Nahuel's book experiment, part 1

October 22^nd 2015, I begin to write a book in English. Funny enough, I’m reading Utopia, by Thomas More¹, an English writer from the XVI century. His book is translated from Latin into English, so I wandered, why an Englishman would write a book in Latin, his second language²? I couldn’t understand it. I thought that maybe if I reread the first part or the introduction, I’d get to an answer. Now look at me, writing a book in my second language. What took me to it? Well, in my case I can come with an explanation based on an analysis of my behavior. I have been a traveler since last year’s April. During the first step of the first trip, in Japan, I wrote a personal diary I would only share with my parents. Much later on, at the very beginning of the third step of my second trip, London, I started writing a public blog in Spanish, my native language, based on a daily journal. Today this blog continues after so many experiences. At some point I wanted to share this with the English speaking friends I’ve made through my travels, but I didn’t want it to be just a translations of my Spanish blog, I wanted it to be different. Today, as I live in a beautiful countryside hose at the south of Limerick, Ireland, I came with an idea, a sort of inspiration. Probably also pushed by the full English speaking life I have now and the lovely couple who hosts me. Kaye and Gerry are most welcoming and take great interest in whatever I do, so there’s a lot of friendly chat around the house. I started to write a book, it may become a biographical novel, a personal biography, or, as I like to call it, A Traveler’s Journal. This is not my first attempt to write a book, I tried a number of times in the past. I always failed out of lack of interest or inspiration. This time I have two sources feeding my desire to write, one of them is to share all I’ve lived with my dear friends, the other one is the chance to experiment with my second language and gain more and more confidence in the art of combining grammar and vocabulary.

So now I welcome all of you who want to read me. It’s my pleasure to share and I’ll be delighted to hear or read any comment or question you may have regarding my story. Maybe an anecdote we lived together?

Let us begin the trip…

*

A long time ago…

Well, not too long ago actually, but in my head it feels like it.

The date was April 24^th 2014; I was at the airport³ saying good bye to my father and three dear friends as I crossed the gate that took me into the passengers’ only area. I was wearing a very meaningful t-shirt at the time. It was a cheap white one, with a stamp of a cute young aikidoka⁴ wearing his hakama⁵ joyfully showing the Love & Pease finger gesture, on top of it there was an inscription that read ‘Juventud Aikidoka Platence’⁶, that was the name of a great group we once had at the Dojo⁷ some years ago. We put a lot of energy into making our school⁸ big and had lots of fun doing so. I took this t-shirt with me as a reminder of a great time, and with the promise of bringing it back, also for the good energy generated back then to join me in mi starting Aikido⁹ trip.

I had of course tears in my eyes; that was the first time I was leaving home all alone and, on top of it, for a fix period of six months. I was missing people in advance. But, when the issues line was nearly over I noticed once again what I was doing, and an incredible feeling of freedom took over me. Being absolutely alone in your trip can be lonely, but it gives you the chance to do whatever you want with no one to discuss the plans with, not that there’s anything bad with it. I was about to board a plane to Atlanta, USA, with Japan as final destination. When I saw the Duty Free¹⁰ stores I knew there was no turning back, I felt so adventurous. The excitement grew within me to the point of picturing the whole trip that was merely starting. The moments before departing were filled with lots of texting, goodbyes and farewells. When the time was just I crossed the last gate, I was into the plane, before me was a nine and a half hours flight to the United States of America and a rather long wait for my transfer.

By that time I had got used to travelling his way, and also to do it for so many hours. I had flown three times to Miami, once to Honolulu, once to Toronto and twice to Madrid; all quite long trips, specially the one to the paradise island. So I knew what to expect and what to do. I sat, relaxed and slept for about 40 minutes. Then the first course came and I engaged myself into lots of movie watching. It was not comfortable of course, but I didn’t suffer the trip, I had my sleep and caught up with some movies I had been wanting to watch for some time then.

