Section 86 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 January 3 Saturday.
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On the 31st of December, for the first time ever (and probably the last) I watched the kickboxing-type sport known as K1.

I saw this on TV when I was up in Gunma Prefecture for the New Year. I think, from memory, the actual fight was held in a stadium in Nagoya.

The attraction was that the retired yokozuna (grand champion) known as Akebono was going to fight a K1 professional by the name of Bob Sapp. I follow sumo, so I've seen Akebono fight many times, and there was a certain irresistible attraction about seeing exactly how Bob Sapp was going to destroy him in the ring.

Actually it just took one round. Bob Sapp is, by all accounts, a very nice guy, but he hits people for a living, and Akebono didn't have much of an idea of how to defend himself.

This was a bit ... well, degrading to watch. It's never nice to see someone's dignity being destroyed. And Akebono's dignity was destroyed totally. By the end, Akebono was flat on his face in the ring, bleeding, unable to get up, and looking rather like a helpless elephant.

To make it worse, for some reason (maybe he thought he could win) Akebono had brought his wife along, and the cameras caught her watching the disaster in the ring with what can only be described as terrified horror. AND, on top of that, Akebono's two young children were with their mother in the stadium.

In the lead-up to the main event (Akebono versus Sapp) there was another tragedy. A young man who had previously a very real chance of going to the Athens Olympics had decided to turn pro, and was having his first fight. He won - I think he's a wrestler, and he easily defeated his opponent, some guy who won a medal in the Barcelona Olympics.

But it's really unimaginably sad that someone should throw away a shot at the Olympics to indulge in ... well, a career in a dismal subculture.

The young man's mother was at the stadium and she cried throughout his fight, and I don't think the fact that he won made her feel any better.

So that was my one and only experience of K1.

I don't know how popular this is in Japan, but there must be a certain amount of money in it. There seemed to be a fair few people in the stadium, and Stevie Wonder was on hand (in person, I think) to perform the American national anthem (which he played, very soulfully, on a mouth organ).

(The Star Spangled Banner was in honor of Bob Sapp. For the Hawaiian-born Akebono, now a naturalized Japanese citizen, there was the Japanese national anthem.)

Not only was Stevie Wonder on hand, but Mike Tyson showed up from Hawaii via some kind of video link. (Tyson thought Bob Sapp would win, and he wasn't wrong.)

So that was K1.

My other recent cultural experience was that, for the first time in a long time, I went to the movies, and saw The Last Samurai. This stars a Japanese actor called Ken Watanabe, ably assisted by some American kid called Tom Cruise.

In Japan, the running time of this movie is two and a half hours, and those two and a half hours went by very quickly. I don't know how this movie might be received in other countries but, here in Japan, it has enormous emotional impact. I cried a couple of times, but the Japanese guy sitting to my right (a stranger) was blubbering uncontrollably for about the last half hour of the movie.

The one thing that disconcerted me a couple of times was a sense of cognitive dissonance ... those giant ferns in the forest scene ... those don't look like Japanese ferns. They look like New Zealand ferns. But I have seen ferns in Japan ... little ones. And that hillside ... that's disconcertingly like a New Zealand hillside.

It was only as the credits rolled that I realized that one of the shooting locations was Taranaki, in New Zealand ... Taranaki's main claim to fame being Mount Taranaki (otherwise known as Mount Egmont), a classical volcanic cone not quite as high as Mount Fuji but (for the purposes of cinematography) pretty much identical.

As the credits began to roll, about half a dozen people scuttled out of the movie theatre. But everyone else in the jam-packed theatre sat there in utter silence until the last of the credits were done.