one month gone

It has already been a month since Liu Laoshi's last seminar in Tokyo. It was a glorious 10+ days and passed much too quickly. Now it is time to practice and consolidate and get ready for the next meeting.

How long will it be before I can go to Beijing again??? Gearing up now for moving from Japan back to the US at last, every day a blur. My taiji friend and mentor in Canada told me to live my last days in Japan to the fullest. But now there is nothing to do but work work work and get ready for the move. oh, and practice in those spare moments.

We'll be moving from our current house to a small weekly rental apartment in a few weeks, and I will have less work. time at last to start the years-delayed Liu Laoshi interview / article???

essential training equipment (8): small sticks

The ba gua dao is a weapon unique to ba gua zhang. I translate it rather loosely as “big-ass sword” because it is just pretty dang big. People love old photos of ancient Chinese masters of smaller stature standing next to swords as tall as them.

Think of a normal dao or broadsword. There is only a single blade and it is curved (in contrast to the jian, which is straight and double-bladed). It has a nice, workable length and is used in a large number of Chinese martial arts.

Then comes the ba gua dao, with the same curved single blade but much bigger and longer. In last month’s trip to Beijing, one of my goals was to learn the ba gua dao form taught by Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

I learned the form but have yet to practice it with a real ba gua dao. I had contacted my usual martial arts supply store in Beijing but they had none on hand (though, as usual, I walked out of there with a large stock of weapons, Fei Yue shoes, and the like).

We spent the first couple days working through all the praying mantis forms in his set (liu he tang lang quan). The next morning he showed up with a small branch from a tree, nothing more than a switch really. That was to be my ba gua dao. Maybe half the length, no curve, no distinction between the bladed and non-bladed sides….

No big deal for now. I learned the ba gua jian form from him in the same Beijing park in 2007 using foot-long folding fans. But at least later in that trip I was able to buy a ba gua jian at the supply shop.

The ba gua dao form is quite similar to the ba gua jian form (he created them both) so I already had most of the principles of motion down. The biggest challenge was finding and working through the differences in doing the form with a totally different kind of sword, thinking about which motions he had deleted / altered / added to take into account the shift from a straight, double-edged sword to a curved, single-edged sword.

The next day, some groundskeepers were cleaning up in the park and I found a longer branch with more curve to it – not the same as a real dao but much closer, anyhow. It felt much better than the small branch, but was still not satisfying. If any of you readers has a spare, unused ba gua dao available, do let me know.

adjusting to your environment (5)

I flew out of Tokyo as a typhoon hit the main island. My plane was delayed three hours, not too bad.

Practice started early the next morning in the Tao Ran Ting park as usual. It was raining heavily in Beijing. We usually practice outdoors but not in heavy rain. If it rains, we go inside the little tea restaurant, move some tables aside, and practice in there. But it was completely full that day. We walked across the park in the rain and found a hotel with an empty room (no easy feat in Beijing).

The space was very narrow, so all plans for ba gua zhang review / ba gua dao were set aside. Liu Laoshi ran me through several of the smaller Liu He Tang Lang Quan forms -- a little cramped but workable in the small space.

Though my intention was to focus on ba gua zhang this trip, I had also polished my mantis fist forms, and that was a good thing due to the sudden change in content.

We continued working on the tang lang forms the next day and, after reviewing all the others, I finally got started on the remaining form in the set, zhao mian deng 照面灯, whose namepiece motion bears striking similarity to a fall - back - and - attack motion found in several ba gua weapons forms. More on that later, as we get to the ba gua dao later in the trip...

The remaining days were marked by excellent practice in severe heat and humidity. The moisture finally broke one hour before my scheduled flight. Beijing AIrport was hastily shut down and we hapless travelers were marched back through immigration, customs, picked up our luggage and began the hours and hours of waiting in line, fending off line-jumpers, arranging flights the next day, fighting for a hotel room, giving up and sleeping in the airport and arriving one day late in Tokyo.

2011 Beijing

Just a quick mention for now - spent five days in the massive heat and humidity of Beijing last week, four days of good training with the boss, Liu Jing Ru Laoshi. More on that later - ba gua dao is nice, so is the 7th/final form in Liu He Tang Lang Quan.

