Oishi Judo

My teachers at Eizan Ryu jujitsu encourage their brown belts to go out into the world and look at different dojos, different arts, under the assumption that no one art or style has complete answers and it’s best to see how other people do it. Cross-training is good.

This past Saturday, I took my first judo class at Oishi Judo down on Leonard Street. I figure that a few judo would be best right now, since I’m going to wind up primarily in aikido when I permanently move to Cleveland, and Oishi isn’t too far from work: I can maybe take a long lunch on Wednesdays and take classes there.

Mat fees are $25 per session (plus $50/year for a judo association membership, which is portable to any judo dojo I find in Cleveland; Oishi Judo gets its insurance through the association), which is a lot more expensive than jujitsu, but I suppose it’s not bad compared to one-off sessions at the gym or higher-end yoga studio. I brought my old white belt with me. There was someone else having his first class that day, too, though he had done some judo many years before. After filling out the waivers and changing, I watched the noon children’s class finish up. It’s apparently hard to get 7-year-old kids to do push ups.

Our 90+ minute classes were about 1/6 warm-ups, 1/3 ne-waza, 1/3 randori and stand-up, and 1/6 cool down. Warm-ups were mainly some light stretching (hey, a whole room full of people with stretches that aren’t obviously better than mine!), some moving across the mat on one’s back (good for ne-waza, I guess) and ukemi. The ukemi wasn’t that interesting, with the rolls more like the tumbling that toddlers do across the floor. I suppose it’s mainly because judo doesn’t use many projection throws, so they don’t really practice the relatively energetic front rolls we do. The side, front and back break falls were more or less the same, but they don’t practice free break falls. Ukemi instruction didn’t seem to be that emphasized, though that may be because everyone in the room was reasonable at falling already.

Next was a quick drill on a throws, doing ippon seionage. As one of the new students, I worked with Oishi. After a couple minutes of fitting in, he basically said I had nothing wrong with the throw, and here’s someone else to work with in the meantime, while he started with the other new guy. After this drill, the class moved on to ne-waza, where I demonstrated that I don’t know what to do on the ground. Most of the teaching is between the sempai you’re working with and yourself, with relatively little coming from the sensei, unless you’re working with him directly. I was lucky to work with one of the black belts for the ne-waza, and we went over the escapes from kesa gatame in much more detail than we had done in jujitsu. After this, we did randori, where I worked with Oishi again. I didn’t throw him once. He swept me a bunch of times, mainly de ashi barai and ko soto gari-type sweeps, and he got me in a fast harai goshi. I might have off-balanced him somewhat when he got a little careless, but I wasn’t able to follow through.

After that, he had me work with one of his brown belts for the rest of the randori period. I had slightly more success, but not much. When Oishi brought me over to the brown belt, he mentioned to him that I had some good throwing technique, but didn’t know when to use it in randori. At the end of this period, the brown belt had me throw him a bunch of times in o goshi. Interestingly, I had to restrain myself from dropping my knee on his head after throwing him at my feet. Oishi had said earlier when I was working with him that all throws were allowed, just don’t try to “hurt” anyone, while pantomiming one of those throat attacks that we do in jujitsu.

There’s a strength-building exercise after randori, which appears to vary week-to-week. Last week, when I watched a class, they did a lot of sit-ups and crunches. This week, it was “pick up your partner and carry him piggy back around the mat a few times.” One thing to note is that it was good trying to do throws against the judo guys, since they’re bigger — taller, heavier — than the body types in jujitsu. The final cool down was actually playing with nikkyo off a lapel grab. Amusingly, I was working with someone who had been at Eizan Ryu a number of years ago (“Is Maria still teaching? Is Steve there? How about Rohana and Allison?”). He wasn’t stepping back in to give power to the nikkyo.

Differences between the jujitsu that I do and the judo? Randori is a good: we should do more of it. There’s a whole set of technique needed to get a throw off against a strongly resisting opponent. Similarly with ne-waza. The judo black belt got out of my kesa gatame without much effort, and I couldn’t get out of any hold he did. On the other hand, judo doesn’t obviously teach evasion in the way we understand getting-out-of-the-way, since the assumption is that you’ll be doing this in a match rather than trying to get away from, say, a bar fight.

I’ll probably go again on Saturday, and maybe this Wednesday, though I haven’t figured out what to do with the soaking gi if I’m in the office.

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