Shoryuhai, the long version

[tarigwaemir]

Lowell House, on the Feast of St. Pius V

Warning: the following post is extremely long, has five embedded Youtube clips, and despite my attempts to make it understandable to the average person, is probably incomprehensible.

The Shoryuhai weekend began, I would have to say, on Thursday night, when most of the shimpan (that is, the judges) arrived from Japan. We were all asked to show up at Legal Seafoods, and I sat at the end of the table with Zach, Tom and Allen. It was nice to see Ohta-san and Kyoko-san again (they are the Keio OGs I've gotten to know the best), as well as Sudoh-san and Mr. Mori. Dave ordered lobsters for all the shimpan, and they all exclaimed at the size of the meal. Students kept trickling out at discreet intervals, but I ended up staying later than I had initially planned so I could say hi to klio911, whose flight arrived later that night. ^_^

Friday evening was practice and setup in Lavieties Pavilion, the varsity basketball court across the river. Normally, we hold the tournament on the basketball courts of the MAC (which in fact is located just across the street from Lowell), but the MAC has been closed for renovations ever since Spring Break, so we've been holding practices in a racketball court at the QRAC (the athletic center at the Quad, which is approximately a fifteen-minute walk from the Yard). Of course, the QRAC doesn't really have the facilities that would house our tournament, so Joe had to negotiate with the Athletic Department to let us use the varsity facilities. Anyway, the gist being that the contents of the closet had all been stored at the QRAC, while the tournament itself was at Lavieties, and the two places pretty much are located at opposite extremes of campus. Anyway, I arrived at Lavieties early so I could put down my bogu and shinai before heading up to the QRAC to move down everything we needed for the tournament before practice, but luckily enough people had shown up that I could get out of helping with the moving expedition. Haha. Compared to previous years, I ended up doing next to no work in helping run this Shoryuhai. I feel a little guilty about that, but then again, I pulled more than my fair share of the work as an underclassman, so I suppose I'll just let that be my excuse.

Anyway, Friday practices before the tournament are supposed to be light, so we just went through warm-ups, a few round of kirikaeshi and shomen, and finally jigeiko. The floor in Lavieties is nice and springy; not quite as pleasant as the MAC Mezzanine, but not the hard slab of concrete beneath wood like the MAC basketball courts. At the QRAC, we'd been practicing on mats on account of the floor being unvarnished, and while the mats don't kill your knees like a hard floor does, they do make it harder to push off (my legs cramped up after every practice), so I for one was happy to be practicing on a normal floor again. Jigeiko with Ohta-san, Hirose-san, Yamashita-sensei, and Mr. Mori. I started off feeling somewhat nervous, which may be why Ohta-san stopped me in the middle and told me that I should play "shiai-style" not as if I was doing kakari-geiko. I was pretty exhausted after that and got even more out of breath after practicing with Hirose-san, which, uh, may be why I ended up having a coughing fit in the middle of practice. I sat out and rested for a while before lining up for Yamashita-sensei, who is really fun. After my first men, he just sort of grinned at me and continued grinning at me for the rest of the match. Some people unnerve you to no end when they smile at you, but Yamashita-sensei just looks like he's enjoying kendo so much that he can't keep from laughing. Anyway, I was pretty proud of keeping up my kiai for that, because I was still not quite over my coughing fit. Final jigeiko with Mr. Mori, who had me essentially do shomen repeatedly and run back to starting position each time before allowing me to end on sanpon shoubu.

Let's see, what advice did I get that night? Making sure to take center (have seme!) before I move, not wasting attacks, remembering to have zanshin...Hm, I wish I had taken notes earlier; I seem to remember Ohta-san telling me something fairly important but I can't actually remember the substance of it. (Ohta-san is officially our women's team coach. The title is a little absurd because we don't actually have a separate women's team, but she's always been quite nice to me and has been, I think, the first person to really give me personalized point-by-point advice about my kendo. Which is why she's one of my favorite people from Keio.)

Izzy also told me that I "looked like a different person" since she last saw me in October, which made me feel loads better about my kendo (so I have improved, and it's not just all in my head, thank goodness). ^_^ Not sure exactly how it's happened, given that I missed most of Kuboh-sensei's visit and spent most of spring semester feeling horribly out-of-shape, but I started off this year determined to get better, and it's a relief to know that determination will get you somewhere.

