A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Well, I survived the black belt test. Since no one has passed it on their first try at my dojo for about 25 years, I don't think I passed; but I think I did OK, and it could conceivably have been a passing test if it hadn't been my first try, although I think it would have been a squeak-through if it had been. However, I did not forget my kata, burst into tears, get punched in the face, or otherwise humiliate myself, so I'd say it went OK.

When I was doing the part where the sensei holds a pen for you to punch at (but not actually hit) while he moves at around, toward the end I hit the pen, and the cap flew straight up in the air, which made me crack up. I don't think either hitting the pen or laughing was a huge faux pas, though; that part of the test is more about hip rotation than anything else.

The big mishap was when I was sparring with another black belt candidate, R., and he countered my side thrust kick by raising his knee. Since that is not how one usually blocks a kick, especially a side thrust kick, I was taken totally by surprise and didn't pull back at all, and the side of my foot slammed into his knee. My foot got the worst of it, and they had to stop the test for a few minutes while I made sure I could bear weight on it. Then we continued. I hope his knee hurts as much as my foot does, but probably not.

Last night's class was about footwork and sliding. J-- taught me to slide when I was a white belt. He charged me with such ferocity that I spontaneously slid backward. This is a fairly difficult skill to learn at all, and also a difficult one to get good at. (If you don't control your back leg rather than letting it drag, you can slide in or out once but you won't be able to do anything from the position you've landed in without readjusting.) A lot of people in the class last night were encountering the concept for the first time.

I derived some amusement from being sequentially paired with two big lower ranked guys, the larger of whom is the biggest person in the school at about 6' 4", and watching their faces at they realized that even if you're twice as big as your opponent, if you're only allowed to move by sliding, the person who knows how to do it is going to be on top of you, very quickly and despite what looks like far too wide a distance to cover. I enjoyed watching their realization of why it's such a useful skill.

Afterward Sempai and (why do half my friends have names beginning with J? It makes pseudonyms so difficult) J from Hong Kong and I went to a Japanese restaurant that serves skewered tidbits. I was reading the specials list to them, which was in hiragana, when the couple sitting at the bar next to us overheard and offered to help me practice my spoken Japanese. Needless to say, I was overcome with nervousness and completely unable to piece together more than about two and a half sentences, or to understand the key words in anything they said. Sempai and JHK were not impressed.

I then accidentally poured sake down the front of my shirt (we were drinking from little wooden boxes), then banged the bottle into the metal cooling bucket as I replaced it.

BOOOOM! Everyone in the restaurant turned around.

"That sounded like the gongs for the Japanese New Year," remarked one of my Japanese inquisitors. (In English.) He went on to suggest that I watch lots of anime, as he'd learned English from TV. (More successfully than I'd learned Japanese, obviously.)

"We're going to see..." Sempai, who is Japanese-American, carefully gave it the correct Japanese pronunciation, "...Gojira."

"Oh, Godzilla," said the Japanese guy.

We proceeded to the original, subtitled, uncut and un-Raymond Burred GOJIRA, which is explicitly a tale of anxiety over nuclear holocaust. Personally, I think it's mostly of historical interest.

One of the characters, a scientist who wears an eyepatch because he was wounded in WWII, creates a weapon of mass destruction which is eventually used to subdue Gojira. He kept saying things like "Kore wa 'Oxygen Destroyer' desu." His pronunciation of "Oxygen Destroyer" had the same labored pronunciation Sempai used for "Gojira."