Dealings with Samurai-Jin

I saw a Turtle in the pond by our place, everybody loves turtles.



As there are a few new faces lurking around in my Castle, introductions were required to the Shatcho & his vice president.

We were ordered to meet them at 1630 on Saturday, not wanting to scew this up and taking into account that the company's HQ is on the other side of time we left on our bikes a whole 40 minutes before we were due to meet our benefactors...Sometimes the world just conspires against you in these situations.

Not long after we had departed Shimei Castle, Lee and I heard a distant shout as we rode along the waterfront, Southwards towards Total Home HQ. Turning to investigate the source of this commotion I saw Tim 50 meters back furiously working on his bike. His bike donated second hand by the People of Kyoto (abandoned) felt this was a timely moment to introduce us to its broken chain.

The chain was shortly fixed but it managed to fall off every 5 minutes meaning we arrived at the bosses place 15 minutes late. While they were OK with this, we lost a bit of face and probably appear to be unrealiable. Hopefully Tim's gift of Red Wine from NZ & Kiwi Chocolate and Lee's present of Kiwifruit 42 Below Vodka & Kiwifruit Chocolate smoothed things over well.


That night we went to Rick's house warming party, we were told to come late to scavenge all the left over food & drinks which we did in a very smart fashion. One of the guests was Toyoda Sensei who is the coach for a High School Judo Team, he gave us all his Biz Card and invited us to come train with his squad on the 28th. Apparantly he has a few adolescent monsters training in his team so it will be good fun.

I'm the only single one living in the house right now, the guys like it when I wink at the girls to see their reactions. As they would get murdered by their respective girls back home for such an act.












We all did a day trip with Nakakuras daughters and a translating Mother-Inlaw to Nijo Castle on Sunday our day off. It was really cool, the Castle was really amazing (see the pics) the floors all wistle like a bird when you walk on them - this was so that Ninja could not sneak up on the Emporer when he was relaxing with the Geisha (Ancient Prostitutes) I made a joke in bad taste about the Emporer and the Geisha forgetting our gentle company, it did not go down so well.
Nijo Castle is where the Emporer took the power back from the Shogun Warlord after 300 Years of Military rule, as the Shoguns Administration was too corrupt.


We are doing 1 more week of training at Kyodai to harden up our bodies & minds before launching into Ritsumeikans fulltime programme next Monday. The reason we are not starting today is because they have a big competition this Saturday and don't want us to interfere with their final build up of their preparation programme which will be tapering off this week. Despite them being busy with this their Sensei Kasuga is coming to visit us with Rick Sensei tomorow at 1200 to meet us etc which is a very generous gesture. They currently have a Mongolian Champion living & training with them who was selected for the 2008 Olympics but did and injury - he is training with Rits in preparation for 2012 London so thats a testament to how good their training is. It works out best this way also as Tim & lee are both only just newly arrived and a week of training at Kyodai will be usefull for them to build up.
We are hitting 100 pushups & situps morning and night, we are lucky to have Lee in the house as he knows all about nutrition, weight training and stretching having worked in the gym and played the World Circuit for years.

We went over to Aokis for dinner last night where we got to join in the cooking of of Japanese Pizza/Pancakes which was fun. We made a shopping list in English for his daughters to test them & got stuck into mixing the bowls and making the food so it was nice and relaxed. Our different personalities work well in these sort of things as Tim is more of the silent type, Lee the natural entertainer and I'm somewhere in the middle ( more of less perfect) so theres no personality clashes. We invited Aoki & his family to our House Warming next week which is a Kiwi Themed BBQ, its also going to be Sensei Ricks farewell as he is back off to NZ next week. We have the mission ontop of Judo this week of getting Sausages, Steaks, etc for the event.
Lee asked Aoki what Japanese people like to be called, with NZ'ers being Kiwis as an example, Aoki was unsure as to what their collective name is other than Nihon-Jin(Japanese People) but said he would like it if they were to be called Samurai-Jin (Warrior-People) I thought that sounded cool enough so perhaps it will catch on.




Noooo!! You cant Choke out the Squirels Jordan!