It was a 6 hour drive, which stretched into closer to 8 hours after we encountered some traffic and subsequently spent an hour at a rest stop. We were pleasantly surprised to find agility equipment set up in one of the dog runs!

Dog Run on Highway

We drove straight to the pension where we were staying for the weekend, which was right on a large lake called Biwa. Unfortunately by the time we arrived, it was too dark for Cody to have a swim. I never did get to see the lake in the daylight, due to our long hours at the trial site. The next night, Cody went into the lake far enough to get his feet wet, but I didn’t want to throw the bumper any further than I could see, so that was the extent of his swimming.

The trial site was built relatively recently (5 years ago, I believe) and it didn’t show up on any of our navigation systems, so getting there early the next morning was a bit of trial and error, and took close to an hour to reach. Fortunately I was traveling with my Japanese friends who could read the local maps – had I been on my own, it could well have taken much longer as there were many back roads which weren’t well marked.

The site was huge, with 4 agility rings and a packed dirt ground. The sounds inside reverberated off the ceiling and walls, and I wasn’t sure if Cody would be affected as it had been so long since he’d run indoors. Fortunately he didn’t seem bothered at all.

Dragon Hat, Shiga (Name of Trial Site)

It wasn’t Cody’s and my weekend for agility, however, and while the courses were nice and the footing was good, Cody and I had a bobble or two in each run. It was fun, however, watching some of the top Japanese competitors on Sunday, as it was an FCI competition during which competitors can earn points towards qualifying for the Japan world team tryouts.

The flyball competition, on the other hand, was another story. We entered the weekend needing a final 3 points for Cody’s Flyball Championship. Points can only be earned by the winning team, and the number of points varies between 3 and 5, depending upon the trial sponsor. We had a stellar team put together by our Flyball club in order to give us the best chance for Cody to get the points he needed, as this would be our last competition in Japan. Cody and I were leaving Japan a week later, and my friends and I were all a bit sad.

As you can guess from the title, our team did win, but it was not an easy win. Two of the usual star dogs on the team made some errors, and we lost one of the heats. But they rallied, and the team won. Hugs and tears were flowing between the team members and the club members – a very emotional time. Cody ‘s Japanese Kennel Club title is now:

AG CH FB CH MACH Cayuga’s Cody XF

The Winning Flyball Team

Signing off….
Cody and I moved from Tokyo last week, so this wraps up two years of Agility In Japan. It has been quite a ride, and I’ve met so many wonderful people in the process. It is with sadness that I depart…..but I know that I will remain in contact with the friends that I have met during our journey.

Sayonara Party

The cake - yes, that is a 5?, we'll leave it at that. That's my name in Japanese.

The Gang

Here are some pictures of the views on the road between the place that I stayed over the weekend and the trial site:

Sunrise in the mountains

Early morning mountain scene

The next two side notes are not related to this trip, but amusing nonetheless. The weekend before Sendai, we had some visitors and we all went to Saiko, a lake about an hour and a half from Tokyo near the base of Mt. Fuji for a few days. It is a beautiful area and Cody loves to swim in the lake. We decided to go visit a traditional village that was reconstructed after a landslide had destroyed the original village in the 1960s.

Mountain village

As we walked past the buildings, we noticed some shops. We stopped in one and found a bag of what appeared to be dried strips of pear (there was a picture on the front of the bag with a drawing of a green pear). The writing on the bag was all in Kanji, the Chinese characters that I haven’t learned yet. The contents looked delicious, so I purchased a bag and opened it up for us to try. After chewing on a piece for a bit, we concluded that the pear had been dipped in soy sauce and/or something fishy. Two of us stopped after one piece, the other continued to chew more and more of it. And it was chewy.

Finally he quit and I said that I would give the rest of the bag to my friends. The following week in agility class I brought it out and gave it away, explaining that we didn’t care for the taste of the pear. I asked whether it had been dipped in something else. They just laughed and laughed – it turns out that the product wasn’t pear at all, it was dried gourd called kampyo, and it was meant to be boiled with soy sauce and sugar before being eaten. Not to be eaten dried! No wonder it tasted so bad!

