adjusting to your environment (1)

Three days of one week, five of the next week, spent down (up?) in the mountains near Hakone, maybe 90 minutes from Tokyo. It was a beautiful location with a perfect view of both Mt. Fuji and the ocean.

But no outdoor training for me. This was a work gig after all – teaching business English skills to ten new employees of XOXO Company in the company’s training facility. It is an immersion program, all English all the time, and we were pretty much under lockdown.

It reminded me a little of pharmaceutical studies where the subjects are confined to a building for a set period of time, except the pay is a little better. No one goes out the front doors. There is nothing within 20 minutes’ taxi ride of the building.

If you want fresh air, you can go out on the balcony or up on the rooftop. I chose the latter, away from prying eyes. Fresh early morning mountain air, no one up there except me and the surveillance camera. Great tai ji setting.

Some nights we worked until 9 PM. Some nights we trainers finished early while the trainees kept working or preparing for the next day’s activities. Those were the good nights.

I had taken up a pair of nunchaku and a pair of tekko in my suitcase – both smallish and the former lightish. But there was no question of taking up a wooden bo staff. Luck was with me, and I found a two-meter aluminum pole with a hook on the end (for catching handles on open windows near the ceiling).

A bit lighter and longer than my bo, and with an unneeded hook on the end, but other wise perfect. I found a fairly secluded spot and got to work, careful not to rip any of the scrolls hanging on the walls. The space was just right and only a few people came to gawk.

I saw a couple of them later. All the work had been completed and the trainees were drinking in a common room. In the middle of that crowded floor, two of them were trying to work through one of the first kata in Shotokan karate.

That was neither the time nor the place, but the next day we found an empty training room and I ran one of them through it, helping him remember the form he had learned in a university class all those months ago.

All in all I kept up a good training regimen through the lockdown – daily morning stretching in my room, rooftop taiji in front of Mt. Fuji, and evening kobudo work on alternate nights. Some weapons I took along, some I found along the way, and all came in handy.

I have another 8 days of training in the same facility coming up later this month and am already thinking of how to maximize training opportunities under lockdown. I recall The Lab in Lincoln where I did enough pharmaceutical studies to pay for much of my university tuition.
We could have limited exercise in the courtyard. At that time I was working on the 3 tekki kata (naihanchi), which involve movements left and right on a straight line. There was a short (one-foot?) concrete wall lining a flower bed and I don’t know how many hours I spent atop that ledge, zipping left and right.

Any weapons would have been seized immediately, but open hands work was fair game, as long as you were willing to put up with a constant chorus of hi-yaaaa’s and misinformed comments about “tae kwon do bullshit” in the background.

But none of that atop the roof under the morning sun.