micaelis

In an earlier post I said that Yuzu, because of his experience on the ice at the time of the quake, is unique amongst athletes in the fact that he has encountered the possibility of dying. He stared death in the face and Yuzu himself has stated that that experience changed him, gave a seriousness to his life that he fundamentally lacked before it. We see it to this day. We sense in him great mysterious depths. Actually everyone has great mysterious deaths. That's part of being human although those depths are largely unknown even to the individuals themselves. The thing about Yuzu is that we suspect that those mysterious depths he has themselves have mysterious depths. He is literally unfathomable.

This makes me quite certain that the Tokyo Olympics will use Yuzu to the max in promoting not only the Olympics in general but particularly Japan's athletes. Expect not only more shorts like this but also extended documentaries. Getting Yuzu and Kohei together for a joint interview on the Olympic experience is almost a certainty since it's so logical that the two highest profile Olympic athletes, one from the Winter games and one from the Summer games should be seen together. This short pep talk makes me fairly certain that Yuzu might be used on every appropriate occasion in the torch relay and opening ceremony. Unlike the JSF the Japan Olympic committee knows Yuzu is the most clickable athlete in Japan. They'll use him whenever and wherever they can.

Is it certain Yuzu's going to 4CC? Also, is Nathan going also? If both are there attention will be at maximum levels (until Worlds, when attention will be maximum +).

That's one thing I find most admirable about Yuzu, his integrity when it comes to his skating. Granted, he wants to win but more importantly he wants to win by doing a Yuzuru-Hanyu skate, not by doing something borrowed from his near competitors. It's either Yuzu's way or no-way.

I'm thinking Yuzu might possibly be involved with both the torch relay and the cauldron lighting ceremony. There will probably be several torch-bearers going through Sendai and it would be most appropriate for Yuzu's stage to involve his home ice-rink in some manner. As for the cauldron, Yuzu won't be the person who ignites it, though he might possibly be involved with it as the torch moves around the stadium grounds. If he's not competing in these summer games coming up I would think that Kohei Uchimura, would be the odds-on favorite to light the cauldron.

Does anyone know for sure that Yuzu can't swim? If he can, there's a pool at TCC in which he could do laps to build stamina. Swimming's much safer than running for stamina building since one doesn't risk injury to knees or ankles there. The recent near-collapse at the end of his FS at GPF does serve to remind us that he still has asthma and thus he has limits to what he can do that the others skaters do not. Just another reminder to us of how Yuzu's battles even include his own body when seeking the perfection he knows he can achieve.

Before everybody panics over today's results, remember Helsinki 2017. The situation is quite similar. Hopefully the results will be the same.

POTO costume 2 is my absolute favorite of Yuzu's costumes. Even after Origin and Masquerade that costume still tops my list.

For those worried about the short time between NHK and GPF you really shouldn't be. True, it's just two weeks but Yuzu's skated before with that short a lead-time. I think the one thing we should see is that Yuzu will be psyched up to take on Nathan, and unlike Worlds this year he's not dealing with any injury. If I were Nathan I'd be worried because an uninjured Yuzu is easily the number one men's skater on the planet. I can't remember the precise interview but I do remember that Yuzu said that after PC he was not particularly motivated, but now that he has a clear rival in Nathan his thirst for victory has increased markedly. The GPF won't be a cakewalk like SC and NHK were but I think what Johnny Weir said some years back that 'nobody can beat a perfect Yuzuru Hanyu' still applies.

He'll be scored as accurately as possible simply because over half the audience will be Yuzu fans and the judges will be risking their lives (LOL) if they don't give Yuzu reasonable scores. Seriously, though, the judges will be on good behavior since Japanese nats this year will be a must-watch TV event. The King, after three years' absence, is returning and needs to have his throne ready for him.

