Ki-ken-tai-ichi, from the Japanese kanji 気剣体一, describes the [...]]]> As part of my Kendo Shodan （first degree black belt) examination （剣道の初段の審査）, I had to answer a question regarding one of Budo’s fundamental principles – that of ‘ki ken tai ichi’ I’ve included my answer here in hopes that it helps people better understand Budo in general.

Ki-ken-tai-ichi, from the Japanese kanji 気剣体一, describes the condition when all essential elements of a strike are unified in a single instant culminating in the perfect strike. The resulting strike, called the yuko-datotsu , or 有効打突, “valid strike”, is a goal all Budoka should strive to achieve.

Dissecting the Kanji into sub-parts can give a better understanding of the term’s meaning.

気, ‘ki’, is the kanji representing “spirt” or “energy”. In the context of ki-ken-tai-ichi, it represents the Budoka’s mental assertiveness and instinctive focus that both initiates and finalizes the strike.

剣, ‘ken’, is the kanji for “sword”. In ki-ken-tai-ichi it is naturally the actual instrument that manifests the mental (internal) and physical (external) intentions of the Budoka when executing a strike. As such, it should be regarded as an extension of the Budoka, not a separate disconnected element.

体, ‘tai’, is the kanji for “body”. In context, this represents the physical element of the Budoka’s intent – his body, the mechanism by which the mind’s intentions are executed resulting in the end goal.

一, ‘ichi’, the kanji for the number one (1). This is added to signify that the ‘ki’, ‘ken’, and ‘tai’ should not be considered separate elements at the moment of impact, but a single unified construct.

The final kanji, ‘ichi’ is the most important. It means that all three elements, the spirit, sword, and body must be realized as a single cohesive element if the resulting strike is to be considered ideal. The ability to obtain ki-ken-tai-ichi consistently is a goal of Budoka of all ranks.

Anyway, as I’ve alluded to before, I like to immerse myself as much as I can when learning [...]]]> So, I started taking Japanese classes a couple of weeks ago, and I really like what I’m learning. The language is actually very easy once you get the patterns down. Much easier than say, Latin or Spanish.

Anyway, as I’ve alluded to before, I like to immerse myself as much as I can when learning new things. So, I started watching a lot of Japanese films with English subtitles to sort of pick up on the tone and general “feel” of the language, even if I don’t know what the actors are saying. The subtitles do help a lot though – I occasionally see things I’ve learned in class and correlate them to the dialog, and it does help reinforce what I’ve learned. Most of the films so far have been from the obligatory Akira Kurosawa collection, and they’ve been incredible. If you’re not familiar with Akira Kurosawa, he’s like Spielberg, Hitchcock, and Kubrick all rolled into one – a national (and now global) icon. His stuff is studied meticulously in film schools worldwide and he was a genius.

Anyway, I digress. The point of this post is to say that I’m having a lot of fun learning about the culture in addition to the language, and I’ve seem some amazing things (Kurosawa’s movies), but I’ve also seen a lot of very weird things.

For example, Japan is freaking nuts about anything cute. The cuter the better. If its disgustingly cute by American standards, its just near perfect for Japanese folks. The word for cute, as the title of this post metions is ‘kawaii’, spelled with 4 hiragana symbols: ka wa i i -> かわいい.

Everything in Japan is かわいい. The tv shows, the toys, the video games (Nintendo anyone? games saturated with cuteness…), clothing, etc. I think I read somewhere there are 10,000 to 15,000 individually licensed Hello Kitty products alone (look at the link, you’ll see what I’m talking about).

There’s even a かわいい-ラジオ (kawaii-radio). And I have to say I’m hooked (on the station, not the ‘cuteness’). I like J-Pop, and I’ve been listening to that station for acouple of days. So sue me

So, when listening to that station, you’ll usually hear a lot of good stuff, but occasionally some over-the-top cutesy songs. I heard one and then found its video – its really…weird:

See what I mean? Bizarre….

