Choose Wrong and You Will Regret It

This happened forty years ago.
Things that would never be allowed in a school today are written here exactly as they were. The words that were said to me, the things that were done to me, the things I did myself -- I have changed none of it.
I want this read as a bad example, and hiding the inconvenient parts would defeat the purpose.

If it reaches someone who is about to choose a school, so much the better.
I am writing it down to put my own mind in order.

A certain high school, Saturday afternoon, in the middle of judo practice. Out of nowhere:

Coach: "If you don't want to be here, go home." Shouting.
Me, inside: Honestly, I don't want to be here, and I don't even like it anymore, so fine, I'll go home. And I started walking toward the changing room.
Coach: "You're leaving?!" Shouting again.
Me, inside: You told me to go home if I didn't want to be here, so I'm going home, and now you ask if I'm leaving. So I'm not allowed to leave?!
Coach: [here he used a slur for a person who cannot hear or speak -- a word nobody would print today] "You're leaving?!"
Me, inside: What do you want from me. So I can't leave after all. Damn it. And I walked back into the dojo.

Then he would not let me rest. He kept me as motodachi -- the one who stands there and gets thrown, over and over -- until the very end of practice. Concentrated fire. Honestly, it was closer to bullying.
One of them tripped me and went for a choke, so I played dead. He hauled me up and slapped me across the face. The look on his face was pure triumph.

After practice everyone told me, laughing, that what you are supposed to say at a moment like that is "I'm not leaving!" or "Please let me practice!"
Really? I was doing the work honestly, and if someone tells you to go home when you don't want to be there, does that not make anyone give up? What exactly counts as showing that you want to be there? I understood less than before.

Looking back, that was the starting point. Training seriously began to feel ridiculous, and I stopped putting anything real into it.
And what had I come to this high school for? It was less that I no longer knew -- I decided it had been a mistake.

The truth is, I had been planning to go to a technical high school. My homeroom teacher in junior high, who also coached judo, knew I had the marks to get into the academic high school without any trouble, so he said: "Not the technical school. Go to the academic high school." And he said it only when the exams were almost on top of us. Before that he had told me the technical school was fine, that I would get in even without a recommendation.

He kept at it right up to the day the application was due, so I gave in and sat the exam, unwillingly, for a school I did not want.
Back then the results were read out on television with the names of everyone who had passed, and I had been looking forward to it. But the evening before, the coach from the high school telephoned and told my mother I had passed, and my mother told me that apparently I had passed.
I had been looking forward to finding it out for myself. That was the first thing taken away from me.

Then the entrance ceremony. For some reason, starting with our year, the school had decided to turn itself into a university-preparatory school. Lessons would start at 8:30 instead of 9:00.
Hold on. I had no intention of entering a school aiming at university entrance. I was not going on to university. It was dull, and from the very first days it was not what I had been told.

So there it was. I was supposed to be learning a trade at a technical high school, and instead the lessons turned into some university-entrance business I had no use for, and they bored me. I had no reason to study. How many times did I hand in a blank answer sheet and take a zero...
Still, apart from English I never took a failing grade (below 40), and I graduated.

I thought about going off the rails, but I had seen plenty of half-delinquents in junior high, and I disliked the idea of running in a pack, so I never became one. Or rather, perhaps I had already done every bad thing there was to do back in elementary school.
What I enjoyed in those days was hanging around, endlessly, the shop run by the old man and his wife who kept a whole world of children's dreams inside it -- the toy shop "Hitsujiya", now long gone.

Partly under my parents' influence, I also used to slip off to the pachinko parlour (a pinball-style gambling arcade). When a patrolling teacher caught me and told me off, I did not even leave. I stayed and kept playing.
The reason is that I did not smoke then and I do not smoke now.
Smoking while playing pachinko got you suspended; playing pachinko without smoking got you a warning and nothing more. I could not understand it.
Well, at least I was never short of pocket money. That was the one thing I was happy about.
Looking back now, that too was part of throwing away, one piece at a time, my own reason for going to school.

Then came the spring of my third year. The coach who had forced me into this school was being transferred, and on the way back from the spring training camp I got roped into helping him clear out his things.
That was when he said another idiotic thing. "How about transferring to the high school in the next city?"
What is this man talking about, I thought. You want to stir up my life again for your own convenience? And besides, I did not have the brains to transfer there, so it is not something to say even as a joke.
Then, at the start of the third year, a different coach arrived, and the club wound down.

I disliked the new coach at first, but he worried about me even after I graduated, and he found me a job. He really was a good teacher.
He once flattered me by saying, "If you had been born in the warring states era, you might have made a great general."
The coach who had pulled me into that school, on the other hand, when I chose a posting in the city on the civil service exam, said "From here on, whatever happens to you is not my problem," and that was that.

At that point I decided I would simply humour the man from then on.

One thing led to another, and in the end I went into the same trade as my father. And I still think, to this day, that I should have gone to the technical high school.
If I had, I would know more than I know now.

Reading this far, you may think the coach is the one at fault.
I thought so myself for a long time.

But the coach who pulled me into that school ended it with "whatever happens to you is not my problem" the moment I chose a job for myself.
The person who pushes you does not carry the responsibility for what comes afterwards. He cannot.

The one who finally wrote his chosen school on that application form -- unwillingly, worn down, but it was me.
And forty years later I am still dragging this regret along behind me, like uchikomi, the same throw repeated over and over.

So, what am I trying to say. If you do not decide your road seriously when the time to decide arrives, you end up like me, grumbling about it afterwards and regretting it.
Even when someone recommends something, choose so that you will not regret it -- school, work, either is fine. Holding on to what you have pictured since childhood, and choosing with that in mind, is essential.

It is fine if people are against you.
Just be able to say, in your own words, why you want to go there.
If you cannot say it, your thinking is not finished. Which also means you still have time to think.

I am not saying adults are always wrong.
There was a coach who worried about me and found me work after I graduated.
Listen to them. And then decide for yourself.

My dream, in elementary school and junior high, was to fish for king salmon and build log houses in Canada.
Yes -- I took the full force of Takao Yaguchi's "Tsurikichi Sanpei" and I meant it seriously.
So I never wanted to do judo in the first place.