Looking at Yuzu's scores and comparing them to Nathan's, I can't think that anybody other than the Americans does not see Yuzu as the heavy favorite going into the GPF. Both of Yuzu's results were over 300 in the combined, whereas Nathan failed to top 300 in his competitions. Moreover, while Nathan's margins of victory were substantial, both of Yuzu's were essentially blowouts. If Yuzu maintains his momentum going through the season, this might be his greatest since his undefeated season of 2009/10, his last season as a Junior skater. What remains this season? GPF and then Japanese nationals, maybe 4CC and then worlds. What we are seeing this season is a consistent Yuzu, one who's truly mastered his programs and skates with the confidence that comes with that level of mastery. I think the GOAT is getting back into form.

Something like that is almost already mostly finished. My feeling is that it will be aired upon Yuzu's retirement from competition. That way the story (at least that chapter of it) is complete.

OK, here's to clarify something. When I talked about Yuzu going for a 4th men's gold I was speaking very hypothetically. I was just imagining how things would be if he indeed did so. I don't think it likely, in fact, I think it only barely possible. Yuzu, I think, has his own internal itinerary and that is the road map he's following, not road maps supplied by other individuals. This is his tenth year of senior level competition and if he achieves his 4A this year I seriously think he'll leave competition, saying the job was done. Then he'll head into ice show production. In the situations provided by his doing ice shows we will finally see Yuzuru Hanyu fully unleashed, skating programs that are the quintessence of what he thinks figure skating is about.

Yes, it will be. If he wins four he will do what nobody has done. The 2026 games will be in two cities in northern Italy. All the stadium events will obviously be in Milan so that's where Yuzu 'will be heading. If he is there with three Olympic titles under his belt he will be by far the greatest story there, something like Michael Phelps' quest for eight golds in one Olympics was at the 2008 games in Beijing. In the past Yuzu's primary journalist following has been largely Japanese but this would make him the focus of journalists everywhere. Even the Americans will be paying close attention. If we thought the attention paid to Yuzu at PC and we can be sure there will be widespread interest if he goes to Beijing, in 2026 Milan Yuzu will be living and operating in the proverbial fishbowl. If he should win the gold the story will be front-page news (the general paper, not the sports section) everywhere. If there's any thought of him as GOAT any doubts will be erased. He will be the GOAT. It couldn't happen to a nicer person.

I think that is part of why Plushy became such a Yuzu pusher. If you remember how he withdrew from Sochi at literally the last moment before the short program began. He boosted Yuzu to make his retirement more explicable. Later he became a genuine Yuzu fan, one of his most prominent.

I really think the idea of a world tour for Yuzu is possible but only in the context of a full ice show. He has only a certain amount of stamina and he cannot skate for hours on end. He is, however, the only skater around now (or ever) who could package a full ice show and tour internationally with it, the only one who could get the financial support and the only one who could get the audience support. As far as other skaters in his show, they'll be lined up wanting to get in since they all know his drawing power, that when he's on the ticket a sell-out is assured. I and many others have said previously that Yuzu's skating after retirement will be in ice shows and going on the evidence of Continues with Wings, he's fully capable of putting together a show.

I think they are recognizing that the GOAT might be back. If you look at how Yuzu was before his two skates you should see that he has that kind of calm confidence he had at the 2015 NHK and GPF, where he captured the record book and stood astride the world of figure skating, not just men's skating, as the most phenomenal skater in memory. I think he's seeing that this tenth season is the season in which he captures that Yuzu of late 2015. If that's the case, what we saw this weekend might just be warmup. NHK is next, and it would be fitting if in that contest and the GPF Yuzu once again takes total hold of the record book as he did in 2015. We are living in interesting times.

For someone like Yuzu there is no great difference between ice and just plain terra firma. His talent lies in his ability to move, whether it be skating, diving, dancing, gymnastics. Had Yuzu been taller and begun training at the relatively same age he would have been a world class ballet dancer. Had his physique been more muscular, like Shoma's, he'd have made a great gymnast. Yuzu's ability to move and remember his moves qualifies him for any number of controlled movement activities. It's just that skating was lucky to be his choice for which all of us can be thankful.