And the boss is coming to Tokyo for his (final) annual seminar at the end of this month....

xing yi quan form of the month: bear

We have been working on the bear form for several weeks now. In the short / simplified version of the 12 animals, the bear form is combined with the eagle form. But in the set of longer, more complicated forms, the bear and eagle are separated. There are still motions where the bear blocks upward while looking up at an eagle overhead, but they remain separated.

To be honest, I wasn’t very sure about the practicality of the bear form – there seemed to be a lot of motions without much combative usefulness, which is very much unlike most xing yi quan.

But that was while just doing the form, whether reps of isolated motions are going through the whole thing. This week we basically “played” with the form, exploring how each motion could be used. And suddenly I gained a lot of respect for the bear form! The form is nice by itself, but by moving off at an angle for most defenses and attacks, instead of moving directly forward / back as in the form, everything was much more useful.

This was one of my best xing yi quan practices in a long time, and I hope we’ll spend more time like this, actively exploring applications. And not just focusing on one application (yes, that is important too) but freely mixing motions from different parts of the form.

This is part of my long-term situation. I came to Japan after 7 years’ hard training in the US, with free fighting a regular part of most practices in karate. After some years of transition here, Japanese arts to Chinese arts, I am in a wonderful training situation and am satisfied with most practices. But we don’t do any free fighting.

Someday, back in the US, I will be teaching this stuff and one of my long-term challenges will be how to convey the things I have learned here in Japan within a different country / culture, and how to add in much more fighting practice to the basics and forms I have learned.

This week’s practice was a good wake-up call to me. Forms are all fine and good but I need to be doing much more application work, and moving in the direction of training with un-cooperative partners. I have been away from that for too long. Maybe I have been sleeping like a bear and am now ready to wake up after the long winter of hibernation?

what I'm looking for

Since I started learning Six Harmonies Praying Mantis Fist from Liu Jing Ru Laoshi, I have been seeing praying mantises like I never have before. I wouldn’t begin to suggest this is some kind of Divine Sign of Mantis Approval, but it has been quite curious.

It started last summer, in the middle of Liu Laoshi’s annual visit to Tokyo. Coming home one night from a few drinks after one of my first Mantis practice (heh heh), I found a mantis on the glass door of a temporary ATM facility just outside my train station – not the usual place to find such critters. (see last year’s post)

So here he was and there I was and we communed awhile and then I decided to take him to a small park near my home where I sometimes practice – crowded spaces in front of train stations are not good habitat for mantises. He bit or clawed me or something and DAMN it hurt, even drew some blood. Maybe that was the Divine Sign of Mantis Approval? Anyway I released him in the park and hope he found a nice place to live and was not captured by insect-hunting human kids.

No big deal, probably just chance, but it kept happening.

Some months later, there was one I found on the steps of Jindaiji Temple, where I had taken my visiting mother for a visit. She must have thought me crazy as I bent to study the brilliant green creature.

This year, I found another mantis outside my mothers’ house in Texas (ironically, I had been practicing Compulsory gongfu forms – maybe he was telling me to dump the competition stuff, and return to tradition?). I lived in Texas six years as a child and don’t recall ever having seen a praying mantis in that time.

Late this autumn – well after the time they are usually to be found – I spotted another praying mantis on the side of our neighbor’s house. I have not seen any other praying mantises in our neighborhood in the nearly ten years we have been in this house. I had been practicing Compulsory Southern Fist forms…

And the best one – about a month ago at our monthly tang lang quan / mantis fist gathering in the park. Obviously I was working on a tang lang quan form at that time. I noticed something fall down from above in front of me. Lots of leaves were falling, so that was not unusual. But I noticed it in the brown carpet of leaves below – yes, another mantis, also well past the season when they are usually seen. A female, she had already given birth (I was told by our resident mantis expert). She played on my hand a bit, showing no signs of wanting to leave. I walked her over to the giant tree, placed her on the trunk, and she scampered upward at a brisk pace.

Yeah yeah, I know, we find what we are looking for and all that. If I were to start, say, snake fist, I would probably begin seeing all kinds of oh-so-symbolic and meaningful snakes all around. But there have just been too many coincidences for me.

a tough day

Kind of a rough day today, but a good one.

The Liu Jing Ru seminar is going great – but already half over, too fast as usual. He comes to Tokyo for a short two weeks each year. I had been focusing on ba gua zhang and xing yi quan but last year opted for my first taste of tang lang quan and was quite pleased.

