As self-confessed slave to nostalgia, I must admit that I waste a lot of time feeling sad about things that have nothing to do with me. Take the recent transformation at Golden Gai in Shinjuku. Once a drinking area for salarymen, now a backpacker hotspot packed with Europeans and Australians on their year out, with barely a grumpy office worker to be seen. Even though I only went there a few times, this development has changed it from a small part of culture I was aware of to something that I quite regularly sit and grieve for. Pointless. That said, sometimes something comes along that justifies this rather negative aspect of my brain.
The hole left as Tsudanuma Dojo goes under the bulldozer hits me both in a personal way and also from a wider sense of loss for the old school gyms, now a dying breed across the world. I recently brought along the 17-year-old son of someone I briefly trained with there in 2006. Competing manfully against the obvious horror at how old I’ve become was an overwhelming feeling of the beauty of it all. I’ve always appreciated my luck in coming across the place at all, but this generational moment filled me with an incomparable warmth, knowing I’ve been a small part of something bigger.
I’m trying to imagine a health inspector checking to see if the dojo I stumbled into at 21 years old was up to standard: No toilet, no changing room, no water, a smell of sweat and dust so ingrained that the token effort at cleaning we did after each class wasn’t even expected to help. The first two summers I was there we only had a ceiling fan, and at the end of a few sessions had to start our sparring from kneeling down, splashing around in a good two millimetres of sweat on the mats. Ten years later I broke my ankle because it got stuck in a gap in those same mats, as all the surface damage was just duct-taped over. Of course, safety-wise I understand why this kind of place is becoming a thing of the past. However, for all of us 80’s and 90’s kids who grew up watching VHS tapes of martial arts B-movies, there’s a genuine magic that’s being lost. I suppose it’s an accurate place for that twattiest of expressions – When you know, you know.
From a very personal point of view, Tsudanuma Dojo, more than anywhere else, is where I came of age. I had never tried at anything before I joined. I did the minimum at school and had zero ambition in my work life. I had started plenty of hobbies but never stuck to anything for more than a few months, and certainly never pushed myself with any kind of consistency. On top of that, MMA was something so unsuited to me both physically and mentally that I’m not sure I even had any intention of keeping it up.
A normal gym would never have changed me, but what I walked into wasn’t that. It was, essentially, like I stepped into a really, really shit film – the kind you might have found in a bargain bin with Bolo Yeung on the cover because the entire budget went on paying him for a 25-second cameo doing kata on a beach. I got everything there. I got my sixty-year-old Japanese father figure, the ridiculously shredded Kawai-san, who constantly taunted me whilst I worked out (“You have no muscle. Make muscle.”), took me to the public baths, welcomed my visiting family, even wrote a song in English about one of my mates’ baldness after only meeting him twice. I got my mentors, top level fighters like Hiroyuki Takaya and Akitoshi Tamura who were competing in massive stadium events while training in what was basically a converted flat behind a convenience store. Having grown up as a football fan, with the impossible divide between players and supporters, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that these guys were cornering the rest of us at amateur events. I got my storyline as an underdeveloped dweeb learning to fight in a foreign setting, poring over instruction pictures in books that I couldn’t read and watching grainy footage of tournaments with archaic rulesets from all across Asia.
Most people who know me are aware of how my career went, so I won’t go too much into that. I had my moments, I did alright, much better than I expected. The main thing is that without the earthiness, without the traditionalism that gets lost in modern standards, it would have been completely different. I wouldn’t have fallen in love, I wouldn’t have stayed and I wouldn’t have left a huge part of myself in this place. Bit by bit, of course, things changed as life dictates. We lost Kawai-san to Covid, leaving a gap that I wouldn’t even try to describe. The whole team that I trained, cut weight, won and lost with inevitably all retired from competition and went in different directions. There was a comfort in the knowledge that the gym’s story would carry on without us – a comfort that I hadn’t really understood until I found out it wouldn’t be the case. Of course, the sport itself is thriving, getting bigger and writing new stories as it goes, but it’s tough to see the ending to our chapter. It’s tougher knowing there will be no sequels, and that the days when a similar gym would open for each one that closed are now firmly in the past.