We landed safely in Atlanta and according to schedule. Migrations went all right since I still had a valid USA VISA in my Argentinean passport. After the expected wait we boarded the plane to Narita airport in Tokyo. It was taking a little too long for the engine to start. After a 30 minutes delay they asked us to leave the aircraft and wait for further information. Two hours later they told us that the flight got cancelled and we had been rescheduled for the same time next day. The pilot’s front screen was damaged and the replacement was on its way. They gave us a voucher for airport food and a night in a hotel nearby. I wasn’t happy about it. Even if I didn´t have an important event waiting for me in Japan the next day, I did have people waiting for me, who had organized their day to receive me. I wrote to Igarashi Sensei¹¹ to let him know about this fact.

Maybe I should make a parenthesis here and explain a little bit about this Aikido thing that seems to be quite a central topic in my story, which it is…

*

Firstly, a brief description and history of the art according to what I’ve learnt, and interpreted from lectures and books and practice. Aikido is a modern martial art developed and officially founded in 1942 by Morihei Usheiba (1883-1969), today known as O’Sensei (Great Master). Among its basis we find several Samurai combat techniques including body, sword and staff fighting, being its closest ancestor Daito-Ryu Aiki-jujutsu (Takeda Sokaku Sensei); all that knowledge combined with a new stream of Shinto Buddhism, Omoto Kyo, which Ueshiba got deeply into at the time as he followed Deguchi Onisaburo, gave as a result a new point of view that caused a revolution in Martial Arts concepts. Aikido, the art of Peace, was born. Through the study of combat we reach harmony with who is meant to be our opponent. Instead of fighting or confronting we accept whatever comes. We join (AI) our energies (KI) into the same direction (DO). Then we are one. There’s no place for fighting, but for awareness of unity. Every single being’s energy in the Universe is connected within the spiral of life. Given this background philosophy, it is not possible to include tournament concepts in this art. Should it be done, that new creation, respectful for itself, would not be proper Aikido.

Now, coming back to a less spiritual explanation, Aikido’s whole training; including staff (Jo), sword (Ken) and body (Tai) techniques; added to traditional warming up (Aiki Taiso), breathing (Kokyu Ryoku), and meditation (Sazen); is advocated to better the empty hand techniques (Tai Jutsu), which include finding and moving the center of balance at our will, levers to every joint in the human body, and close control or wide expansion of the joint energies. I mean the energy used by the attacker and the one used by the defender; which end up in one single stream.

Secondly, I’ll tell about my encounter with this art and how it helped me become a traveler. Back in 2006 I was 18 years old and a 1^st Kyu¹² in Karate¹³. A former practitioner showed up to rejoin the practice at the Dojo after a long absence, I had never seen him before, but he was already a 2^nd Kyu, so he was around before I even knew about my Sensei. After some months I got to learn that he had become an Aikido Sensei, I had no clue what that was, I had only heard the name a couple of times before. One night Daniel Picciola, that is his name, brought a wooden sword that resembled the traditional Japanese Samurai Katana saber (boken), and started wilding it to show something to our Karate Sensei. I was stretching on the floor, as I would always do before the class, when that boken got my complete attention. That was one thing I had been interested in for a while; I guess I can say I found it extremely cool. I got closer and joined the chat. My Karate Sensei was going to start practicing Aikido with him, so I decided to join as well. I had to learn how to use the Samurai weapon. We trained the whole month of November before my first weapons class came. I waited patiently for it, and in the mean time I had a fair view of what Aikido was really about. Of course that changed many times in the future. I loved the boken class, but then that was not my only motivation to keep going.

2007’s Aikido year started in February and so did my Sensei and I. I was totally immersed in martial arts in a kind of funny way. Both my Senseis where as well my class partners in each other’s Dojos. That didn´t last too long though. I won’t explain my whole Aikido life. That may be done in a different document, in a different time. So I’ll speed up to the traveling.

Five years after my start, in 2011, Picciola Sensei decided to try and join a Japanese school to improve our Aikido technique and to enroll with the Aikikai Foundation¹⁴ and, therefore, gain international recognition. For that matter, a group of five representatives of our Dojo went to Calgary, Canada, to meet for the first official time Igarashi Kazuo Shihan¹⁵. This man is well known among the Aikikai community and his Sensei, who’s still around, had a mayor participation in the early days of the discipline.

