Dutch Master

A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from Dutch 6th dan Jaap Niezen; Jaap is a specialist in the kata of judo, and tours Germany and the Netherlands to hold clinics. His sons had shouted him a trip to New Zealand for his seventieth birthday, and he visited our dojo because, as one of the sons put it, “he can’t spend 4 weeks with no Judo.”

All the better for us.

Alan had let people around the area know that Jaap would be there, but we seemed to get fewer non-Budokan judoka than you’d expect, and most of them were spectators rather than on the mat. Oh well, their loss.

And it was their loss. I can see why Jaap is in demand; while he’s capable of putting a stern face on, he’s a very charismatic guy who had the class in the palm of his hand; his admonishments are just hard enough to be taken seriously, but without the kind of venom or sense of singling out that could make a student feel like giving up rather than persisting.

Probably his most valuable attribute as a teacher is a good sense of what he needs to tell people - it’s easy when someone reaches a high degree of skill to forget all the little things that bedevil the less able, and Jaap has a real knack for working out what you don’t know, and focusing on that. Since we were, for the most part, a kyu class doing naga-no-kata, he put a lot of focus on drumming proper terms and concepts into us; he went into more detail around the more sophisticated kata toward the end, with the dan grades.

The format was fairly straightforward; Jaap pulled two of the senior (brown belt) students out (Dave and Simon) and had them run through a throw as tori and uke. Jaap would identify weaknesses in their execution; for example, after uki otoshi, Jaap quizzed Simon as to what otoshi means - and given that it means “fall” or “drop”, could Simon please re-do the throw dropping his uke down, rather than hurling Dave into the distance. For some throws Jaap would put questions to the class, and for others he would demonstrate himself. Once he felt we had a good example to work from, we would be turned out on the mat to practise as tori and uke, with our own instructors assisting Jaap. The only thing lacking was time.

The best thing I took away was his very clear explanations of why we do things; as I mentioned before, I’d been doing the three-step when practicing technique, but no-one had mentioned why it’s three steps. Now I have a better handle on it. Jaap’s insistence on Japanese terms for techniques, and breaking those terms down to explain how the throws work, was also valuable¹, since it’s done a bit to drum some of the terminology into my head.

One pleasing moment that had nothing to do with technique was when an older visitor who’d come to see Jaap asked about techniques he felt were “impolite” to perform with women. Jaap drew himself up, pointed to one of the women dan-ranked players, and announced, “When I do judo, I am judoka. When she does judo, she is judoka. There is no difference.” Which is how it is in our dojo, but it’s nice to see an older teacher spell it out so clearly.