Anyway, I guess its not that bad – just a little much. I could even suppose its better than American pop culture – American music glorifies violence, sex, drugs, frivolous spending, lack of responsibility, etc – lord knows what influence that has on our youth and makes us all the more screwed up because of it. Perhaps we Americans can take notes – its better to be too ‘cute’ than too negative. Maybe playing more Nintendo games is a start (something I’ll have to work on – still a little hard for me to swallow just yet)

For those who don’t know me, this kind of thing drives me crazy – If I find something really interesting, I have to learn as much [...]]]> So I wrote in my last post about my Utada Hikaru interest. Well, I really loved the songs, but there was one problem – I don’t speak Japanese.

For those who don’t know me, this kind of thing drives me crazy – If I find something really interesting, I have to learn as much about that subject as I possibly can. I’m like a sponge – I crave learning new things and soak it all up as much as I possibly can. I quite often go overboard and immerse myself in whatever the topic is. Sometimes its downright debilitating, and I just saturate myself.

So, really liking the songs wasn’t good enough for me. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I started google wandering.

I first found a web page that translated the Keep Tryin’ lyrics to English, representing the Japanese characters as romaji. I thought this was awesome. So, what did I do? I memorized the song in a few hours so I could sing it from memory. In Japanese

Languages fascinate me. Mouth formations, syllabic pronunciations, vocal inflection, grammar – you name it, I’m interested. In my opinion, Linguistics is the perfect balance of left-brain and right-brain activity, and I’d like to think my brain is equally as balanced (I sing first tenor and enjoy numerous artistic hobbies to balance my logic-heavy career path). If I didn’t love Computer Science so much, I know I would have done something professionally in languages, maybe becoming a UN translator or something.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy CS so much. I love the algorithmic thought processes and problem solving that I experience when programming, but I get a semi-linguistic satisfaction as well – there are a lot of programming languages out there today as well, some as different from each other as spoken languages. But I say semi-linguistic satisfaction though, because although you learn different grammars, programming languages don’t exercise right-brained speech functions.

So anyway, while memorizing the Romaji lyrics, it wasn’t good enough to read it and just sing along. I very carefully watched the video over and over again, staying in sync with what I was reading, so I could watch exactly how Hikaru (everyone calls her Hikki) formed her mouth to pronounce the words. Because of this, and my past experience with learning languages and focusing on strict pronunciation, I would now venture to say that I could sing the song with enough proficiency to pass as a long-time or maybe even native speaker. Especially in a karaoke bar where a lot of the natives could be drunk

So, in my google wandering, I found a lot of sites/blogs talking about Hikki, how much they liked her, etc. Of course, most of these web sites were in Japanese, using Japanese characters. Well, that was one more thing I didn’t understand, so, you guessed it – I went to learn about Japanese writing…

The Japanese writing system is composed of 3 character sets – Kanji, which is the older ‘traditional’ character set, and 2 simplified sets, Hirigana and Katakana, together called ‘Kana’ for short. In my research I found that there are a common core of 2,000 Kanji characters, half of which youth learn formally in school, but there are actually a complete total of around 48,000 individual Kanji characters. Japanese spend their whole lives learning and remembering the full Kanji set.

The reason why is that Kanji characters represent physical things and ideas – one character for the word ‘tree’, another character for the word ‘bush’, and yet another for the word ‘forest’. This alphabet originates from the ancient Chinese character set, which is very similar even today and equally as complex.

Kanji and its Chinese parent are a complete opposites of Roman and Greek based languages, like English, which are entirely phonetic in nature: a very small set of characters are used together to represent sounds. Those sounds together form spoken words.

So, as might be expected, Japanese’s other two ‘simplified’ character sets (Kana) are phonetic in nature, like English. Hiragana is used for representing standard Japanese words and phrases. Katakana is an entirely different alphabet primarily used in representing formal names and places, especially foreign names.