We started setting up the courts after practice, although I ended up once again missing most of it so I could go pick up the University of Wyoming team and show them back to Lowell. I was hosting three girls (who were all surprisingly tall and towered over me), who were all quite nice and friendly. (I didn't have a chance to get to know them very well, thanks to me running about to all the kendo events, but they left me a sweet thank-you note with two of their club shirts as gifts.)

Team dinner later that night at Uno's, as per tradition. Phil, Kacey, Allen and I sat at one end of the table, in a half-joking effort to promote B-team unity (haha). Also, that night initiated the neverending series of 300 jokes, which I predict will be a well-established fixture in kendo conversations for months to come. (Okay, technically, the 300 jokes probably started much earlier but they completely dominated Shoryuhai weekend.)

Saturday was the team tournament. Before I proceed any further, the quick and dirty guide to understanding shiai (tournament-style matches) for anyone reading who may not know what's involved:

• Each team has five positions that play in the following order: senpo, jiho, chuken, fukusho and taisho. There are different "styles" associated with each position (e.g., senpo is usually very aggressive and physical), although of course there are exceptions to every rule. Technically, the taisho ought to be the best person on the team, but of course, teams try to stack the line-up in different ways, in hopes of maximizing their winning potential. If there are less than five players on a team, then the empty positions become automatic losses to your side.
  
• There are four targets: men (the head), kote (the wrist), dou (the torso), and tsuki (the throat). However, tsuki is not allowed at the Shoryuhai because it's pretty dangerous especially when used by beginners. Each strike is worth one point, and if you step out of bounds or commit some other sort of foul (called hansoku), you lose a half-point.
  
• Each match has three judges. At least two out of the three judges must agree that you've gotten the point in order for you to score. Matches end when one side has scored two points or when time is up. (In team matches, ties remain as ties; in individual matches, ties are broken by going into overtime, when the first person to score a point wins.) What do the judges look for when deciding on points? Well, a book could probably be written on that topic alone (and probably has been in Japanese), but it's not just about hitting the target. One has to have proper form, ki-ken-tai-ichi, zanshin, seme...in any case, you must persuade the judge that you have really ovewhelmingly defeated your opponent.
  
• The Shoryuhai team tournament begins with a round-robin preliminary round with four brackets. The top two teams in each bracket advance into the quarterfinals, and from there, it's single elimination.

The B team was in a fairly good bracket with Cornell, UCSD B, GWU, UCLA C and Soka B. We lost to the first four, although we came really close to tying with GWU and UCLA C, and we won against Soka B, although it was only a three-person team. I lost against Cornell and UCSD B, but tied against GWU and UCLA C. Ugh. I was pretty cautious in the Cornell match and had only one point scored on me. Ken told me afterwards that I should be more aggressive and less "afraid" to attack...Unfortunately, me trying to be aggressive only ever leads to me being more careless, and I lost very quickly to the UCSD B fukusho. Granted, it was UCSD B, but I felt that I hadn't really done my best. Anyway, I decided to be more careful and not leave any openings in the GWU match, where I think I actually managed to tire out my opponent but couldn't manage to figure out how to score on her. The UCLA C match was actually kind of fun: their fukusho was shorter than me, which I wasn't used to at all, and very good at avoiding men despite it seeming an easy target. (Haha, now I know how people feel when they play against me.) I tied that one as well and felt pretty good about it. The Soka B fukusho position was empty, so I "won" by forfeit, I suppose, although I felt kind of lousy that I would be finishing my last team tournament without a single point scored.

Of course, that was soon offset after we heard that Harvard A team would be advancing out of the round-robin preliminaries. Now, Harvard has not gotten a team out of Shoryuhai preliminaries since my freshman year, and I'm in fact the only undergraduate in the club who even remembers that. What with all the focus on recruiting new members to keep the club alive, we haven't had a chance to field a strong team until this year. Even so, our odds were long: no one in the club has done kendo for more than three years (except, again, for me, and I've only done it for four), compared to teams like UCLA and UCSD, whose players have been doing kendo since elementary school. Luckily, we do have people with talent and, perhaps even more importantly, determination. I said in my last year's Shoryuhai post that I thought UCLA won the team tournament because they wanted that trophy more than anyone else. Well, I think Harvard A made it into semifinals this year because we all wanted it so much. Brian said all last semester that he was tired of losing and really wanted to win for once, and at the holiday party in December, Joe and Jon were drunkenly proclaiming, "This is the year we're going to make it into quarterfinals!" And I mean, I knew exactly how they felt...heck, I spent all year obsessing over kendo because of this Shoryuhai.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, Harvard A won against all the teams in its bracket except UCSD A (which is, again, to be expected). They did really well in the preliminaries; I glanced over to watch some of their matches and saw them demolish their opponents pretty quickly. They were matched up against UCLA B for the quarterfinals...and you've probably realized by now that UCLA is pretty much the elite when it comes to college kendo in the U.S. Of course it wasn't their A team, but still, no one really dared utter the hope that Harvard A just might possibly win.