Yuzu as torch-bearer? He almost certainly will carry it at some point, most probably while it's passing through Sendai. Another time he might be carrying it would be in the opening ceremonies when the torch enters the stadium and is usually then passed to someone else to circle the field and then hand it to the one who will light the main torch. Unless he's competing this time, I think the most likely person to light the main torch will be Kohei Uchimura. If Kohei's competing then who might light the main torch is very much up in the air as far as my knowledge goes. A fitting symbolism might be made by having Yuzu be the one handing the torch to Kohei, a symbolism of winter handing the flame over to summer. I think, though, since the Tokyo games are much less than a year away we might want to open a thread for Tokyo. All in all I think we can count on there being some kind of role for Yuzu in the torch proceedings. He is by far the best known winter athlete from Japan, both in Japan and around the world and the videos of him carrying the torch will be the videos most foreign broadcasters likely would choose when doing a story on the movement of the torch through Japan.

With the news about Eurosport I'm quite saddened. Even more than the videos I'll miss the commentary. Oh, well! We can at least realize that there will probably be many fancams of Yuzu in action so at least there will be that to watch.

In some sense this is off topic but it ties into the topic I highlighted with a recent post (I won't say 'introduced' since it's been around in various ways for I don't know how long) that has come into focus since my very lengthy post yesterday. One person referred to the Boxing Day tsunami that killed nearly a quarter million people in various localities around the Indian Ocean. I was, of course, very mindful of that and watched numerous videos on that disaster. Much of the worst damage occurred on the island of Sumatra but in seeing those a very different picture emerges. The society we saw there was much less technologically advanced and much less economically wealthy. It was a 'developing' world society. In seeing those tsunami videos in Japan I was aware that what I was seeing here was a nation that was very technologically advanced and with a high standard of living. One of the most haunting sounds I noted was the drone of car horns as the waves inundated them and shorted out the horns. Also, the sight of all those cars floating about (I didn't realize modern cars are so waterproof) remains with me. In any case I was much more able to connect with the people there since they shared the same level of economic and technological development as I have here in the middle of the United States. The point was brought up that Indonesia and the other countries affected by the Boxing Day tsunamis was not at all prepared for them. There was no expectation of their possibility. Now they know but my understanding is that there has been no real efforts to prepare for the next one (there will be one though it won't probably be in the near future). Part of that is the matter of money. The other is cultural inertia. Such tsunamis are not part of the culture, unlike Japan, where they've been recording the time and place of individual tsunamis for many centuries. In the United States we can see examples of both of those situations. In the central US tornadoes are part of everyday culture. Every city and town has sirens to alert the populace of a tornado approaching. Everybody knows what to do when the sirens sound. There is no way to build walls to keep the tornadoes out but there are ways to protect oneself when a tornado is oncoming, the only one being to get to the lowest possible level and have something on top of you (a ceiling, a mattress, etc) to protect yourself from falling debris. When tornadoes are around the local TV and radio stations interrupt their normal proceedings to keep the populace informed. It is, in a way, a system of preparedness very similar to what the Japanese have in place. However, there is an example of the Indonesian situation to be found in the Pacific Northwest of the US. That part of the country faces a danger identical to that which produced the 3/11 disaster, the danger of a subduction quake of similar intensity to Japan's. Like Indonesia, though, such a quake was not thought possible until about thirty years ago and while some building codes have been toughened up and some thought has been given to how to handle such a disaster, but there has really been a lack of will and resources to do what needs to be done. Nobody is proposing building sea walls like the Japanese have done (the walls only failed because they had been designed for the tsunamis of a much less powerful quake than that which was actually experienced, thinking that was the most powerful quake possible). But there is in the northwest US no real sense of the possibility of such an earthquake, certainly nothing like the tornado consciousness to be found by those living in the American Midwest. Until an equivalent consciousness is achieved there will not be the targeting of resources to prepare for that earthquake. Which points out the political realities that every society faces when dealing with the potential for disaster. There's only so much money at hand and there are so many purposes demanding it. It's not until there is a sense amongst the general populace that it's necessary to put money into play for preparations for such a disaster that anything will get done. I think there are many parts of the world that could benefit by seeing the examples of Japan and the American Midwest. 3/11 was the disaster it was because the science on which the Japanese seawalls was constructed was faulty. Had it been correct, there would have been innumerable videos of the waves crashing against unyielding barriers and the towns behind them untouched. In the American Midwest the preparation is just as elaborate, although there concerned solely with the protection of life since there's no protection of property possible for the 300 mph winds of an F5 tornado (unless you build everything underground). It's only when the people as a whole know of the possibility of a natural catastrophe that anything will be done. If they ignore it, then they had better be ready for the body-counts that will result. Now, for me at least, it's time to get back to Yuzu.