Romaji is not really a separate character set – its just a hacky name for using Roman letters to form Japanese sounds so westerners can learn to pronounce the language without learning new character sets. At the end of the day though, any serious student of Japanese is far better off learning Hiragana and Katakana while learning vocabulary to immediately start training their brains in a proper manner – this is how elementary school children in Japan learn. Romaji is actually counterproductive to someone learning Japanese, because it acts as a crutch and prevents the student from reaching the full potential of being fluent and literate in Japanese.

It is interesting to note though that computers in Japan expect Romaji input which the operating system then converts into the respective character sets. This is done for practicality – could you imagine what a keyboard would look like if it had to support all the different character sets?!? Today its very common for Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji to be used in the same document. So, one must really learn all 4 to be perfectly literate.

So where did I end up after this maelstrom of searching?

I’m going to start Japanese classes later this month

Yeah, yeah, I know this is going overboard and I’m a little nuts, but why not? My brain craves a scholastic environment pretty often actually. But I don’t want to have to go through full enrollment in a university again, so this is a great option for me. The classes are twice a week in the evenings and accomodate my work schedule perfectly.

I did this a couple of years ago for Spanish to continue what I learned while living in Spain. I’m now quasi-fluent in Spanish and feel pretty comfortable in that language. Unfortunately, my vocabulary has been decreasing since then…

Who knows…in a few months, I could be functionally fluent in Japanese too (which learning to speak is, in all honesty, much easier to learn than Western languages – its just the writing system is much harder).

All because of a few Utada Hikaru songs

I’m currently feeding a juvenile addiction by being absolutely hooked on a Japanese Pop artist named Utada Hikaru.
I look at that sentence and think [...]]]> Ok, so I’m a little ashamed to be writing this post. But, whats the point of a blog if you can’t spill your guts every now and then?

I’m currently feeding a juvenile addiction by being absolutely hooked on a Japanese Pop artist named Utada Hikaru.
I look at that sentence and think to myself “How the heck did I ever even hear about that chick”?

Well, since I lived in Europe (Barcelona) for a semester back in my college days, I was introduced and really opened up to international music. It was there that I found a love for certain forms of guitar as well as techno (vocal trance) and other forms of ‘electronica’. Barcelona had a great following, with Ibiza so close by – ground zero for enthusiasts worldwide.
Anyway, when I came back to the States with my new found love, I started listening to more and more of it via ShoutCast streams. My favorite one is the Digitally Imported Vocal Trance station.

So, I’m listening to Digitally Imported one day, and I heard this techno remix of some Japanese song. It was freaking awesome – a nice blend of vocals over a killer beat track touching on the minor scale while resolving cleanly to the major. It was awesome. As the song came to a close, I quickly jotted the name down and noticed it was a remix of a song by some artist named Utada Hikaru.

Although I can’t remember the name of the song now (It was probably a mix of ‘Simple and Clean’, which is the most popular for dance mixes), that song led me to good ‘ol Google.

So, I googled away and found some of her stuff. I listened to it. I was then sucked in. I now feed my addiction with songs and videos.

Here are my favorites so far (watch out, you might get sucked in too!):

#1. Keep Tryin’:

#2. Passion – a really great song for a potential trance mix, beautiful imagery in the video:

#3. Passion (Live performance, but watch #2 first)

There’s an abstractly seductive yet elegant quality about her; I can’t really put my finger on it.

Maybe introducing you to these songs will broaden your musical horizon just like it did mine, even if you don’t agree with my juvenile addiction Enjoy!

In one video, he passes large salt shaker right through a glass table – with people right next to him! Absolutely mind blowing.
Usually with sleight of hand, you [...]]]> While searching Google Video, I found this Japanese-American master magician named Cyril Takayama.
Then, I found a Cyril Takayama YouTube page

In one video, he passes large salt shaker right through a glass table – with people right next to him! Absolutely mind blowing.
Usually with sleight of hand, you can see the magician contorting his hands a little bit, which sorta gives away that he might be hiding or palming things. This guy doesn’t do that – you swear its not magic and that he has discovered holes in the universe or something – a true master. Unbelievable!!!