This was just one more example of my occasionally feeling like a toddler here, being aware of what is going on around me, but unable to read so relying a lot on pictures, however, sometimes they can fool!

And finally, I thought that you might be interested to see this advertisement on the local bus:

Bus advertisement

They love that show here – just as it’s loved in the US!

Agility in the Mountains

Saturday was our day for competing at Level 2. The courses were not bad, just wish we’d qualified on them! We had a refusal in Jumpers, and TWO missed contacts in Standard. The refusal was a direct result of Cody’s blowing his start line stay. Time to come up with a solution to this tiresome problem. That will be a project for the next few weeks as we prepare for our next two day trial at the end of November.

Sunday was slightly better at Level 3 with a clean run in Standard. Cody dropped a bar on the double in Jumpers, and looking at the video later, I saw that it was a direct result of poor timing on my part. On the Standard run, I was forceful on both the A-frame and dogwalk contacts, given our experience of the day before. While we ended up with a clean run, it was much slower than it needed to be, so we were way out of the contention for a placement.

This trial seemed to draw some higher caliber teams than I have typically seen. I noticed that out of the top 10 placements on Sunday, 5 had placed in the top 10 in both Standard and Jumpers. Usually there are only one or two teams that end up placing in the top 10 for both runs.

One of the judges on both Saturday and Sunday was Masanori Kaitoda, a member of the Japanese World Team at the recent FCI World Agility Championships in Germany. He had one run in which he placed second with his Border Collie, Chalo, in Team Jumpers. You can view the run on YouTube:

Someone who attended the trial this past weekend drew up Mr. Kaitoda’s course map for Level 3 Jumpers – she says that it’s not very precise, but it looks pretty accurate to me:

Sendai Level 3 Jumping

On Sunday we also participated in a flyball tournament. Cody’s team rallied and earned first place! We were happy to go home with one placement anyway!

First Place Flyball

The day started out quite rainy, a continuation of the same the day before the trial. I had been warned that the field doesn’t drain well, so I was expecting the worst. Indeed, the parking area was a mess and we waited in line for 45 minutes before we could park. The attendants had to steer each car around huge puddles and mud pits.

Fortunately the rain quit shortly after the trial started. Two of the three agility fields were basically fine (there was one soggy spot in one of the two), but one field was a muddy mess. That field was devoted all day to Level 1. The other two fields were set up for Level 2 standard and jumpers, followed by Level 3.

The nice thing about not running until later was that I could watch my friends in Levels 1 and 2 without distraction. I felt bad for the teams in Level 1, as the ground was very slippery and the course was very fast. Dogs were slipping on the dog walk and handlers were sliding in the mud. It was difficult to watch. I was afraid that the other two rings would deteriorate before they started running the Level 3 courses, but fortunately they remained relatively dry.

Finally at midday the Level 3 courses were set up – the Large class was running Jumpers first. The courses were closer to AKC style than we often see, with more 180s than threadles . The Jumpers course started off with a 180 and then threadle between the 180 through to a straight tunnel. I managed to keep Cody out of the tunnel, which is a bit of a feat without a start line stay. After the second jump, he unexpectedly headed to the far side of the jump rather than through the middle, which was fine, but he was confused as I tried to guide him to the tunnel and back jumped the second jump. So, out we went, after 2 obstacles and 5 hours of waiting!!

Shortly after, we had our standard run. I was determined that we would at least make it through this course without being eliminated, although many dogs had trouble with two C-shaped tunnels side by side nestled under the dog walk. Following the A-frame, the dogs saw 4 entrances to tunnels, the correct entrance was the black tunnel on the left, right side. Cody slowed down at the bottom of the A-frame, but didn’t stop and somehow ended up in the correct tunnel. We finished the course clean, although slower than I would have liked, earning a 4th place rosette.

Level 3 Standard, 4th Place

We leave on Friday for our next trial in Sendai, 5 hours away and for two days. The first day doesn’t offer Level 3, so we’ll compete at Level 2 again, but only for that one day. After that trial, there will be no competitions until the end of November, when we will be traveling 6 hours or so to our first indoor trial, also 2 days long, with Level 3 offered both days. I am looking forward to visiting a new area of Japan, even though it will require spending many hours in the car.

