Читать книгу Complete Aikido. Aikido Kyohan: The Definitive Guide to the Way of Harmony онлайн

50 страница из 78

With Tachikawa AFB a good thirty miles outside the city limits, the driver was somewhat reluctant to make the journey. However, after assurances that he had enough money to pay for the trip (“It cost me about 3,000 yen, which was only about $8.50 then; I think today it would cost about $300!”), Suenaka was on his way.

Even today, Tokyo’s labyrinthine streets and haphazard addresses make navigation difficult, so much so that even natives have a tough time finding their destination. It was no different in 1961, as Suenaka recalls:

“The taxi driver said, ‘Well, where’s the dojo?’ And I said, ‘Shinjuku-ku,’ which is a district in Tokyo, one of the largest. He said, ‘We are in Shinjuku-ku—where in Shinjukuku?’ And I said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho,’ which is like a borough, or part of a town. And he said, ‘Wakamatsu-cho?’ So we drove around for what seemed like an hour, until finally he said, ‘This is Wakamatsu-cho.’ Then we had to find Nishi Okubo, which is in Western Okubo, which is a neighborhood there in Wakamatsu-cho, like a subdivision, and it’s also the name of the main street in Nishi Okubo. We kept driving and he asked around—we finally found Nishi Okubo, the street, and we drove and drove and drove looking for Nuke-Benten, which was a store or supermarket near the Hombu on Nishi Okubo . . . [The driver said], ‘This is the town, but where’s the house?,’ and so about another half-an-hour or so, we were driving around and I looked at a telephone pole right on the side of the road with a little sign with ‘aikido’ calligraphy on it and an arrow pointing down the lane. I yelled, ‘This is it! We found it!’ The taxi driver was elated . . . It took about an hour-and-a-half to drive thirty miles and find it.”