Ladies and Gentlemen, We Present...The Enbukkai! May 24th, 2008

Finally, after all that practice and all my mumblings, we went to Tokyo. After waiting about 3 hours for our turn, we ran out to the red mat right in front of the judges and did our routines for 90 seconds. Sensei seemed really pleased at our performance. IMHO, I think we did rather well. Here you go:



I had planned to do iriminage before my final nikkyo, but I noticed the other couples were finishing and so I adlibbed a bit and edited my routine. I think I was a bit slow somewhere in the middle of the performance. My partner reacted well and was quite flexible (mentally speaking) and didn't panic or get flustered when I deviated from our plan. Good guy he was, owe him a drink.

Oh yeah, many other people performed there as well. Some of them were pretty good, too. I took a few shots of the Hombu Dojo crowd (literally, there were many of them).




Here's a dojo from a girls' school. They were quite young, but they moved really well and showed a lot of grace.




These last two are of Mr. Ueshiba the Dosshu of the Hombu Dojo. He always does the grand finale and gives a great demonstration of aikido in action.






The rest of Saturday was a blur of trains, taxis and food. I dimly recall coming back to the hotel and trying to get some sleep for the next day. Which I tell you all about next post.