This year I chose tang lang quan for the first two days (Saturday and Sunday). Days 3 and 4 (Tues-Wed), being in the middle of the week, have much lower attendance. Running the circuit through all three groups runs Liu Laoshi ragged, so today and tomorrow are BGZ / XYQ only, no tang lang quan.

OK, back to the ba gua zhang for me. 9:30 AM – opening remarks are short, we have all already stretched, so we are ready to circle by about 9:32. He starts with the ba gua zhang group (the XYQ people are told to review for a bit). He calls me out in front of all and has me start circling. By 9:33 I knew it was going to be a long morning. He totally reworked me on just the first main palm, completely kicked and fixed my ass.

Sure, I had sped up my ba gua zhang review in recent days, but especially after a new blast of tang lang quan to get on top of….

Anyway I survived the morning and learned a lot and all that. We are in the middle of the 64 palms which, when being learned, seem like about 647 palms but who is counting.

Good and bad news after that – I have work in Beijing (the first international “combat games”) on Friday and Saturday, fly back to Tokyo on Sunday. If I am lucky and there are no traffic jams, I will make it back just in time for the goodbye dinner on Sunday. But I will miss the last two days’ training, pian pian.

Well, I have my network set up and will pick up the BGZ and TLQ (and, in other classes, will slowly get the XYQ) that I miss on the final weekend. So I will get there in the end, but I really wish I could spend the last two days here in Tokyo with Mr. L.

More to come on his visit. And I am edging closer to FINALLY finishing my interview with him which has gone on over five sessions so far in various cities and languages.

Enough of this – time for some late night circling.

xing yi quan form of the month: tuo

I think I missed another month somewhere in there – so it goes.

The mysterious and mythical tuo – some kind of water-dwelling creature. No picture for this one, since it is after all an imaginary creature.

I have seen it referred to as being similar to any number of creatures in the past. My earlier conception was the alligator or crocodile, and the powerful swipe of its tail back and forth. Thus the zig-zag stepping of the basic form, and the hands grabbing and pulling across from side to side.

We are working on it this month in class and all references are to a water strider / whirligig or similar animal – gliding smoothly and effortlessly across the water surface. And we are edging our way into the longer, more complex version with a weird body-shaking motion – which makes more sense when stepping back to the side and slipping out of the grip of someone who has grabbed you in a bear hug from the rear.

This form has bugged and eluded me for many years, and I am glad to get a deeper look at last. It is one of the remaining animal forms Liu Jing Ru Laoshi has not taught us on his Tokyo visits. Nor will he be doing it this year, so I hope we make good progress in the form in the remaining month. Then we’ll have to wait until next year’s visit…

xing yi quan form of (last) month: horse

My ideal is to know the forms I study well enough to be able to perform any of them if asked, no preparation and no hesitation. Yeah, that and being able to actually use the applications in appropriate circumstances.

I found out how far I was from that goal on Sunday. Very nice practice, four hours of nothing but Six Harmonies Praying Mantis Fist – review of the familiar and a plunge into a new form, shuang feng (双封). Good review, good consolidation.

Then somewhere near the end of the day, someone asked about a motion from the horse form, 马形, from xing yi quan. I started…and stopped, unsure of a couple motions. A bit earlier, I had whipped out the swallow form (燕形) on demand and was glad I had been reviewing that lately. But the horse…the horse…

So I got out my notes on paper, walked through the form once and got it. Satisfying in one sense, that it came back automatically. And very dissatisfying in another sense – it was obviously nowhere near second nature. Working on the new stuff is always fun, but it is time to go back and double-check everything.

xing yi quan's 12 animal forms (1) - the swallow

It started out as a very focused practice – just the 燕形, yan xing or swallow form, one of the 12 animal forms in xing yi quan. I got to feeling pretty good with the swallow, so I moved on to 鹞形, yao xing or sparrow hawk. That got me to thinking about 鸡形, the chicken, which had been my main theme for review a couple days back.

Then I realized how often birds figure in the 12 animal forms, so I moved on to the mysterious 骀形, or tai form. The form itself is simple. But the tai is one of the mythological creatures among the 12. After that, I moved into the eagle-bear combined form, 鹰熊合形.

