UCL Lost Boys

A nice short picture post for you. This is what happened to my umbrella when a minor Typhoon went through Tokyo last week and took a dislike to it:

Here we go again! All the fun of the god damned fair. Japanese summer is on it’s way, so that means climbing temperatures again…..it’s 26 degrees already. Wank. One guy in our office got sandwiched on the bus yesterday and arrived in the office looking like someone had thrown a bucket of water over him. And he loved it. Time to switch the old air con on again soon I think! The trains have started doing it, but so far they are keeping the top of my head a vageuly respectable temperature, and not giving me freezer burns on my scalp. Yet.

The dojo is starting to get fruity now too. It’s going to be the season for Topical Fungal Infection (TFI!!!) which is currently Matt Watkinson’s favourite buzzword: Topical. Twat. In fact, a Topical Twat.

At least all the honeys out and about are wearing respectably skimpy clothing now. Mmmmm, legs.

Have you ever searched yourself on Google?

The first link that is definately me (linking the BKA webpage) is on page 12. This shows 2 things:

2) There are many Stuart Gibsons in the world, none of whom are me. Well, except one.

and

f) I am clearly not important enough.

I just moderated (read deleted!) 83 comments for posts on this forum. 80 were for mobile phone ringtones (including, still, the crazy fucking frog. What the fuck is it with you people?! Yes, you lot who purchase ring tones. The crazy frog?! Fucking chavs! ) and 3 were for gay porn. Lovely. It’s nice to see my target audience is finally getting interested.

Weeeeee! Happy Birthday me!

2 days ago I turned the ripe old age of 28. Congratulations Mois.

For my birthday, I ate 3 packets of high quality Miyazaki black pig and got the mother of all meat sweats. I didn’t even have space for cake, and my belly looked like it could fall off. Dam that was a lot of meat! And to top it off, we’ve still got two packs of the sliced meat left and 3 big packs of sausages!

MEAT!

Took me until today to have a proper shit though….

Not actually a week at all, but still a glorious set of 4 public holidays in a row. Luverly Jubbly! Love a bit of Del Boy*

*I spoke with a guy about sheepskin today (while on the subject of Del Boy). He was extolling the virtues of sheepskin slippers. Fucking Wierdo.

So, for my first Golden Week, the missus and I went to stay with a certain policeman and his family in Osaka for 3 days, to go back and forward to the Kyoto Taikai, a massive demonstration Event that is over 100 years old. To cut a long story very short, it’s a lot of kendo, with demo’s from people Renshi and upwards. There you go.

Arrived on saturday at 5.30ish, and by 5.40 had a beer in my hand. Good start, and things got better from there! Saturday’s theme was pretty much beer and meat. No kendo. Just strips of fried goodness washed down with chilled blessings. Mmmmmm, holy food.

Sunday, finally went to Kyoto. My friend had blagged us into a little keiko kai that his teacher goes to every year at the Kyoto Taikai, that actually turned out to be a keiko kai exclusively for people who all passed their hachidan exam on the same day some point 5-10 years ago at the Kyoto Taikai. I was half the age of EVERYONE in this keiko kai, but it was absolutely fucking ace! I practised with Ishizuka sensei (Current Osaka riot police dad), Eguchi Sensei (turbo 8th dan midget – he’s so wee!), Endo sensei (This years 8th dan champ. I beat him in ippon shoubu…….) and Toda sensei (God). It was top, and I felt totally washed out by it too. A week later, 3 different people from my dojo in Tokyo told me they’d seen me there, and then said “And how the hell did you end up with those guys?!” Connections, baby. Connections….

Then we went back to Osaka for Sushi, Pizza and Beer. And I had a huge poo in this guy’s lav that needed a double flush. I got Sushi sweats too. Like the meat sweats, but with rice and fish.

Next morning was Asageiko at the Budo centre next door to the butokuden (where they do the taikai). So I woke up at the joyuos hour of 4am. On a monday, after drinking too much and having the Sushi-sweats. To say that I didn’t exactly feel chipper would be something of an understatement. We got a lift to Kyoto with one of my mates current colleagues, and one of his kohai jumped in too. (He tried to out drinking-story me, but I feel that I won and up held UCL pride with a double whammy of Drunken Batman Quaser Laser and getting thrown out of a bowling alley dressed like old ladies after Joe vommed in an ashtray. UCL 1 Osaka Police 0).

Asageiko was actually pretty dam top. I had a go with 5 hachidans, and then my pal too, who usually kicks my ass back to London. All good baby, all good!

Once asageiko was done, we went to the Butokuden (it’s nowhere near as big as I imagined it, and everyone who is not a ZNKR official stands!) to watch the last day, the hachidans. We got in a good 3 hours, and I heard some choice statements too:

“Bloody hell, he’s a big fella.”

