The Littlest Black Belt Gets Dressed Up

[swan_tower]

After my test back in March, Shihan gave me a plain black belt to wear.

My real black belt had to be ordered from Okinawa, you see. Which takes a while — and then I vanished for three months, on account of house-buying and travel and house-moving and the dojo’s annual summer break. But tonight I went back, for the first time since early May, and this was waiting for me:

Mind you, the really real symbol of my achievement won’t come until the dojo party this Christmas. As Shihan has pointed out, anybody can go online and buy a black belt — even one with their name embroidered on it in Japanese. But you can’t buy an enormous diploma signed by a ninth-degree black belt in your style, which is what I’ll get in a few months.

Still and all . . . it’s good to have the belt. 🙂

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[sovay]

Still and all . . . it’s good to have the belt.

Mazel tov!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

"No-i-n-shi-yu-wa-n-da-?" (I assume that last character is some kind of "r" sound, but it doesn't match what I'm seeing in the katakana charts for "ri", "ru", or "re".

Thank you for this evening's reading comprehension exercise!

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

The last character is a vowel lengthener. It's very common to elide a terminal -r sound and lengthen the preceding vowel instead.

The small yu runs together with the "shi". Shiyu is how you do a "shu", just as shiya is how you do "sha". Also there's an E after the I. So, "Noienshuwandaa".

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Aha, I had wondered if the small size of the "yu" meant something. (Though I guess I didn't wonder enough to google it.)

Thank you for enlightening a katakana noob!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

davidgoldfarb beat me to it. :-)

Small katakana also get used for representing sounds that don't exist in Japanese. For example, if you need the syllable "fa," you write "fu" (the only way you can get an F) and then a small "a" after it.

(And for anybody who's curious, the other part of the belt reads "Ryuukyuu Bujutsu Kenkyuu Douyuukai," which is the name of the martial arts organization Shihan helped found.)

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! (because it still feels good to mention it, from one black belt to another. Got mine in June :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Woot! Congrats to you as well. What style?

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

The belt is gorgeous, but the enormous diploma signed by the ninth-degree black belt? That's awesome.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to it. :-D