From May 25 to June 3, my youngest son Randall and I were in Tokyo to enjoy a week of samurai sword training and to participate in an all-Japan taikai (tournament). Here begin my “Top Ten Reasons for Samurai Sword Training in Japan” …

Reason No. 10: The ability finally to “get” Bill Murray’s movie Lost in Translation. Somebody had told us before the trip, “Don’t worry about English. So many people in Japan speak the language, you won’t have any problems.” A preposterous lie. Our travel agent booked us into a businessman’s hotel — a Japanese businessman’s hotel. It wasn’t easy … I couldn’t tell if I was being told, “Your bank card overpaid us by 200 yen,” or “You owe us 200 yen more.” By virtue of the fact that we were allowed out of the country at the end of the week, I infer the former. Nonetheless, even when language was a problem, we kept finding people who tried to help. And it so happens that body language is a pretty amazing dialect.

Reason No. 9: A chance to get a very quick take on an extraordinary people and land. Japan is about many people and much stuff in small spaces. Emblematic: in the little bit of soil around an electric pole on a city sidewalk somebody, I observed, was grooming a lovely rose plant (of course, I never got around to taking a picture). Tokyo and environs are filled with electrical wires, over which you can easily envision Godzilla tripping. Plumbing pipes are on the outside of buildings (all the better for servicing — brilliant!). Cars travel on the left side (note, I resist saying “wrong” side) of roads, and people walk on the left side of sidewalks. Every time I got in the front seat, passenger side of a car I’d reach for a nonexistent steering wheel and start to adjust the mirror. And, oh, the variety of vehicles! My favorite was the Nissan Cube (rival to my beloved Scion xB — which, over there is called the dB). People don’t jaywalk. Bicycles are everywhere — and whereas bicycles in the U.S. are normally recreational, bicycles in Japan are for basic transportation. Thus, they all have fenders and baskets, and are almost all “female” (which makes a lot of sense, once you think about how much easier it is to mount and dismount when there’s not this crazy bar you have to lift your leg over).

The little bit of sightseeing our schedule allowed took us to Mt. Fuji on one day (in the vicinity of which stands Odowara Castle) and to Kurakama on another (home of a famous Buddha statue, and historic shrines).

Reason No. 8: Intense training. In the U.S. it’s awfully hard to come by tatami mats (the slicing & dicing of which is the basic point in the art of batto jutsu). Not to mention they’re prohibitively expensive (sometimes as much as $6 per mat to cut). In Japan, tatami mats are in abundant supply, and they are quite cheap (about $2 per mat to cut). So, while in the U.S. we might get to cut two mats a week, during our week in Japan we cut every day but one. I figure we cut about forty tatami in that week. I went to Japan fairly confident in my basic 5-cut pattern (godan-giri), but scared to death of the next-step-up 6-cut pattern (rokudan-giri). I felt pretty good about both when I left. I hope it was a turning point. We’ll see. At any rate, it was training paradise!

In this regard as well, it was wonderful just to be in Hataya Mitsuo sensei’s sword shop and dojo. Watching him work on swords, you realized you were witnessing generations of artisans — his samurai family served the clan of the great samurai Date Masamune (1567-1636). Oh, and by the end of the week, I at least had a name, “Kidd San” as did my son, “Young Man.” It meant a lot that Hataya sensei gave “Young Man” so much encouragement, sparring with him (not with live blades, thank you very much!), and giving him the last double mat to cut on the last day of training.