Judo

Last week I started judo here. They seem to like me at my new sojung. All of the younger judoka were very excited to have a foreigner at the practice. Many told me that I am "very handsome." After a couple practices they were telling me that I am "very strong." After my last practice the coach, or 'gwan jang nim,' told me "good stamina." So I guess I'm impressing them to some degree. I kicked a two hundred pound black belt over my head (for what would have been a full score if there was a ref) last practice. One of the kids watching said "nice" which made the beating I took after the throw worth it.

I have to say, though, the level of competition here is not what I expected. I am living in a rural area by Korean standards, and so all of the elite judoka are probably in Seoul. If there are any here, I haven't found them. There seems to be only one sojung for the whole city. But I'm having fun going to the one I'm at now; it's turned out better than I expected it to be after my first class. I was initially disappointed that there weren't more competitive players. A lot of them are younger novice belts and the older ones mostly seem to be done with serious competition.

Someone explained to me that by high school most students here have to quit sports because of the academic pressures of school. The ones who don't quit get really serious and move to a big city where they have the resources to become seriously competitive. When I moved to Victoria, I mistakenly imagined that the judo there would be more competitive as I would be closer to Japan¹. Now I am even closer to Japan and for the second time the judo here has not proved to be as high of a calibre as I expected. The most competitive and challenging judo practices I've participated in are still the provincial team sessions that I was part of at the University of Manitoba.

I've played with the idea of using one of my vacations to train at the Kodokan in Tokyo, but I think I would rather travel somewhere fun with Joanne. There will be tournaments this year in Yeosu and Suncheon, so hopefully that will satisfy my desire for competition.

¹On a side note (or is it a footnote?), of all the foreign countries in the world I could have selected to judo in I picked the one that does judo in a language other than the one I understand it in. As far as I know, judo is done in Japanese everywhere else in the world. But since Japan has invaded Korea more than once, they're not about to make a point of speaking Japanese here. In my dojos in Canada, before practice began we would bow to a picture of Jigoro Kano (the Japanese founder of judo) and then our senseis. Here, at the sojung where I practice judo, we bow to the Korean flag and then our gwan jang nim. But the biggest difference is the language. I don't know what any of the techniques are called in Korean, and so I have to figure out what's going on by watching others.