Before I go any further, let me back up and set the scene. It was a beautiful day, a respite from many rainy days last week and additional rain anticipated for the upcoming week. The temperature was in the high 70s, a welcome relief from the high 80s we had last week. I arrived at the trial early, wondering if I should have slept in a bit longer as the Level 3 courses are always at the end of the day. I am so glad that I did, as there were 3 rings and one ring was running the Level 3 jumpers first thing.

The trial started with a few minutes of calisthenics – I remembered this from last year and was ready to join in. I was amazed that there was very little direction and yet everyone seemed in step, except for me! That was when a friend told me that Japanese children do the same set of exercises starting in grade school. I tried to keep up as best as I could, figuring that some exercise and stretching is better than none.

Now for the courses – the judge for both the Level 3 jumpers and standard runs was the one that Cody and I had run under at the big FCI competition at the end of May. It was our introductory run competing at Level 3. He is known as a judge who designs difficult courses, and today was no exception. Out of 45 dogs in the Large class, only two in jumpers and two in standard had clean runs.

While I found the courses to be challenging, they were fair, but there was no room for error. They were a true test of handling ability and teamwork with the dog. Cody was the second dog in the running order, so we weren’t able to learn from the errors of others, but it did give me the opportunity to watch most of the other dogs in the class run. Those that qualified deserved to do so, with not a step out of place.

On the jumper’s run, I felt that there was no option other than using a blind cross on a straight line of jumps. I lost Cody after I did the cross, and while I did get him back in time for the next jump, it put me behind for the following jump and Cody flew into a beckoning off course tunnel. So, my training plan is to work on blind cross skills.

I was pleased that we made it through the standard course without being whistled off. Cody dropped a bar, which is rare for him, but it was my fault – I was worried that he would suck into another tunnel, and I called too hard. At the end of the run he popped the A-frame contact (again, preventable had I worked it – I was just happy that we made it to the end of the course).

Because so many teams had problems on the course, after the runs were completed, the judge kindly allowed anyone who wanted to run again off the record to do so for a payment of about $10. The line was very long!

Since no course maps are distributed, I have drawn the standard course from memory, just to give an idea of the challenges the handler-dog teams faced:

Level 3 Standard Course

The main problem areas were the off course jump 20 after the second jump, tunnel 8 was taken by many dogs after jump 4 and jump 5, and finally the weavepole entry proved to be a challenge for many teams.

Our next trial is in two weeks, October 10th, when we will give another try at Level 3 courses. I can’t wait!

The temperatures were soaring during the time that the flyball was being held – it was easily in the high 80s and the heat was radiating off of the semi-dry grass. But the dogs on our team held their own, and we ended up coming in first place. It had been a while since we’d won a tournament, so we were very pleased.

The Large class Level 3 agility competition didn’t get started until close to 4pm. It had been a long day of sitting around, followed by some baking during the flyball contest. Cody and I had our standard run first, and I am happy to report that we qualified! And came in 3rd! (Admittedly this was a small trial, so there weren’t nearly as many competitors in this class as usual, but we’ll take it.)

Level 3 Standard - 3rd Place

Our Jumpers run was next, and Cody broke his start line stay as usual, but this time for some reason followed me around the first jump. I had placed him at an angle and I should have gone around the jump on the other side, but I was afraid that I would be in big trouble if he broke before I got into position. Anyway, he incurred a refusal before we even started the run. I placed him back behind the first jump and he ran whole course clean.

Our next trial is Sunday. I just found out that I had incorrect information as to where it is to be held. There was a change from last year and the two websites where I get information were incorrect when I had checked them in July. There may have been some casual conversation among the agility competitors concerning the change in venue, but naturally I would have missed that. Anyway, I’m happy that I am in the “know” before having driven to the wrong site!

Below are a couple of wonderful photos taken in Sendai in July by my friend Megumi Nayuki. The first photo captures us coming over the finish line following a successful run, and the second shows Cody complaining about my request to have him stay at the start line. Classic Cody!

Finish Line

Talking Back

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

I am getting ready to travel for a month, and will sadly be leaving Cody behind. Upon my return (when the weather will hopefully be cooler) we will only have two weeks to whip ourselves into shape before our next agility trial. This fall we’ll have a mix of Level 2 and 3 competitions – I am really looking forward to the challenges that lie ahead.

