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Japan: A Tale of Two Flyers
Part I. The Older Generation
By Dallas Kenny (translated by Megumi Sunako)
Tsuneo Oki typifies many of the older flyers in Japan who got started in the sport with birds from America. A man with deep respect for racing’s roots and traditions, Mr. Oki owns and operates the Sion Bar; named after the Heitzman Sions he flew as a young man.
Next to the Sion Bar, he also owns a small shop devoted to local handicrafts. One corner of this store is set aside for a modest line of pigeon products and feed which he imports from Holland -- a sign of the changing times -- but he most enjoys telling stories about "those beautiful birds," the Trentons, and the Stassarts, Sions and Gordons he once flew.
"At that time, this place was all country side," he explained. "When you sent birds to a race, they all came back. Now it’s a big city with wires, radio towers and noise. Now they’re almost always late if they come back at all!" Mr. Oki had suppressed a life-time’s worth of questions about pigeon racing in America and now they all came tumbling out at once. What about wires? The failure to bring young members into the sport? YB losses? He was at once amazed and somehow reassured that our problems are almost identical to his.
A 35-year veteran of the sport, Mr. Oki designed the first bird shipping containers 30 years ago. Before that, birds were still released from individual crates, a hair-raising operation, which could take up to 5 minutes for a large release. In Japan, they now prefer containers to pigeon trucks or trailers because each container, which is fitted with waterers and automatic release doors, may hold several hundred birds and can be loaded on various sized flat-bed trucks, depending on the size of the race. This way they can use fewer containers and smaller trucks toward the end of the season when there are fewer birds to be shipped.
Mr. Oki’s loft, which sits behind the Sion Bar atop an old warehouse, now consists mainly of Jan Aardens and Rosseins. His sturdy long distance birds, which have taken top prizes at both 1000 and 1100 kilometers, are clocked inside the loft with an STB clock. Air blows in freely through the wire mesh windows. He never shuts them except during typhoons, as it rarely dips below freezing in the Tokyo area.
After short races, the clocks are opened at a rented hall. For the longer races, where clocking can drag on into the next day, his 80-member club uses the local Buddhist Temple (one of their members is a monk). There are no regular club meetings, he says, because "we are old friends and always get together to socialize -- the best part of the sport!"
Mr. Oki laments that there are now only a couple of club members under 40 years old and believes that the high cost of racing is keeping young people out of the sport. In Japan, there is no tradition of giving free birds to new members, and $1000 per bird is the average asking price. To have any hope of competing, a new flyer must be prepared to shell out $20,000 for birds alone. The cost of building and maintaining a loft is on top of that.
Through it all, Mr. Oki has remained true to his sport and to the classic American birds whose memory he keeps alive in the Sion Bar.
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