Why the swallow? I have been focused on the 杂式捶 zashichui form for a couple days. I learned it on one rainy day just outside the tea house, under the overhanging roof, in tao ran ting park with Liu Jing Ru Laoshi. There was a sudden, massive rain storm as I rode across Beijing from my work at the Olympics to the park in the south of the city. By the time I arrived the rains had eased up but were still falling. It was the first and only time we took shelter under the roof during our lessons.

Zashichui incorporates motions from the swallow form – swooping low then rising high on one leg, soaring through the air and landing low again…running through those motions, I knew it was time to review the swallow form in its entirety.

My first practice of the new year, on the morning of January 1, focused on the nan quan form I will be demonstrating again in a week, and on the zashichui form. Tonight’s review session was the follow-up: the swallow, the sparrow hawk, and so on, through the five birds.

But why stop there? I had hot water in the thermos and a while before dinner. I worked on through all 12 animals, finishing with the monkey form (my namesake, having been born in the Year of the Monkey) just as dinner was served. The horse, snake, and the mythological tuo (鼍形)…and the tiger and dragon of course (the first ones we learned).

Tomorrow: more of the same but with more focus. But who knows – once you get started, it is hard to stop.

Photo: The bottle on the left is “Yanjing Pijiu” – Yanjing is an old / alternate name for Beijing and could be translated as swallow capital or swift capital. Beijing is (was) famous for the swallows / swifts which used to fly about everywhere before massive construction changed the landscape. The beer itself is a light lager and one of the best sellers in Asia.

Reading about the disappearing swifts (search for article at danwei.org) reminded me that Liu Laoshi told me a story about how he loved the swifts which used to be seen everywhere in Beijing. But their numbers have been so decimated that sightings of swifts sometimes make the news.

And another story. Two summers back, I met a friend for a long walk around the Forbidden City, there in the heart of Beijing. We admired a section of water (pond? moat?). She told me that when she was a young girl, people who lived in the neighborhood used to come ice skating when the water froze over. But, due to global warming, it has not frozen over for years. These stories got me thinking about why some martial arts traditions flourish and thrive, while others are lost. More on that at another time.

mantis

OK people, this is too strange.

I started six harmonies praying mantis fist (liu he tang lang quan 六合螳螂拳) today with Liu Laoshi. I have had my eye on it at each year’s seminar (2006, 2007, 2008) but have kept a respectful distance. As you may have surmised, I have a few martial arts to work on and struggle with the breadth vs. depth question everyday. So I have focused entirely on bagua zhang and xingyi quan on all of Liu Laoshi’s visits to Tokyo (and on my visits to him in Beijing).

An email with a close gong fu and budo friend from Tokyo changed everything. He may visit some of Liu Laoshi’s seminar dates for the first time, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to work on something like this with a good friend. Turns out he might only be able to come for a day or two, but I have jumped in and committed myself all the way.

Actually I am getting some good xingyi quan review in along the way, in addition to as much ba gua zhang as I can swipe from the sidelines (I will catch it all later in the review classes, but it is nice to get a taste now).

Each year only a few people opt for mantis fist, so we get a lot of attention when he makes it over our way between the other two groups. And we are off to a good start, working at a fast pace through 藏花, the Hidden Flower form. I like it quite a bit and am looking very much forward to the next class.

After the day’s seminar, I took a long walk through one of my favorite areas of Tokyo, the Shin-Okubo / Okubo area, full of Chinese and Korean people and a few Japanese holdovers. I have always loved the area since moving to Tokyo and love to explore whenever I get the chance, even though it means walking the long way around.

I moved on to my favorite Chinese restaurant, a Chang’an place out west near my home. I ate and drank to excess and left in the finest of moods. A street cat outside, perched on a bicycle seat, caught my eye and suffered my attentions, lifting my spirits even higher as I snapped some photos and offered my hand and nose.

Then, at my home station, I got out of the station and was walking along in a wonderful mood when I spied a large praying mantis on the door of a bank. Captivated instantly, I got out my camera and got to work. But this was no place for a stray mantis, with cars and bicycles and twirpy kids who love to grab insects as overnight pets all around.

I set about trying to capture the mantis and had a hard time of it. His earlier motions, swaying back and forth in a nonchalant manner, betrayed a speed I had not imagined. About that time, a passerby stopped and offered support.

It was unusual in the best of ways. I have something of a complex about my spoken Japanese and get quickly and exceedingly grumpy when some Japanese people act as if I do not exist. No eye contact, speaking to any Japanese person next to me but never directly to me, staring blankly in response to my (gasp! Foreigner’s) Japanese (go read Laowiseass’ blog for his version of the same in China (Taiwan lately).