“He might be a fatty, but thats a quick men!”

“Gibbo, stop pushing me!”

“You did well to get here from Iran” “Shut the fuck up, Gibbo!”

“He’s got a kamae like a proffesional wrestler.”

“It must be the jetlag from your flight from Iran” “Shut the fuck up, Gibbo!”

All good. A totally knackering 3 days, but well worth it. Next time, I might try and fit in a little more kendo though…..3 days and I did a total of about an hour and 40 minutes….oops!

Sometimes, in my long winded rants about Japanese trains, I tend to forget that this blog is actually on a KENDO website. Maybe I’ll forget what kendo is soon, and just right the Yamanote san round and round for 2 hours after work instead. I might stand a chance of getting a seat that way. Ahem. Anyway…….

 I have two longish walks every morning, 20 minutes to the train station, and then when I get off 15 minutes to the office. Thats 35 minutes a day, 175 minutes a week, or 9100 minutes a year. Fuck me thats a lot.

Anyway, I spend much of this time thinking about my kendo, especially on keiko days. I also saw a video of my shiai from a recent Competition (the one in February, in Chiba) which has given me much food for thought.

My Feet

After watching the video especially, they just have to go. Or at least change, if they went I’d have to take up snooker or something. The video gave me stark highlights of the 2 major problems with my footwork at the moment. First, my legs are too far apart. For those of you with semi-pronographic images of me with a kamae like I’m sat down on a birthing coach, think again.

This also means I end up bending my left leg a lot, which is just not good, because it lowers my kamae, and also makes it bloody obvious when I’m going to attack. The other problem, which is a kind of side effect, is that my left heel is often too high as a result, thereby reducing my cutting distance accordinlgy.

My Kamae

This I am actually quite happy with, apart from my little finger on my left hand, which I’m putting mucho effort in to fixing, so that my tsuka-gashira (the end of the handle) doesn’t poke out of the bottom of my kote.

I spent an hour on Tuesday sanding down the end of the tsuka to be slightly rounder and oh so slightly thinner, so that I can hold the thing more comfortably, and also properly right at the end and not a centimetre in. And I’ve started using proper fatty shinai too. This combination has probably had the biggest effect on my kendo that I think anything has since I started. The result of the shaved fatty (now THAT will bring some bizarre searches heading this way from google….) is that I am finally, after only 9 years, truly happy with my shinai. This also means that I don’t need to fight the shinai to move it, and therefore don’t need to physically exert much strength to move it. SO, I can relax. This was another one of them “Aaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” moments, and actually gave my kendo a minor speed up too. The resulting relaxation in my shoulders and arms also now means that my techniques all come out that much easier that I can now concentrate far more on my opponent than myself. Really, this is a massive step forward for me.

Going forward and backwards

Or more accurately, why stepping back is a bad thing. I’ve also finally figured this out too, and it too a fucking massive beating at the hands of a riot rozzer to figure it out too. It’s quite simple really. Against someone better and faster, if you step back, you lose. I hadn’t experienced it quite to the degree I did last weekend, which illustrated quite nicely the effects. I think I had a valley carved in to my forehead by this guy. And it also reinforced my understanding of stepping in to, because when I didn’t have much idea or forethought, and just stepped in, he twatted me again. Big learning.

I also read a quality article about debana waza (with pictures!) in Kendo Jidai too. Lot’s of stuff by lots of very good people (Ishida Toshiya, Sato Hiromitsu, Eiga Hideyuki, Chikamoto Takumi – ie all quite good…) about what they do and what and how they think about debana waza. More goodness. See as I benkyou. This article bizzarely contained some much that is relevant to my current line of my-kendo questioning it was uncanny.

The way I cut

Yamanaka Sensei : “Oi Gibson” – He actually did say that

Mois : “Yeeeeeers?”

Yamanaka Sensei : “You break a lot of shinai, don’t you?”

Me : “Eeeerrrrrr, maybe?”

Yamanaka Sensei : “Try this” shows Oi Gibson a far superior way of cutting.

Me : “Aha!”

And thats that!

So I get loads of time to think about stuff, and this, combined with roughly dick all in the responsibility department, suddenly means that kendo is fun all over again. Weeeeee! I’m just doing kendo for me again, and it’s great!

Let’s see if I feel that way in a month shall we…..

People who read this pile of shit regularly will have no doubt been long amused by my atrocious spelling. “How can a kendo god like Gibbo (YEAH!) not be able to spell the word “The” properly?” you might ask yourselves? Well, there is a short answer:

 I neither know, nor care.

 But I have noticed one thing, almost all my errors revolve around the ltter E? Why is this? My name contains no E (neither do any of the derogatory terms often applied to me…) so maybe thats it. I life destined to contain no E.