#10 Aikido in Japan

This is Shawn's neighborhood. It's very quiet, and I spent part of Sunday morning sitting in a park reading and eating BALANCEUP, my favorite pre-packaged Japanese breakfast snack.







Shawn and I traveled by train out to a very rural part of northeastern Tokyo. When we got off the train, Shawn started talking to this woman on the street and then next thing I knew, we got in her car and started to drive. I was kind of curious, so I asked who she was. They both laughed - she was Shawn's top student, and every week she meets him at the train station to drive him to class.



This is the building where we trained. It's a middle school by day, and we were using the gynasium. The two classes were really great - Shawn is a very good teacher and has very strong students - and I received what I felt was a very high compliment when one of the Japanese students tld me she thought my Aikido was "beautiful." Training in Aikido in Japan had been a dream of mine for some time - there's just something very powerful about that experience.



This is Shawn and his tremendously kind top student. The class took us to dinner at a restaurant where they served Sushi on a conveyor belt. I am not making this up.












This is the Aikido crew. The gentleman in the hat on the far left is a fashion designer (?!), and the girl on the far right and I hit it off smashingly despite an almost complete language barrier - whenever soemthing strange came down the conveyor belt at dinner, she would place it in front of me and say "Challenge!" I did the same to her, and it was a lot of fun. The class made me feel very welcome and I had a wonderful time - which, incidentally, is in my opnion as much a part of aikido as the classes we had had earlier in the day.