Japanese Martial Arts

The Budokan 武道館, Tsukuba University, Ibaraki Japan

May 25, 2011

Martial arts, hands down, is one of my favorite pastimes. Whether it’s watching them on TV or doing them, it’s something I’ve been connected to for as long as I can remember. One of my worst fears when I came to Japan was that I was going to have a hard time finding a place to train regularly because of the whole language barrier thing. When I got here, I was pretty lucky because one of my co-workers was really into martial arts (namely the Brazilian Jiujitsu side of it). He showed me, very early in my stay, exactly where the Budokan was. The Budokan, 武道館, is a training hall for an array of...

Kyokushin Karate Tournament: Oyama City (Not Fighting…This Time)

October 13, 2010

By Donald Ash

Today I was cleaning up some of my videos, to empty my camera’s memory, and I stumbled upon some Kyokushin Karate footage I had captured on September 20th, 2010. The footage comes from a tournament that was held in Oyama City, Japan. Oyama City is located in the Tochigi prefecture east Japan: I had gone to class on Saturday night, and used what broken Japanese I knew to find out there was a tournament happening this Monday. I wasn’t prepared to fight just yet (being full-contact and all) but I REALLY wanted to see it. I found out that the tournament was going to be in Tochigi, which was just too far and too...