 10 minutes earlier, with buckets and rags out to clean the jigsaw mats before and after each training. It is very important that the training area was clean of blood, dust, etc, not only as a part of the discipline of this way of life, but also the responsibility in being part of this team.
6.00 – 7.00 Dinner at the dining hall. After setting up dinner and everyone is seated, everyone in the karate team only begin to eat when the captain has clapped his hand together twice and announced “itadakimasu!” We noticed that all the karate students held their chopsticks in their left-hands to eat; turns out they did it solely for the purpose of extra hand-eye coordination training! The Japanese kids really did eat, sleep and breathe karate!
In between: Extra training, sometimes we were invited to train at the Blue Dragon Dojo with Matsubara sensei and all the kids.
11.30 Sleep!!!! (Finally!)
Karate training with the Meitoku students was such an eye-opening experience. The atmosphere created by their voices; kiai-ing, encouraging each other on, cheering and clapping was amazing, and on top of that was their energy and the amazing speed of their karate. Training involved a lot of focus on kumite, doing drills such as ‘uchikomi’ (which is a flurry of techniques across the hall, but still with the one-hit-one-kill mentality), ‘oikomi’ (pushing your opponent back with continuous punches, focusing on the rotation of your hip), kihon, and strengthening exercises. With at least three hours of training per day, and more on the weekend, we trained the hardest we’d ever trained! The training was long and tough, but another challenge, both mentally and physically, was keeping dynamic and moving in freezing temperatures! Outside, the puddles had formed into ice, the dojo hall was like a huge tin hangar, and we only had our gis (and for some of us our thermal skins) on. Once you stopped moving, your body would freeze up immediately – you could actually see the steam coming off us as we trained!
On the Sunday, we had a friendship competition, where children from local dojos were invited to compete and meet the Australian team. The highlight was probably the demonstration team katas by a select few of the Meitoku students, as well as the senior kumite demonstration. The Meitoku students won almost every bout, but Johan did the Australian team proud with an amazing ushirogeri and won his friendly match, to a chorus of excited Australian screams! The Meitoku team katas (a boys and girls team) were amazing and Oishi-sensei had them all doing extra training sessions to be able to move exactly in time, and to show the application of kata movements in a fighting situation.
Throughout our time at Meitoku, we did a number of amazing (did I say amazing? I meant difficult!) exercises we’d never tried before, including doing bounce squats in a circle and maegeri kicks with our ankles connected to a thick elastic rope (our legs definitely benefited from those). One of the most amazing things about seeing the Japanese team train was their team spirit. When one person was lagging behind, the entire team would yell and cheer them on. There was no moment when they weren’t giving it their all, particularly the Japanese team Captain, Tatsuyoshi (or Tatsu, for short). Tatsu was sort of like Oishi-sensei’s right hand man, and it was Tatsu who explained to us how to do a lot of the exercises and drills. Seeing Tatsu and the other Meitoku students training so hard really pushed the Australians to work harder and move faster, under the watchful eye of Oishi-sensei, the Japanese coach. Although his English wasn’t amazing (in our experience, it was limited mostly to ‘high speed’, ‘more power!’ and ‘no! faster!’) Oishi-sensei demonstrated what he wanted us to do, sometimes using the students to demonstrate and explain what we were doing wrong, and how we could improve. When he wasn’t terrifying us with his Japanese-mafia-style yelling, he showed a lot of concern for making sure that we were all working as a team and giving it our best.
Not only that; the Japanese students themselves were very helpful and gave us all tips on how to improve our personal technique. We did hundreds of maegeri kicks over the time we spent there, and by the end Oishi-sensei said (in Japanese, of course) that our kicks were all much better than when we started. More importantly, by the last training he explained that we had focused our energy as a group and become more of a team than when we arrived. When somebody was having trouble or two students were doing a kumite drill, both the Australians and the Japanese students would cheer as one. What was particularly inspiring was the fact that most of the Japanese students hadn’t been doing karate for as long as we’d expected – some of the girls we asked had only been training between 2-5 years! To see how much they’d achieved in such a comparatively short time was awe-inspiring, and really showed how much effort can make a difference! By the end of the trip the Australians were joining in to the Meitoku cheers (to the point that some of us were singing them in our sleep, according to the Meitoku students).
The most amazing thing we learnt was how much spirit can make a difference. By putting in maximum effort and training as hard as we could, we found that we improved even in the short space of time while we were there. More importantly, we learnt how we could train hard in the future upon our return to Australia. Oishi-sensei used the Japanese term zanshin, which describes a state of total awareness. It is this mindset that we need to use in our training every day – being ready and willing to train our hardest!
Oss!