This is a long post, but its one I've been preparing for some time now, doing extensive online research and trying to tie all things together, the object being to somehow grasp what Yuzu's experience of the 3/11 earthquake involved and what effect it had on his life and his skating. This involved going through more than two hundred YouTube videos dealing with the quake, reading three books about the quake and its aftermath, and doing as much research into Yuzu's life around that time to get me some sense of the event and its effect on him. Central to my understanding of Yuzu during that time was the lengthy interview by Kenji Miyamoto in which the first half of the third segment dealt with Yuzu's experience of the quake. The interview was more intense since the interviewer himself had gone through the January, 1995 Kobe earthquake so the two were able to relate together in a way that would probably not have been possible if the interviewer had not had his own experiences to draw on in dealing with Yuzu. I've been hampered, though, in that I neither speak nor read Japanese, but about two months ago I discovered a huge number of videos from Fuji News Network that had been uploaded to YouTube in which the videos all told of the location of the events being seen and the time of their occurrence, but most helpfully the videos had captions in English and even translation of what was being said by individuals in the videos when the words were significant. Many of those videos, primarily of the tsunamis, I had already seen, but now I was able to relate where they were. Moreover the FNN videos had numerous vids recorded during the earthquake and, most significantly, had many videos in which their people went out and viewed the destruction in various towns and cities afterwards. The FNN videos really made this effort possible and I must thank them for putting them on the Internet. For any nonspeakers of Japanese wanting to get hold of the quake, just put FNN311 as your search terms and that should bring you to them. The first major question I was posing was how the Japanese in general dealt with the quake, not just those in the affected areas, but across the nation. In exploring I found that a good starting point would be the Kobe earthquake of January 1995. Registering around magnitude 7, it was the last catastrophic earthquake Japan had experienced before 3/11. Over six thousand people died in it, making it the first catastrophic (my characterization) quake since 1948, the first to have a death toll over 1000. Since before 1948 Japan had experienced several quakes claiming lives in the thousands in the earlier 20th Century, including the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which saw the destruction of much of Tokyo and Yokohama and the loss of well over one hundred thousand lives, going for so long (nearly half a century) without a truly massive earthquake was unusual to the Japanese experience. The significance of Kobe when compared to 3/11 is that they were earthquakes of two very different types. Lasting only about 20 seconds, its effects on Kobe were enhanced because the quake was relatively close to the surface and centered almost directly beneath the city. The damage that occurred in Kobe was largely failures of some larger structures and, most pertinently as the cause of the high death toll, the fires that swept through residential areas where so many houses had collapsed. The time of the quake also was important, as it occurred shortly before six AM when most people were still at home in bed. Had it occurred six hours later the death toll would most likely have been much lower since most people would have been at work or school. As far as Japan as a whole is concerned the damage was largely restricted to the Kobe area. In raw terms the quake was just not that powerful but the proximity of its epicenter to Kobe enhanced what destructive power it had. Yuzu, of course, had no direct memory of the event. When it occurred he was barely over a month old and Sendai was quite some distance from Kobe. But he grew up in a Japan where memories of the Kobe quake were fresh and where there would have been much documenting on the media of the quake, its aftermath and the recovery efforts. By and large, I think, most people in Japan would be thinking that Kobe was the earthquake referred to when there was talk about 'the quake'. All that proceeded to change at 2:46 PM on Friday, March 11, 2011. It began as a muted shaking but escalated rapidly to major shaking and it just kept shaking. Now Japanese people are used to earthquakes. Minor tremors, if not a daily occurrence, do occur often enough that they just take them in stride. In any case they usually last only a few seconds. This one didn't. It kept shaking for at first one minute, and then a second minute and the shaking finally stopped after almost six minutes. Now what everyone should realize is that the longer an earthquake persists the stronger it is. Any quake lasting much over four minutes is going to be a magnitude 9, and that indeed was what this one was. For the average Japanese the longevity of that quake made them instantly aware that it was not a business-as-usual quake. And for the Japanese media it was a notice that they were witnessing the beginning of what would be a very major news story. And some of that coverage actually began in their own newsrooms. I saw a couple of videos where one could see what was actually happening in that room as it swayed and bucked and knocked everything over that could be and even some things that shouldn't have toppled. One of those was in Sendai