Before I sign off until September, I want to leave you with a couple of cultural tidbits that I recently encountered:

Blood Type: Knowing one’s blood type is of paramount importance here in Japan – not in case of a possible transfusion, but because it is considered a predictor of personality, much like horoscopes based on our birth dates. My friends couldn’t believe that I didn’t know the blood type of my husband or kids.

Watermelons and salt: Yes, we had watermelon the other day, and a bottle of salt was served along with the sweet, juicy chunks. My friends sprinkled the salt on each chunk before eating – yikes! – that didn’t sit well with my very well developed sweet tooth!!

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Upon our arrival in Sendai, we set up our tent by the ring and then headed out to dinner at a restaurant that had all types of Japanese food, cooked and uncooked (I prefer the cooked variety myself!). I am not an adventurous eater, which can be complicated here in Japan when eating with Japanese friends. I feel that I can’t say NO to all the foods that I normally wouldn’t try, although knowing my friends now for a year, I find that I do say NO more often. And now that they know me better, they are more insistent that I try new foods. That night my “new” food was abalone, which was cooked and not bad tasting.

We finished our meal rather late and I still had a long drive to the pension (like a B&B) where I was staying, and where I had stayed the last time I was in Sendai. There are few places where a dog can stay in the room, and many people will stay in hotels that are close to the trial site and leave their dogs in their car, or they stay in their mini RVs on the agility site. I chose to stay again at this place, an hour away, in the mountains, the drive to which is part highway and part tight winding roads. That night the winding roads were especially challenging as it was raining and they were encased in fog. I arrived at 11:00pm and found that the lady of the house wasn’t too pleased with my late arrival.

Day 1 :
The next morning the skies were bright at 4am (there’s no daylight savings here in Japan) and all the other clientele were up and getting ready to go. So I did the same, despite a very short night of sleep. We got to the agility site at 6:30am (the trial was due to start at 7am) and then waited until noon or so before we had our first run. The skies were bright, the sun was hot, but fortunately there was a nice breeze. Cody and I had our jumpers run first. (Although the highest level offered at this trial was Level 2, there were all levels of competitors attending as many people enjoy this trial as a mini vacation, visiting the local onsens following a day of agility.)

Level 2 courses typically have a smoother flow than Level 3, and the courses this weekend were no exception. Cody and I ran the Jumpers course clean and ended up in 8th place, which wasn’t good enough at this trial to place us on the podium (1-5th place). It was just as well, as the day would have been very long, and I didn’t want to get back to the pension as late as I had the night before. Our standard run was not as successful, as the course begged for a good start line stay. Cody let me lead out past the first jump, but not to the second jump that I would have preferred. I got behind and he ended up going off course on the 4th obstacle, which meant that we were whistled off. Ouch.

A group of us went out to dinner to a Korean barbeque restaurant, where we cooked the food at our table. We had our own room, and on the table was a built in draft beer tap and a meter which kept track of how many milliliters of beer were consumed. (I stuck with non-alcohol beer as I had the long drive back to the pension.) My friends chose the food, which was heavy on meat, light on vegetables, and then at the end they ordered an abalone which was cooked on the grill. As it was cooking, it was writhing in the shell for quite some time, expanding and contracting. I was trying to opt out of eating it, as I felt squeamish, but my friends were persistent, so I broke down and gave it a try – yes, it was better than the abalone the day before. But the one bite was enough!

Abalone writhing in its shell

Day 2:
What a treat, being able to attend a two-day agility trial! After another early rise, we arrived at the trial site again around 6:30am. The day started out sultry and very warm, but fortunately clouds rolled in and the weather was more comfortable than the day before, despite the lack of breeze. By the end of the day, when Cody had his standard run, it was raining moderately.

We fared better with both the jumpers run and the standard run, both of which were clean. We ended up in 7th place in the jumpers run and 4th place in the standard run, with a visit to the podium. Also with the standard run we earned 5 championship points, which means that we now have accumulated all the points necessary for an agility championship, with only an obedience title of CD2 to complete the process. (We have been working on the skills needed for this and hopefully we will have an opportunity soon to attempt to pass the CD2 test.) After the podium visit, we headed back, tired and happy, on an uneventful trip back to Tokyo.