Thanks to Yifon, I have links to Youtube clips of all the matches to aid my narration! Ohoho. Shiai can be kind of confusing to watch, but do watch if you're interested. Harvard A wears white tags on their back; UCLA B wears red.

Senpo match: Jon goes up against the UCLA B senpo and wins by scoring two kote points. Jon is a senior but only joined last year. He's pretty talented and has worked really hard to get good at kendo, partly because his girlfriend, UG, has been doing kendo since she was nine and currently ranks sandan.

Jiho match: Howard gets scored on by the UCLA B jiho, but then makes a good comeback by scoring a men point of his own. He loses the match in the end, but it was still an impressive match, especially if you consider that he is only a sophomore and also just joined last year. One of ladydaera's and my kids! He's improved immensely over this past year, scary kid that he is: at the end of last year, he was still a bit stiff and tense, but now he moves naturally and much, much more quickly. (Darn it, I can't take advantage of his slow turnaround time anymore. ^_^) I'm awfully proud of him! ::wipes away maternal tear::

Chuken match: Brian scores kote (his favorite strike), then gets scored on (his opponent apparently also really liked kote), but manages to win the match with a second kote. Brian is one of the current captains (the other captain, Zach, couldn't compete due to a foot injury) and probably the best in our club. (klio911 often calls him the "prodigy".) Probably my favorite HRKC person after lawnmower_elf because of his deadpan sense of humor. He's currently a junior, so I think he'll probably end up being captain next year as well, although I'm not sure if he really wants to be.

Fukusho match: Joe's opponent scores kote and then men, although Joe does play his usual calm, strategic game and manages to stretch out the match for a pretty long time. Joe technically should be a junior, like Brian and Zach, but he's graduating a year early, like ladydaera. (I think at least half the people in the HRKC are super-overachievers.) Despite having missed most practices last semester, Joe returned this semester with a vengeance and somehow managed to get better than ever really quickly. (Heh, I wish I could do that. -_-)

Taisho match: So after the fukusho match, Harvard A had two wins and two losses, leaving it tied squarely with UCLA B. It all came down to this one "captains' match". Ong scored two men points against UCLA B taisho, leaving us all in a delirious state of shock and joy. Ong is a senior, although he joined a year after I did, and also one of the best in the club. (He's not as intimidatingly fast as Brian is, but he's still really, really good, particularly when it comes to using some of the more tricky waza. Also, he has this little trick of opening up his kote to lure you in, which is, haha, really hard to resist falling for if you like hitting kote.)

Eva and I cheered ourselves hoarse (you can hear us in the video clips calling out "Faito!" from the far right) and practically screamed when we realized that the A team had won quarterfinals. Harvard could claim its fair share of fangirls for this year's Shoryuhai at the very least. Oh geez, I was so, so happy...I can only imagine how the A team itself felt. ^_^ They faced UCSD A in semifinals (the very same team that had beat them in the preliminaries), so the loss was a bit inevitable. But it couldn't really kill the mood; the rest of the day was one long kendo high. Harvard A took home a third-place trophy.

The next day was the individuals tournament. lawnmower_elf and I were both on the B bracket, so we both helped out as courtside staff while waiting for our matches to come up. Emily, our only freshman and the Shoryuhai manager who put the whole tournament together, and Jesse, one of the alumni, also had matches on our court. Phil was matched up against Alex, another alum, leaving us at a bit of a loss as to who to cheer for. (So we cheered for both.) Eva had a super-long match that went into overtime against someone from Cornell (he must have been a graduate student because he looked quite old). She held out for a really long time, and I think she had a good shot at winning, but her opponent managed to score a point first in the end. And then two matches later, it was my turn.