Anyway, this was really uplifting. A total stranger, she spoke to me like a normal human being, no hesitation whatsoever about my FOREIGNER status. It was the first time either of us had seen a mantis in years and we were both concerned for its safety.

I grabbed it one more time and was promptly bitten / scratched / somethinged and blood was drawn. Shit, that bugger could cause some pain. The woman grabbed him, showed me how to hold him without being bitten or somethinged, then handed him back.

I said I would take him to the nearby public area where I often practice. She did something very uncharacteristically Japanese and, under the circumstances, very natural and normal. She took out a package of bread items, took them out and put them into her purse (without a bag! Gasp! Utterly shocking concept in this over-clean and over-wrapped country) and gave me the bag to put the mantis in while carrying him to the park.

A totally natural gesture in most countries, but a complete and very welcome surprise in this country. Mantis in bag, I thanked her and headed off to the park. A few minutes later, I heard footsteps approaching from behind. She had returned to offer a band-aid for my thumb, still smarting from the mantis’ greeting.

The mantis crawled about and explored the bag as we made our way to the park. I let it go among some flowers and wished it well, then moved on, still gripped with wonder.

I have almost never seen mantises in Japan (maybe never in the US). Only once stands out to me – my family had joined the DaZaE crew (our budo/yoga/beer/everything friends from the neighboring station) for a day of frolicking in the park and a tiny brown mantis had jumped onto my arm. It wouldn’t go near anyone else. But I couldn’t get if off my arm. We looked at each other and rocked our bodies side to side and it was good.

Tonight’s mantis was much bigger, an adult, and vibrant green but for a pair of black eyes protruding slightly. Its green will help it hide in the park, I hope.

What timing brought us together, this day that I began my mantis fist career? That long walk through Okubo, just the right time spent over food and drink at the Chinese place, a chance glance at a brightly-lit door on a bank.

Good luck, my mantis friend.

Liu Laoshi is coming to Tokyo

...what more can be said? Nothing but review and preparation the next couple days, then it all starts. More to come...

(Photo one of the few leftovers from Tao Ran Ting in August 2008, working on ba gua jian)

hungry, thirsty, and gotta piss 5

I walked into the dojo, quite late because (A) work ran late, even after I had arranged in advance for it to finish early, just to get to the dojo earlier, and (B) there had been yet another train suicide and the trains were stalled and the train platforms impossibly crowded, and me with my bag-o-Okinawan-weapons.

N: “Hi Bryan, nice to see you. Are you free on the 29th?”

B: shit….loaded question….think fast….I think I know what’s coming…”Yes, I could be”.

N: “Good, there will be a test. You’ll need to do bo kihon and the tekko kata”.

B: “OK, I will be there”. Shit shit shit.

OK, we have focused rather exclusively on the bo-tai-bo and bo-tai-sai sets and I am getting familiar with both sides of each, if a bit by-the-numbers. I check again, just to be sure.

B: “So, only bo kihon (staff basics) and the tekko kata (knuckle-dusters, essentially)?”

N: “Hmmm, there might be one of the nunchaku kata as well.”

B: “OK, I ‘ll be ready.” I don’t want to push my luck by asking which one.

So it goes. Time to re-arrange the rest of the month, gear up for this chance.

It was another great practice, and I forgot all the problems. Hoping for those few extra minutes of practice, I had foregone toilet, dinner, and water. It took me straight back to last summer in Beijing, those glorious summer nights with Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

I worked all day at the Olympics, dashed off as soon as I could, raced across that crazy and wonderful town and…sat down to relax with Liu Laoshi over tea in Tao Ran Ting park. Before scrutinizing my ba gua zhang or xing yi quan, he would critique my ability to snap a folding fan open and shut. Glorious and unforgettable nights. Go see the hungry, thirsty, gotta piss series in this blog, which started in Beijing.

Same story – how much will you give up for those few extra minutes of practice? And just like in Beijing, once I got moving tonight, I forgot all about having to piss, being hungry, needing a drink.

Yeah, I know, you should relax and slow down and all that. But sometimes we can forget the complaints and limitations of the body. And the relief is all the better once practice is done. No tea for me, thanks. I’ll take another cold beer. They taste so much better tonight.