itself so I was able to see what Yuzu would have been experiencing on the ice at IceRink Sendai at the very same time. It would not have been a pretty picture and I can very well understand that he was probably fearing for his life as he scrambled off the ice and out the door, fearing the building might come down on him at almost any time. The building, as we all know, didn't collapse but it did require extensive repairs and thus necessitated Yuzu's finding another rink on which to train. I will point out, though, that Japan dodged a couple bullets and the outcome could have been much worse if the quake had come at 2:46 AM rather than PM. That would have meant most would have been awakened from a presumably sound sleep and there would have been initial confusion before realizing the need to head for higher ground. I think many more thousands would have died had that been the case. The other was that the tsunamis were coming ashore not long before low tide would have been occurring on Japan's coast. Had the tsunamis been coming ashore near high tide there destruction might have been even worse. What I felt was most significant watching those videos taken during the quake itself and in the period of time immediately after it was how rapidly the Japanese public adjusted to what, based on the duration of the quake, they knew that lengthy quake meant. It can be said in one word - tsunami. Indeed the quake hadn't even finished when there were helicopters heading out to sea to video the mayhem everyone knew was on the way. And the Japanese in Tokyo, who had felt the tremors though not on the scale that those closer to the epicenter did, did not return to their jobs once the shaking had ended. Not when there were already strong aftershocks occurring and not when they knew the story was as yet a work in progress. On their smartphones or gathered around giant public video screens they stood and watched as a Japan's northeastern cities and towns were inundated by tsunamis that were, in some cases, over a hundred feet in height. Many of those watching may have grown up in those cities or had friends or relatives there. The anxiety amongst those watching must have been intense, and in Tokyo it was made ever moreso by the fact that the trains were not running and so many in central Tokyo found themselves stranded with no way to get home, particularly as traffic had become gridlocked. Of great interest to me, once I'd put those horrific videos of the tsunamis coming ashore and literally flattening many a small town behind me were the videos taken afterward, usually on the day following, visits conducted by FNN journalists as they surveyed the damage. The damage itself, if one dismissed the areas of standing water, suggested to me the damage following an F5 tornado, the strongest and rarest, where the winds can exceed 300 miles an hour (500 kph). The landscape would simply be flattened. The difference, though, was that those threatened by the tsunamis knew to head for higher ground, and it is from these vantage points that all those videos were made and I could only wonder how great the horror must have been to those onlookers as they saw their homes and neighborhoods reduced to saturated rubble. That is much different from the experience we have in this part of the world where instead of heading for high ground one heads for low ground with cover overhead and then listens as the sounds of the destruction overhead escalate and then decline. For those individuals, the destruction is only heard, not seen and the horror comes when emerging from cover and seeing how the world has been totally and ruinously altered in just the matter of a minute or two. There have been no videos taken from inside an F5 tornado while the videos of the waves coming ashore in northeastern Japan have made the 3/11 disaster the most visually documented natural disaster in human history. I will digress to point out why Japan seemed to have been so unprepared for the event. Seeing the videos of one seawall after another being overtopped by the incoming waves one wonders how the Japanese had so miscalculated things. The problem was they were based on faulty science. Before 3/11 the consensus had been that Japan could not experience an earthquake greater than magnitude 8.4. As a result, the seawalls and such all had been constructed to handle the tsunamis from such a quake. They were wrong and had they listened back in 2005 when at a conference a Japanese seismologist by the name of Yasutaka Ikeda presented a paper where he said that calculations were wrong and that Japan could expect at almost any time a Magnitude 9 earthquake and the resultant tsunamis. The reception of the paper was polite and then nobody thought anything about it after the conference. Had it been believed, there might have been some additions made to make the sea walls higher. At this point I turn now to Yuzu and the earthquake. Everyone knows (or should know) how he fled the ice when the quake was occurring and how he and his family spent three nights in an evacuation center (actually a school gymnasium). He has spoken of that and also he has said how he almost quit skating then. It wasn't just the difficulty of finding another rink on which to practice, but also he felt guilty that by pursuing his skating he was somehow shirking his responsibility to participate in the recovery. And that is what he was dealing with. Yuzu's experience of the earthquake did not end when he and his family were able to return to their home. It continued and dominated the reality of northeastern Japan and there was no escaping it. Sendai