Getting old, getting out-of-shape, and getting nowhere fast, Robert Twigger and his two Tokyo flatmates decide to enrol in aikido classes at the famous Yoshinkan dojo. Besides regular aikido classes, the dojo also offers the Riot Police course, a torturous year-long intensive course taken by Tokyo policemen training to be riot police, but that is also open to other students.

The mystique of the course seizes Twigger’s mind and he finds himself signing up, along with a ragtag bunch of foreigners. And, as is usual in such martial-arts-coming-of-age books, having been driven to the brink of total collapse and near-injury everyday, Twigger finds hidden reserves within himself and discovers little epiphanies, so that he completes the course despite being thought least-likely-to-finish in the beginning.

I quite enjoyed this book, but not as much as similar books like Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman and American Shaolin by Matthew Polly, I think because Angry White Pyjamas doesn’t have as much in the way of vignettes illustrating Japanese life. There are two reasons behind this. Firstly, Salzman and Polly were on their own in China, and were forced to mingle with the local populace. Most of Twigger’s interactions are with other foreigners – his flatmates and his fellow-senshusei (people taking the Riot Police course), and so what few vignettes come from his Japanese sensei, the Japanese school he teaches at, and his Japanese girlfriend, the latter of whom aren’t mentioned very often due to his consuming involvement in aikido.

Secondly, Salzman and Polly were in the countryside, where they could see almost-unadulterated Chinese culture at work and play. But Twigger is in Tokyo, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and perhaps urbanites everywhere are not that different.

Still, the aikido parts of the book are fairly interesting and there are some hints as to “how aikido works”, which always interests me. And his going from flabby English teacher-poet to tough aikidoka is quite inspiring. If he could do it, anyone with the right attitude can, he seems to be saying. Which is a good message.

PS. One more bit that I thought was neat, due to my abiding interest in language pedagogy, was his description of how he began teaching “aikido English” – breaking things down into specific patterns and drilling over and over. It sounds like quite a boring system, but it just shows how pedagogic styles can be borrowed across disciplines and be inspired from anywhere.