By Carl Sampson
We have been lucky enough to host an exchange student for the past couple of months. He will be with us through the end of the school year.
His name is Tak and he’s from Japan.
Tak is a fairly typical 15-year-old boy, and fits in well with our crew, which consists of a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old. He listens to a lot of Japanese music, which makes as much sense to me as most of the American music our kids listen to. I can’t understand a word of either the Japanese or the American “musicians.”
Which is fine, because I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what they’re saying.
The other day I asked Tak if he liked Oregon. He said he did, which is a relief. It would be tough to be away from home for a year in place you didn’t like.
Then he reminded me of his commute to school in Japan. To get to school each day he rides a bicycle to catch a train, and then switches to a bus. The trip takes two hours each way.
I think about that in the mornings when I’m whining about my 30-minute commute into Salem. No bicycle, no train and no bus. Just a warm and comfortable car and a rock-n-roll CD in the player.
We had a bit of a breakthrough the other day when I asked him which sports he likes. Basketball was one, but his favorite is something called kendo, which translated means “way of the sword.”
I was curious, so he showed me some competitions that were posted on the Japanese version of You Tube.
Holy buckets. These guys are serious. The main goal of a kendo fight is either to whack the opponent on the head or to shove the sword through his throat.
We’re talking full-blown samurai action.
Tak then showed me something that I will think about a lot if I ever go to Japan.
It was a Kendo practice for police officers. It seems police in Japan don’t rely much on guns, the way American cops do. They don’t need to. They carry swords. If some bad guy gives a Japanese cop a hard time he is likely to end up being sliced and diced. I don’t imagine many bad guys survive the Cuisinart effect of a master swordsman.
I got thinking about American police. They carry guns — usually more than one. And they carry tasers, which are used to zap a bad guy if he gives a cop a hard time. And they know a goodly amount of self defense like karate or judo.
But I’ve never seen an American cop pull out a three-foot-long sword. If I were a bad guy I’d think twice about giving that cop a bad time.
In fact, I’d do anything I could to make sure I didn’t become the Japanese equivalent of a shish kabob.