had not been horribly damaged by the tsunamis although large neighborhoods near the ocean had been obliterated but the central business district was located inland and on higher ground and so had been untouched by the waters. Sendai has a population of just over a million and out of that million more than a thousand perished. I imagine there had been some building damage but I would think it was not widespread. Japanese building codes, particularly for larger structures, are stringent and have been in place for decades, with major modifications coming after the Kobe quake. In his interview with Kenji Miyamoto, who had once been a competitive ice dancer and later had choreographed for Yuzu, the two were able to relate their two experiences of earthquakes (Kenji's the Kobe quake and Yuzu the 3/11 quake). Yuzu explained how the experience of the quake had a silver lining for him in that it opened up within him expressive resources that had not been there before the occurrence of the quake and tsunami. He relates particularly how the charity show benefit that was held in Kobe in April of 2011 was the experience that finally convinced him to continue skating. I wondered initially why it was held in Kobe rather than Tokyo and then I think I figured out why. Over fifteen years after the earthquake it was a chance for Japan to see how Kobe had rebuilt itself and I'm sure that that fact was brought out in the broadcast. It was meant to show those in the affected areas that there was hope, that rebuilding could take place. As for Yuzu becoming so identified with the rebuilding, it was not a role he willingly undertook but as he expressed it, it was something that was thrust upon him. He had the wisdom not to reject it. I'm certain that the public actions he'd taken over the years associated with the recovery were an unstated reason why he won the People's Honor Award. In any case, despite his removal to Toronto, he remained one of the people most associated with those who had experienced the quake but had managed to continue. His position was highlighted even more with the 2013/14 season, his breakout season where he won gold in the GPF, at Sochi, and the World Championships, the first man to hold all three titles simultaneously since Alexei Yagudin back in 2002. What really put the spotlight on Yuzu, though, was Japan's experience in the 2014 Olympics, where not only was Yuzu the first Japanese man to win figure skating gold but he was the only Japanese athlete in any sport to come home with gold. Over the years Yuzu apparently has accepted his symbolic role in the recovery effort. I think that to a certain extent it has become routine for him. Basically he does what he can through visits to schools and senior centers and other such places to just give those there an uplift by his very presence. He has never resorted to the sort of antics of a primo uomo (masculine version of prima donna) and has conducted himself with dignity when the occasion demanded it and with playfulness when the occasion allowed. As for the recovery, even now there are many thousands still in temporary housing. I've used Google Maps to go and look at the areas denuded by the tsunamis and have seen that many of those areas remain now unoccupied, barren tracts because everybody knows that where the waters came once they can come again. I understand that in a couple of cases the town is actually being raised up by using debris from the tsunami as landfill to raise the level of the town above any potential future tsunamis. I have a feeling other places might convert the areas into parks although, just as with those agricultural areas inundated by the tsunamis, there is the problem of removing the salt from the earth in order to grow the kinds of bushes and trees and such one expects in parks. As for Japan, it still struggles to meet the challenges 3/11 posed for it. Japan had not seen destruction on such a scale since World War II, and even though unlike then it possesses the resources to work toward a full recovery, unlike the situation three quarters of a century ago, the demands of recovery often are coming into conflict with other needs and there's only so much money and so much effort that can be directed towards it. In that sense Yuzu is an important element, since by his activities of visitations and such and the resultant news coverage there is communicated that there is still much that needs to be done. Kobe's damage was relatively localized. 3/11's damage was much more widespread although concentrated largely on the coast. But that affected coastline extends from Ibaraki Prefecture in the south, just north of the Tokyo area, to Honshu's northernmost Aomori Prefecture and also parts of Hokkaido's southeastern coastline. As for the Japanese authorities, the great challenge now is not simply replacing what was lost, since so much of it was irreplaceable, but also putting in the resources that will allow those in the affected areas to create for themselves a new normal, a normal replacing that one that was so brutally taken from them at 2:46 PM on the eleventh of March in 2011. Yuzu has been able to do that for himself personally, and he has allowed himself to be put forward as an example that others can create for themselves a satisfactory world that does not ignore the events of the past but builds on them to make positive what so many would surrender to as a negative. He told Kenji how the experience of the quake opened up in him expressive resources he did not realize he possessed and he exists now as a positive example that one can live past tragedy and do it triumphantly.

