Taking pains to be a good pupil
James Delingpole
ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS by Robert Twigger Indigo, £6.99, pp. 316
IMINI■11•■
It's all very well having a rapier wit and a black belt in killer irony, but I'd happily sacrifice both for the ability to wipe out my enemies with my bare hands. No doubt that's why I took such pathetic, boyish plea- sure in this account, written by a similarly over-educated wimp, of a year learning aikido with the Japanese riot police.
It opens with Robert Twigger in unenvi- able circumstances. His glory days at Oxford (where, like Wilde, he won the Newdigate poetry prize) long past, he scrapes a living as a schoolteacher in Tokyo, eating junk food, drinking too much coffee and smoking too many cigarettes, in a tiny squalid apartment shared with a balding know-all and a flatulent Iranian called Fat Frank. Something, he realises, must be done to arrest his decline into thirtynothingdom.
Inspired by the examples of his literary idol, the 19th-century warrior-poet Tesshu, and of his doughty grandfather, Colonel H. Twigger, who fought the dreaded Nip alongside the Naga headhunters in the last war, Twigger junior decides to reclaim his manhood by enrolling in the notoriously tough senshusei (specialist) course at the Yoshinkan aikido school.
It turns out to be a scarily masochistic exercise. Over the next year for five days a week, he must arrive at the Dojo (training centre) at 7am to spend an hour cleaning the loos before five hours' ritual torture at the hands of aikido instructors.
On the way, Twigger manages to learn one or two nifty aikido moves. But arm- locks and throws, he soon realises, are con- sidered less important than the art of suf- fering bravely. His knees are reduced first to a bloody pulp, then to a mess of suppu- rating sores; his buttocks and back are rubbed raw after doing up to 300 'break falls' in an hour; the bones (`knobbies) at the base of his spine become calcified and bruised; his ribs are nearly broken. But little by little he learns to become 'a connoisseur of pain'.
Of course, Twigger runs the risk at this point of becoming almost as tediously, self- regardingly macho as his lunk-headed international classmates (one styles himself Mad Dog; another claims, erroneously, to have served with the Australian SAS). For- tunately, his cynicism and dry sense of humour come to the rescue.
He notes, for example, that Kancho the honorific for the head of the school is very similar to the Japanese word for `enema'. And he gleefully confesses how, after hearing the 'terrible news' that the aging Kancho has finally succumbed to lung cancer (all aikidoki smoke, it seems), he punches the air and shouts, 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' because it will mean a week's holiday from training.
There are also plenty of amusing insights into the weirdness of Japanese culture: how, for example, it is considered perfectly acceptable for tough riot policemen to demonstrate affection by pinching one another's bottoms; and, owing to the absence of greenery and the plethora of professional voyeurs, how difficult it is to find anywhere in Tokyo to kiss your young Japanese girlfriend.
But you'll enjoy the book most if you have an interest, however remote, in mar- tial arts. It's an arcane field which tends to attract more than its fair share of recondite or pompous writing. Any White Pyjamas avoids these pitfalls.
Twigger knows and clearly loves his subject. He is good at explaining its strange rituals, which appear to have changed little since the 17th-century Samurai hand- book he quotes at the beginning of each chapter: After reading books and the like it is best to burn them or throw them away. Reading is for the imperial court, whereas the way of the Samurai is death.
He is intelligent enough to recognise, however, that the 'way of death' is not so practicable in the 20th century. In the inevitable scene where Twigger finally gets the chance to test his martial skills, surrounded by a gang of vicious bikers, he is grateful to be let off the hook by a friend's conciliatory charms. As someone else tells him wisely, it's very easy to kill a man: the hard part is not getting killed in the process.
Maybe I'll stick with that rapier wit and black belt in irony after all.
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