This trip was the first one I would do without my family. Even if we were a group doing everything together, my father was not there to solve everything for me. I learnt a thing or two about airports.

As you will notice, I made much more trips than the ones I’ll specifically tell about in this book. Calgary is one of them. I intend to go through all later on. For now, I’ll concentrate on how these experiences contributed to make my Japan trip happen.

A number of things that opened my mind occurred to us when we were in Canada.

The first one was landing and checking my position in the map. I was ridiculously far from home, and that was all right. Maybe the feeling was something like ‘Mi house is not the only place where life can be, but here too or elsewhere’. Of course that’s a most logical thing to think and it is, of course, correct. But it is not the same to know in theory than to realize in practice.

The second thing that I found, were new friends coming from Aikido. Very fast we got to meet Takashi Kobayashi, a very nice fellow who invited us to his house for a dinner party in honor of the seminar, he didn’t know us; before this event, we found about the kindness people is capable of with two outstanding examples, outstanding for us at the time at least. One was that we got lost going to his place and the bus driver deviated from his route to take us to our destination, the second one was when was when Jen, Takashi’s wife, went to pick us up after we realized we had mistaken the address. Then we made friends with Chris, one of the local Senseis. He welcomed us at his Dojo, friend us in Facebook right away and started sharing all his Aikido with us. Today we’re still in contact with them.

The third thing that opened my mind was to keep travelling after the seminar. We went all together to Toronto, then we split and Juan and I went alone to Montreal and to Quebec. We traveled, though by plane, from the far West to the far East of Canada and back to Argentina in 21 days. In Montreal we had a chat about our trips sitting in an Italian restaurant; he has travelled a lot too. I was very happy to hear about his road trips across Argentina.

All these experiences, added to the friendly, simple and sincere way all of them invited us to come back, made me feel it was not impossible, it may be a hard goal to achieve, but I was not denying it anymore. After all, I was as far as I could be from home within my continent.

We went back home with two huge plans to embrace:

-          In 2012 Igarashi Sensei visited Argentina and we were to do what we had seen done in Calgary for the same kind of event. Since Sensei had met five of us, we were due to take care of him. That brought me closer to him and helped to narrow our relationship a little bit. I had some big responsibilities during his stay and he noticed them. That grant me a personal present I kept very dearly.

-          In 2013 a new, though similar, set of 5 representatives from our Dojo, joined a very impressive and important seminar in Hawaii. Probably Daniel Sensei knew all I’m going to say now from the very beginning, but I got aware of the magnitude of the event years later. It was the combined 30^th anniversary of Igarashi Dojo, our Sensei’s, and the 50^th anniversary of Kailua Aikido Club, his best friend overseas, Kubo Sensei’s. Many people joined, including several masters from Japan and lots of delegations from all the countries these two old happy aikidokas travel to teach to. There I met many people from all over the world. They had travelled as much as we did and for the same reason. We were not alone in the ‘madness’ of spending a large amount of money to attend an Aikido seminar. I learnt that with this martial art people tend to move around a lot. It helps you make up your mind and jump into tripping. When the seminar was over we moved from Oahu Island to Maui and spent a week in a paradisiacal beach hotel. I shared the cottage with Daniel Sensei. After all I had lived so far, and given my possibilities and the obvious interest I had in Aikido travelling, he encouraged me into taking a step forward. I talked to an Argentinean who had become a chef at the hotel and to a Californian who was working at the pool. They gave me ideas and inspiration. There was where my first fantastic plan came. I would settle in Hawaii for four years, training with Kubo Sensei and teaching at a local Dojo.

