A Quote

I was reading Jonathan Frantzen's excellent book "Freedom" and found a great quote that was very applicable to me.

"Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those
miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult
where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than
she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to
be basketball." (p. 40)

Replace basketball with budo and you have a pretty good picture of me ... at one point, anyway. I like to believe that I have grown up a bit, although I'm not sure that's true.

Ed's Visit to Tokyo

Many of my original readers from the Sei Do Kai will know Ed. He visited Tokyo in March to get his 5th-dan in Jodo. He put in some very intensive practice with Tsubaki Sensei on a nearly daily basis for about 2 weeks, along with some visits to Shiiya Sensei's dojo and the Nikkei Dojo, to get pointers and to brush up on his skills before the test.




I tagged along "to help" but of course I was just trying to leech some of the training and pointers, too.

If you know Ed, you will also know that he passed his 5th-dan with flying colours and impressed the pants off of everyone there. Way to go, Ed!

With all that training, there wasn't much time to do anything else, but after the grading he and I did spend an afternoon at the Tokyo Edo Museum...



One of the exhibits was the "face" from the Okamoto Taro "Tower of the Sun" from Expo '70. A quick look at the Wikipedia page mentions that the tower had 3 faces, one of which was in the basement, called "The Face of the Underworld". It is currently in an "unknown location". I wonder if this is it ... or just a facsimile of the main face? Gee, shoulda read the pamphlet.

Playing with the "miniature" effect on my camera.