Lungs of Ice

Tonight I went to the 5:30pm beginner's class. I prefer it to the 7:00pm weekday class because there are fewer students and we can do the full moves, swinging and throwing our uke around without worrying too much about hitting the pair next to us. There is no way we can even think of doing that in the Sunday morning beginner's class!

The class tonight was taught by Kuribayashi Sensei. I remember the first time I attended his class last year. Here is why I remember it so well: At the beginning of class, he demonstrated a move and then we proceeded to practice it with partners. I was tori and Kobayashi Sensei walked over and said to me in English, "What are you doing?" With the stern look on his face, I knew something was wrong. I answered with the name of the particular move that I was doing (it happened to be the omote version). He said, in quite good English, "I said to do only ura. Why didn't you listen?" I felt pretty pathetic, so I apologized. As he walked away, he said, "Wake up!" It was the first time I was scolded for making a mistake. Needless to say, I learned to pay more careful attention after that.

Tonight we did some new variations with ai-hanmi that I hadn't practiced before. We started with katate-dori shiho-nage, but it was ai-hanmi stance, as opposed to the usual gyaku-hanmi stance. It's really interesting to see the different variations; it reminds me of just how practical aikido can be. We also did katate-dori ikkyo and irimi-nage, both ai-hanmi. My partner for ai-hanmi ikkyo was a fairly big Western guy. It's unusual for me to have an uke who nearly matches me in size (I am 192 cm [6'5"] and about 100 kg [220 lbs]), so I had to get my technique corrected by sensei in order for it to be effective.

After my first class last year, I began to see sensei's sense of humor and his passion for aikido. His explanations are very thorough, all the way down to the smallest details such as proper shomen-uchi movement of uke. Also, Kuribayashi Sensei is the first instructor at Hombu who sometimes gives full correction to me in decent English. I have yet to experience any private instruction or correction from any of the other shihan in English. Interesting. But I haven't attended every day of the week, either.

As a side note, Hombu Dojo doesn't have any heat in the dojo in winter or air conditioning in the summer, so we really learn how to adapt to the different seasons. No one takes showers in the winter because there is no hot water. So tonight the cold air was like ice in my lungs as I was gasping for breath towards the end of class. It was rather exhilarating!