Book Review: Angry White Pyjamas

Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons From the Tokyo Riot Police (Harper Paperbacks, 2001) by Robert Twigger.

A fellow dojo mate at Three Rivers Aikido mentioned this book to me. The book as gone through several printings with different subtitles. It is about Twigger's experience studying Yoshinkan Aikido in Japan in the mid 1990s. Yoshinkan Aikido is founded by Shihan Gozo Shioda which is considered a hard style of aikido because it emphasizes martial use. Shioda Shihan who was a personal live-in student (uchideshi) of Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba. The Aikido that Shioda Shihan learned from O'Sensei Ueshiba was a very martial version of Aikido (pre-WWII it was called Aiki Budo). The book tells several stories of Shioda's prowess in the martial arts and a story about his use of Aikido during the second World War. Interestingly, the students of Ueshiba went around picking fights to test their Aikido even though O'Sensei Ueshiba told them not to!

Twigger recounts the many hardships that he had to endure during the year long course. Hardships included knee walking on bleeding knees, 500 backward breakfalls, injuries, and mistreatment at the hands of his teachers. It also recounts Japanese nightlife and various cultural issues of being a gaijin (foreigner) in Japan. At one point in the book a friend asks him if he could take care of himself in a real fight. Twigger reponds that he doesn't know about beating up someone else, but he knows he can take one hell of a beating!