Back in Tokyo
September 13, 2010
I returned to Tokyo last Tuesday night after having been away for a month. Cody looked great – no evidence of the pudginess that I had seen at this time last year. Less than 48 hours after my return, we were back on the agility field for a class. Cody was obviously excited to be back as he flew through the course despite the heat (still in the 90s here). Not surprisingly, my timing was rusty, so it took a few run throughs to master the course. We were back at it two days later with better results (although still not clean the first time through).
This is the “busy” trialing season here, and we have a one day trial this coming Sunday, and one the following Sunday. In October there will be 3 days of trials, including a two-day trial in Sendai (the site that is 5 hours away). Out of the five days of trials in the next two months, four offer Level 3 courses, so there will be an opportunity for us to get some experience at this top level.
I continue to be amazed at how much I must be missing about what is going on around me. In the latest incident, two people came up to me in class on Saturday and started to congratulate me on Cody’s and my performance at Sendai in July (our last trial). They don’t speak English, so I made an assumption that they were referring to our 4th place position in standard, but they kept saying something about first place, and mentioned the Dog Sports Journal, the magazine that covers agility as well as other dog sports. I had “read” the September issue that they were referring to, but my “reading” is basically looking at pictures and looking for Cody’s and my name on the general rankings. Certainly there weren’t any first places for us there. I listened to what they were saying again, and understood that the combined standard and jumpers scores (time) for that day put us in first place! I didn’t know that this sort of combination was ever looked at here. When I got home, I checked out the magazine again – it took a while for me to find what they were referring to (out of the three written languages in Japanese, I can read two, but I don’t read the most prevalent, Chinese characters called “Kanji”). There was a discussion on a page of mostly pictures from the trial and there I found the reference with Cody’s and my name. Wow – very unexpected!
Page in Dog Sports Journal
Sentence referencing Cody and me
You need an interpreter, like all the Japanese baseball players have over here. I think the South Korean women golf players have them, too! Congratulations! Which of those words says “Cody.”? I see reference to agility and jumpers, letters which refer to times? Are you mentioned? I just love languages and trying to figure stuff out. My niece is studying Mandarin and I have the character for “dog” on my fridge!
From what I can read, it has our standard time (AG 42.89) and placement (4) + our jumpers time (JP 31.73) and placement (7). After the parentheses around the 7 closes, there is one character and then my name starts. It goes until the ampersand and then it says “Cody (Nova Scotia/Tokyo)” and then the next number is the total time and then there is a 1, which references the first place.
Cody’s breed is known as “Nova Scotia” here – I’ve tried to introduce the short name that we use in the U.S., “Toller”, but my friends find it too difficult to pronounce.