Following this interview something has become totally clear to me (though I'd been thinking along those lines previously), and that is that Yuzu is essentially coaching himself. Brian and company are around mainly for feedback and advice but it is Yuzu who is setting the goals and working up the strategies to achieve those goals. If you remember way back when Yuzu first came to TCC he wanted to learn how to jump more consistently. Instead he was put through a rigorous retraining of basic skating skills. At that time the coaching team there was pretty much directing where Yuzu should be heading, although I have a feeling that if Yuzu is really against something he can be formidably stubborn. Somewhere along the line, though, Yuzu's relationship with Brian and Tracy and others altered. He became a living legend as a skater and handling him became more a matter of persuasion than command. I think it was certainly at that point after those two phenomenal competitions in late 2015 (NHK and GPF) where Yuzu took command of the record books and never looked back. If you parse Yuzu's words here, and I think whoever did the translation should be grandly congratulated for creating subtitles that handled idiomatic English with very superior skill, in any case what we see here is that most of Yuzu's answers show that he is the one doing the strategizing and developing the means to attain his goals. In many respects, I think, he remains at TCC because he trusts the staff there and knows he could not find better elsewhere. I think also he likes it there because he's distant from the high-pressure life he has whenever he's home in Japan. It's hard to be a media superstar, which is exactly what he is in Japan, and Canada offers him a welcome refuge where he can focus on the essentials and not worry about fans and cameras and such. In Canada he is relatively free. In Japan he exists in a fishbowl. Is that true? Lately I've discovered literally dozens of videos on YouTube where the viewer is put in the operator's chair on various Japanese railroad routes. They are extremely fascinating. There was one video I saw yesterday, which had additionally footage of entering and leaving the stations at the beginning and the end of the journey. It was in descending towards street level that I saw a large poster advertisement, advertising Free WiFi. On one side of the text box was the photo of a young Japanese woman. On the other side was Yuzu. It made me realize that the statements some have made about Yuzu being everywhere may not be exaggerations. Perhaps that's why some skating fans in Japan so dislike Yuzu. It's because he's everywhere and their favorite skaters aren't.

It looks like a photomanip to me. Notice how the placement of the head seems to have little real relation to the neck supporting it. Also, Yuzu's neck seems even more like a Modigliani neck than normal. It's almost like Yuzu's added a couple more neck vertebrae.

I've thought all along that Shoma is essentially a shy person, a person who sheds his shyness only while he's on the ice skating. I remember all those times that Yuzu has prodded him (sometimes even physically), leading the way on how to pose for pics on the podium and other places, cajoling him in press conferences and all that, generally playing big brother who knows the ropes. I have a strong feeling that Shoma is ambivalent about his coming matchup against Yuzu at the Japanese nationals, assuming Yuzu doesn't injure himself yet again. Shoma has been the National Champion for three years straight now, all because Yuzu wasn't there. The first time the flu derailed him, the next two were the seasons with injuries. Believe me, if Yuzu is skating against Shoma in Japanese nationals this year it will be one of the most watched programs in Japanese sports history.