In the time between my return to Argentina from Hawaii in 2013 and my departure to Japan on April 24^th 2014, I put a lot of thought into my new plan. At that point I was dealing with several things. On a general background, my parents had got divorced not too long before, a fact that would still affect me. Then, I had to quit my job as a self defense instructor at the police school, I had more than a reason to do it, nevertheless, I asked for a half a year non-paid license. I also closed my Karate Dojo, that was a tough decision, but my mind was somewhere else, and my spirit too. Once decided I started taking Japanese lessons, which grew my excitement regarding the trip. Finally, I quit my other job as a manufacturer for my Karate Sensei´s factory. Saying good bye to friends was lots of fun, for we spent long hours with such excuse; but it was also sad. As I pictured my exciting life abroad I was missing them already. Same went for family.

After many considerations the four years life in Hawaii became a six months journey with two long settlements in two cities and a short vacation in a third one.

*

Atlanta was an unexpected destination stop in my itinerary. The airport shuttle let me at the hotel in the afternoon. The first couple of hours I just relaxed, I took a good shower and used the room’s Wi-Fi lying on the bed. Later on I went outside for a walk and to grab something for dinner. The neighborhood wasn’t too nice. A very wide street that might as well have been a road, with some fast food shops on the side. I went to Subway, if I remember correctly, and had my sandwich in a table by the cashier. Since there weren’t much to do around, I headed back to the hotel and continued with my book. I was reading one by Haruki Murakami, The wind Up Bird Chronicle. It was catching and easy to read. The best part of it came as I continued to read it once I had been to Tokyo, but that’ll be deeper explained later on. That was it really, in the morning I helped myself with some breakfast from the buffet, there I had a chance to speak some morning casual English with other tourists, then we took the shuttle back to the airport and all was ready for us to depart. We boarded the plane and there they were, Japanese fly attendants, messages in both languages. One of my objectives was being accomplished at the moment, to live in a non-Spanish environment. I could either speak in English or strive to barely communicate in Japanese.

I sat back and relaxed as we took off. This time I slept more than I watched movies. The food was good and before I knew it, I was in Japan.

Notes

1.        Utopia, by Thomas More: first published in 1516 in Latin, translated into English by Paul Turner and published in 1965.

2.        His second language: Thomas More was fluent in Latin and Greek.

3.        At the airport: Ezeiza international airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

4.        Aikidoka: an Aikido practitioner.

5.        Hakama: traditional Japanese pants for men, standard dressing for aikidokas.

6.        ‘Juventud Aikidoka Platence’: ‘Juventud’, Youth; ‘Platence’, that lives in or belongs to the City of La Plata. An Aikido enthusiastic and promoting group inspired and leaded by Patricio Pereyra.

7.        Dojo: physical place where Japanese martial arts are practiced.

8.        Our School: martial arts’ organizations are commonly referred to as ‘school’. This varies depending on the organization and the country.

9.        Aikido: a modern Japanese martial art founded in 1942 by Morihei Ueshiba. It’s based in ancient traditional Samurai fighting and modern Shinto Buddhism.

10.     Duty Free: a set of duty free stores located into international airports where only boarding pass holders are allowed to buy.

11.     Sensei: in Japanese, teacher, master. It is common practice to refer to Japanese martial arts’ teachers with their last name followed by the word ‘Sensei’.

12.     Kyu/Dan: in most Japanese Martial Arts, practitioners’ levels are organized in two sets of ranks. Lower ranks are called Kyus (sometimes represented with white belt, and sometimes with color belts) and they grow in decrement numbers, being 1^st Kyu the highest. The higher ranks come immediately after 1^st Kyu and are called Dans (mostly represented with black belt), and they grow in crescent numbers, being 1^st Dan the lowest.

13.     Karate: a modern Japanese Martial Art founded in 1930 by Chojun Miyagi in Okinawa. It combines hard Okinawan fighting styles with soft Chinese ones.

14.     Aikikai Foundation: one of the three mayor global Aikido organizations. With its headquarters located in Tokyo, Japan. Its leader must always be a direct descendant of the founder and is denominated Aikido Doshu. Today he is the grandson, Moriteru Ueshiba.

15.     Shihan: After obtaining the 6^th Dan from Aikikai, an aikidoka can be given the Shihan recognition by Doshu himself. That means this person is not only highly skilled, but also has devoted his life to expand the borders of Aikido through the World.