Fourth place standard run

But we move on, and Cody and I had a busy weekend. We had an agility trial on Saturday and a flyball competition on Sunday. This is the “rainy” season in Tokyo, which is characterized by high humidity and drizzle. On Saturday, there was cloud cover and a breeze, which picked up towards the end of the day, helping to cool things down a bit.

Agility: It was our second time competing at Level 3, and in the end, we made some progress over our first experience by making it through to obstacle number 18 (out of 20) in a very difficult jumpers course, and making it all the way through the standard run with only an unfortunate hop at the end of the dog walk.

As I walked through the seemingly impossible jumpers course, I was wondering why I had been in such a rush to move out of Level 2. We aren’t given course maps, but I sketched it during the trial:

Level 3 Jumpers Course

In the end, out of almost 100 dogs in the large class, only 1 dog ran clean!! The course ran better than I thought it would, and I realized that with a couple of handling adjustments, it was very doable. In fact, I found that I actually enjoyed the challenge! The sad news is that I have to wait until the middle of September before being able to compete at Level 3 again. (Our next agility trial is a two day event in a couple of weeks, where the highest level offered is Level 2.)

The standard course, on the other hand, had a much better flow and was more similar to AKC style. There seems to be a wide range of difficulty in the Level 3 courses, and while I am not familiar with the guidelines judges are given for course design, I was told that the courses are reviewed the night before a trial by a group of people (other judges and perhaps some of the trial administrators) and any necessary tweaks are made at that time.

Flyball: Sunday was a sultry day, with the sun making an appearance in the afternoon, bringing the heat index to an uncomfortable level. As Cody ran for his team, I noticed him slow down a bit during the last heat. Our team placed a disappointing 3rd, however, this was primarily due to errors on the part of his 3 team mates. Our next competition isn’t until September, so there is plenty of time for practice, and the weather will presumably be cooler then.

Trial gifts: a tea kettle on Saturday (which I was happy about since I didn’t have one) and on Sunday, a small box of powdered laundry detergent!

Cultural Notes: I had a couple of interesting experiences traveling to and from the trial site. On the highways, there is an automated fee charging system similar to EZPass in the NJ/NY/PA area. In my car, there is a small sensor on the windshield and then in the glove compartment is a unit with a credit card that is read when the car passes through the toll gates. My sensor has been fluky and on some highways when I’ve gone to the special lanes for cars with sensors, I have been held up by a gate that didn’t open. This then results in some squawking in Japanese over an intercom, and because I have no clue what is being said, I usually just wait until someone comes (although the first time I just said to the intercom in Japanese “I don’t understand” and the gate magically opened!)

Now when that happens, I wait until someone shows up and takes my card and charges it manually. As you can imagine, if this happened in the US, there would be some grumbling on the part of the employee and any cars stuck behind. When this happened on Saturday, not only did I receive a smile and a bow, but I also was given a gift of a small packet of tissues!

And there’s more…on Sunday as I headed to the same site, I went through the regular lanes for cars with no sensors and picked up a ticket. At the other end, I went to the non-sensor lane to pay, and was surprised that instead of a person there to receive my money, there was a machine. Things were marked in English, fortunately, so I put in the ticket and then noticed that there was a slot for the credit card. I decided to use the one from my glove compartment to pay the fee as there are discounted rates on the weekends. So I inserted my card, and nothing happened. Yikes! I then put some cash in, hoping that my card would come back out. Not! So I had to wait until someone noticed that I wasn’t moving through the gate, and sure enough someone spoke to me over the intercom. I waited until an employee showed up so that I could explain what I had done. He asked me to pull over to the side and he took my card and ran into the building, ran out and asked me whether my sensor system was functional, I answered yes, and he ran back in and then back out again with my receipt for the discounted rate, my card and two tissue packets and a small towel as a gift!! Only in Japan would they essentially apologize for my “inconvenience”, when I was the one who caused the problem!!

Here are a couple of photos that I took near the trial site:

A traditional old building which served as a store in the town near the trial site.

Bright green rice paddies near the trial site