I went into the match feeling tired and stiff on my feet. Not at all ready. (Oh. Now I remember what Ohta-san had told me on Friday. She said that the match begins as soon as you step into the court, before the judge even calls, "Hajime!") My opponent was from UMass Boston. I was relieved to find that although he had a sturdy build, he wasn't the type of player to push you around. He also wasn't too much taller than me and seemed more or less at my level, so I thought to myself that I had a chance of scoring a point on him. (I must admit that actually winning the match wasn't on my mind at the time.) I'd promised Dave that I would limit myself to kote and dou strikes only, since I never extend enough on the men strike to score, so I pretty much kept trying to go for kote. There were a couple of times where I thought I hit it, but I knew I didn't have the right zanshin, and then later, as I got more tired, I didn't have the right form either. I was pretty good about not leaving openings though, and he also got hansoku for stepping out of bounds. I also tried a lot of hiki-dou at the beginning, but dou is a notoriously hard strike, which the judges don't give points for easily, and I decided after a while that I wasn't likely to score with it, so I started going for hiki-kote and the occasional hiki-men instead. Match time ran out so we went into overtime (called encho). I realized that if I scored just one point, I could in fact win the match, and I think it was only then I really became determined to actually win. So I tried pretty much everything I could think of to score that one point. Of course, my mind was completely blanking out, so it wasn't as if I was doing anything particularly unexpected. For a while, I played near the edges of the court, hoping that somehow he'd step out of bounds again (if my opponent got two hansoku, I would win the match), but he was clearly being careful after his first mistake. I noticed that he was getting pretty tired...of course, I was pretty tired as well and silently thanking my stars that we'd done just enough stamina drills over the past few weeks that I could still stand up straight and think about attacking. I also tried sneak side attacks to his kote although he hadn't slowed down enough for me to get the timing right. -_- Anyway, at a certain point, I decided that I had nothing to lose and started trying hiki-dou again. On my second or third dou, I thought, "Oh God, if they don't give me that, I don't know what else to do"...and I got the point.

I was so dazed coming out of the match that I didn't even really feel any exhilaration, just a kind of dumbfounded relief and surprise. I was really happy though, and everyone congratulated me, which was nice. I found out later from Buck that my match had lasted ten and a half minutes. O_O All the matches on that court were insanely long, and most of them went into encho. Anyway, my next match was against the UCSD A taisho, which I lost pretty quickly of course. But anyway, I'm so glad I managed to win that one match; I think a part of me would always have felt disappointed if I had graduated without winning any at my last Shoryuhai.

Oh, I forgot to mention the actual tournament results! UCLA A won the team tournament again, after a tense final showdown with UCSD A, just like last year. The individual final round was between last year's first place finisher, Takino from Soka, and the UCLA A taisho, Goya. The match ended really quickly, which was almost anticlimactic after the long matches preceding it. Takino is a sophomore and Goya is a freshman, which means they'll be returning for several more years to battle it out again, I'll bet.

That evening, we all went out to another dinner at Legal Seafoods with the shimpan and the alumni. I ordered a meal of grilled crab legs, which was absolutely delicious. ^_^ A nice way to end a fabulous weekend.

This past weekend was pretty fabulous as well. On Friday, I went to visit tryogeru at Wellesley, where we sang Karaoke Revolution for four hours. Later, my roommates and I went to take a look at the new campus pub, the Queen's Head, although I bowed out early to go to the kendo "beer night" where we, haha, watched 300 via streaming video. On Saturday, we went to Yardfest, the spring outdoor summer concert, and saw Third Eye Blind perform in the rain. We came back drenched and muddy, but it was worth it: they sang many of their old hits, like "Never Let You Go", "Jumper", "How's It Going to Be" and of course, "Semi-Charmed Life". (Okay, I'm not a particular fan of Third Eye Blind, but "Jumper" was my favorite song on the mainstream pop radio in seventh grade, and whenever I hear it, I get a whole rushing wave of nostalgia for those middle-school years.)

Of course, I've done absolutely no work all weekend, and I have a listening quiz and a problem set, not to mention a poetry reading where I am expected to (ugh!) read my own poetry tomorrow. Or rather, later today. And let's not even mention blind_go. >_< Wish me luck.

Yours &c.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I don't usually comment on your kendo posts but I was really glad for you when you posted your results the other time. So congratulations! ^_^

[troisroyaumes]

Thank you! ^_^