Uncertainty Lies Ahead

This afternoon I trekked out to Ayase for the Shin-nen Keikokai (New Year Training). I realized a few things (nothing new, so feel free to skip this post) as the day wore on, and my rambling thoughts kept dominoing until finally tonight I feel lower than canine excrement.

I'm spoiled. That's one thing. How am I spoiled, do you ask? That's a very just question with a very simple answer. I'm a member of two organizations here in Tokyo that teach traditional budo (martial arts). One organization, the Aikikai, is absolutely enormous. The ratio of advanced practitioners to beginners is fairly well balanced at the Aikikai headquarters. Whenever I get on the mat, even when the turn out is lower than usual, I have my pick of incredibly advanced and knowledgeable aikidoka to choose from for serious in-depth training.

The other organization hasn't been around as long, and the members tend to be on the immature side. My aikido training over the past eleven years has helped me develop a specific method for picking up techniques. Watch, mimic, ingrain, advance. Rinse, lather, repeat. The integrity of this training method fails miserably when applied to the other (iai) organization. The backbone of this method relies on the presence of noticeably advanced practitioners (watch'em, emulate'em, if it works, pound it into your brain and body, and then voila! you get better) who are for the most part nonexistent in my iai school. If you read this far, then you know this is something I've written about many times before. By now you're saying to yourself, "Too bad I bookmarked this page!" Oh, wait, no you're not. No one ever reads this site to begin with!

I don't know how I fell into this slump, but I did. Since I started thinking about all this b.s. (again) today, I realized that this problem I keep struggling with isn't going to go away. Perhaps the origin of such stress comes from external factors, such as, not having any friends who are around my age here in Tokyo who think the way I do or enjoy the things I enjoy. It dawned on me about an hour ago that I have few social outlets (if any). Most of my budo friends are at least 8 to 10 years older, have serious, high paying jobs and familial responsibilities. I don't have any friends my age who do budo. Even my non-budo friends are in that higher age range, and I often feel like the naive younger brother rather than someone to hang with.

It's difficult to just "enjoy my training," as the Bucho put it to me earlier this afternoon, when I have no one to really enjoy it with who sees things from my point of view. And it's not just the training, but the society that is Japan too. Most of my older friends have been in Japan so long that they "no longer give a shit," as they say. God knows how many times I've voiced my opinion about some aspect of Japanese culture and received a lecture rather than empathy. Even something as mundane as, "It's a shame that Japanese children have to wear uniforms and endure military-like discipline in school. Superficially they seem to be discouraged from having any individuality. I think the education system should be more open minded," receives a slap on the wrist for being too critical. The rebuttal to a remark like this is often, "Those uniforms allow all children to be equal in school and even help them stay safe when walking home from school. Without this kind of discipline, a Japanese child would not be able to contribute to society in the future." Ok, nice debate, but do I have to have one every time I make a passing remark about some insignificant observation that I'll stop caring about 20 minutes down the line? I get retorts like this even from my American and other non-Japanese friends. To make a long story short(er), it's impossible to vent when no one sees eye to eye with you. I've also been accused by a Japanese friend of being a stuck up, patriotic American who thinks everything American should be the world standard. This is a friend who I thought was a sympathetic ear at first, but ended up mistaking my examples of comparatively better experiences in the US for Billy Bob Joe, confederate flag-waving propaganda. Let's get one thing straight, I like America, but not enough to live there. That's why I live HERE. But Japan ain't perfect either, is my point. Maybe people are just sick of hearing me bitch. Who knows? "Who cares," is more like it.