Why are you yelling?

June has officially begun, and I am constantly seeing updates from my teacher friends back in the states on how the school year is over and everyone is ready for summer.  If only I were so lucky.  The school year in Japan runs a little differently.  Classes start in April and go till March the next year.  We do get a summer break, but it’s only about three weeks in August.  But I’m not here to complain. 

When school started in April this year all the new seventh graders had to choose clubs.  It’s a big deal, because when you choose a club you are also choosing how you will be spending your time afterschool and on weekends for the next three years of junior high.  So at the beginning of the year there is a lot of advertising done by the clubs, trying to get new kids to join.  We even have an assembly where all 18 clubs get to put on a five minute presentation to try and get the newbies to sign up (not the most thrilling afternoon for the teachers). 

At a kendo tournament.

During this time the clubs will invite seventh graders to watch practices to get an idea of what it looks like.  Some kids were heading out to practices one of these days, and one of my students invited me to join him at kendo practice.  (In case you aren’t familiar with the martial art, it is essentially Japanese fencing.  The pictures I'm putting in dont necessarily reflect what I'm writing about, but if you've never seen kendo before it will give you an idea what it looks like.)  I followed him to the kakugi-jo (kendo/judo practice building), joined the seventh graders sitting at the back of the room, and watched the upper-classmen start practice.  Eventually they handed bamboo swords (called shinai) to the seventh graders and got them started on some basic exercises.  I watched my new friends awkwardly swing their new tools, but after a few minutes a student came over to me and motioned that I should grab a shinai and join them.  To make a long story short, I eagerly took advantage of the offer and have been going to kendo practice ever since.  Later this month I will be taking a test to get a sort of pre-certification called i-kyuu (pronounced “ee-kyoo”).  If I am successful, I can take another test in September to get the first level of official certification, 1-dan. 

So that’s where I am right now with kendo, but how did I get there?  I could write a ton on all I’ve learned so far, but I want to try and explain why I got into it in the first place.

It comes down to the yelling.  You almost never hear a Japanese kid with a raised voice.  Kids here seem to be mellow most of the time.  Sure they get happy, but not really super-excited.   Yes, they get frustrated, but I’ve never seen a kid visibly mad (maybe they are angry or ecstatic on the inside, they are just good at controlling what they show you).  Japan is just a quieter place – no cars blasting stereos, no cop sirens at all hours of the day, and here in the country the sidewalks roll up around 6 (except for the kids going to their cram schools).  It is hard for me to see passion in the kids here for what they do, at least you don’t see it the way you might in the states.  For the most part, personal expression and individuality takes back seat to fitting into what the culture expects of you.  I’m used to kids being crazy, running around, screaming at the top of their lungs from time to time, getting mad from time to time, maybe even getting in a fight.  In the states, that’s part of what it means to be a kid.  Not here though.  Except at kendo.

Last year I watched the city-wide kendo tournament in the fall.  I had never seen kendo before, didn’t know what it was really.  I knew my dad did it when he was a kid growing up in Japan, so I wanted to see what it was all about.  So I watched the tournament all day, trying to figure out the rules (with only mild success).  The thing that really got my attention was all the screaming.  I didn’t know Japanese kids had it in them.  Let me try to explain what I saw:  kids wearing tricked out catcher’s uniforms, stomping their feet, screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to whack each other on the head with bamboo sticks.  I didn’t really understand the rules.  But I did know that I was seeing a very different side of my students.  I was really happy to see the screaming side of students, but I wanted to learn more.  Why were they screaming anyway?  What was it about kendo, a culturally traditional activity, that got kids acting in a way that seemed contrary to everything else I’ve observed in the culture here?  I wanted to find out.

Learning kendo has been on my mind ever since I went to the tournament last year, but I didn’t really know how I could get started.  I mean, I’m in Japan, what better place to learn kendo?  But my Japanese isn’t too good, my schedule can be unreliable, and other such excuses crowded out the idea of actually any sort of class.  When school ended in March, I made a sort of new year’s resolution to find out how to learn kendo in the next year.  So you can imagine how happy I was to accept the invitation to attend kendo practice after school.  Yay!  I did it!

So what’s up with the yelling anyways?  Well, I’m still very much a beginner at kendo and have a ton to learn, but here’s what I’ve noticed so far.  In kendo there is the idea that the sword, body, and spirit are all supposed to be acting together as one entity.  When you make an attack against an opponent, you are not just trying to attack with your sword, you are attacking with your body and your spirit too.  So when you attack, the moment your sword touches your opponent, your foot should be pounding the floor as though you were trying to put a hole in it and you should be screaming like a banshee.  Kendo is a wholistic martial art.  It isn’t just about trying to improve your skills with a wooden sword to level up or do well at tournaments; it is about becoming a stronger, unified person, being able to put your all into whatever you are doing and without holding anything back.  I love seeing kids learning how to do this, and now I get to learn with them.