Sumo – the Japanese art of compressing everything that matters into one moment of decision

The hall is silent. Six thousand people and not a single sound. Two men, each weighing close to two hundred kilograms, crouch behind two white lines painted on packed clay. Seventy centimeters apart. The length from shoulder to hand. The crowd holds its breath, and the tension hums strangely in the temples. The two of them look each other in the eye. Fists hover over the ground. A second. Inhale. Their fists touch the clay almost in the same millisecond. And then a dull, short, jarring "thud". Skull strikes skull. Atama kara (頭から). A muffled, powerful crack that cannot be mistaken for anything else. The crowd erupts. The fight has just begun and just ended.

The rest will last five, seven, at most ten seconds. But who won is already known. Sixty to seventy percent of sumo bouts are decided in the first second of the start – so say the older masters and so says statistics. Everything that follows – the pushing, the grabbing of the belt, the attempt to force the opponent out – is only the closing of what has already happened in the first explosion. You could compare it to a chess game decided on the third move, with the difference that the entire game here lasts shorter than saying the word "I lost".

This paradox is the heart of the discipline. Because the wrestlers train this one second their whole lives. Not technique, not grip, not endurance. This one second. They get up every day at four in the morning for twenty, thirty years, in order to explode once a day from stillness with a force capable of crushing bones. And what is even more interesting is that this is not just a sporting custom. This is a Japanese theory of the deciding moment, captured in a microcosm played out on four square meters of packed clay. The same logic governs haiku, the samurai duel, the tea ceremony, ikebana. Let us see what these two men at the starting lines know about it – and what we can take from it for ourselves.

Anatomy of seven seconds

The encounter is called tachiai (立合い), which literally means "to stand and meet". Two characters: the first means rising, standing up from a crouch. The second – meeting, colliding, contact. Together they describe exactly what happens: two men rise from a crouch and collide with as much force as each is capable of.

The ring is called dohyō (土俵). It is four and a half meters in diameter, made of packed clay covered with a thin layer of sand, surrounded by a border of woven rice straw bales. In its center are two short white lines – shikiri-sen (仕切り線). In English: starting lines. They are ninety centimeters long and six wide, painted in white enamel. The space between them is seventy centimeters. That is what separates the two wrestlers in the first second of battle.

The weight of an average rikishi in the top division today is between one hundred fifty and two hundred kilograms. Height – about one meter eighty-five. What happens when two such bodies move from stillness and meet after seventy centimeters? The physics is brutal. The maximum speed they reach is roughly that of a good sprinter on the first meters – five, six meters per second. The momentum of the collision is hundreds of kilograms times that speed. For comparison: a car hitting a pedestrian at a similar speed usually ends in broken legs and bruising. In sumo, this is how the fight begins.

That is why rikishi (力士 – literally "person of strength", that is, a wrestler) have marks on their foreheads. Characteristic bruises, sometimes abrasions, sometimes cuts. Some wrestlers are known for charging head-first and bleeding for the tenth time in a tournament. Others try to take the impact on the shoulder, but then they risk losing the line of attack. It is always a calculation: bend too low and the opponent will knock you down, rise too quickly and you lose momentum. A perfect tachiai is like a perfect hammer strike on a nail – neither too high nor too low, with all the force directed into one point. Perfection and precision.

A bout in the top division – makuuchi (幕内, literally "inside the curtain": in Edo, the best rikishi had a separate dressing room divided by a curtain, hence the name) – may last up to four minutes. After that time the referee gyōji (行司) announces mizu-iri (水入り, "entering of water"), a break during which the wrestlers receive something to drink. But this point is almost never reached. Statistically, especially in the last decade, bouts end in less than ten seconds. Hakuhō, the greatest yokozuna (横綱, "horizontal rope" – the highest rank in sumo) of modern times, had bouts lasting three seconds. Three. As long as it takes to read this sentence.

Four minutes of pure tension

Before those three seconds arrive, however, up to four minutes of pure tension pass. That is how long the ritual of entering the moment takes.

The rikishi enter the ring separately, each from their own side – east or west. The first thing they do is stomp. They lift one leg as high as they can – which, given their build, is a spectacular display of flexibility – and bring it down on the clay with all their might. Then the other leg. This movement is called shiko (四股 – "four thighs" – this is ateji, a phonetic spelling of a very ancient Japanese word that had no characters and meant "to drive the foot into the ground" – shikofumu), and in training it is performed one hundred, two hundred times a day. Symbolically it is meant to drive evil spirits from the ring. Practically – it tells the body: we begin.

Then comes salt. Each rikishi reaches into a large basket and throws a handful toward the ring. On average two hundred grams. Some throw half a kilo, in a high arc. This is shio-maki (塩撒き – "scattering of salt"). In Shinto, salt purifies – from ritual impurity, from evil forces, from bad luck. Its practical effect is also that it is rubbed into small abrasions from earlier bouts, because it acts as a disinfectant. A tradition with a very practical aspect.

Then chiri-chōzu (塵手水 – "dust water for hands") – a sequence of claps and opening of the hands. A demonstration that the wrestler bears no weapon. This ritual looks like a dance, and is in fact an archaic way of saying: we fight honestly, fair, no trickery. Finally the water of strength – chikara-mizu (力水), passed by ladle from a fellow team member who won the previous bout. Rinsing the mouth, wiping the lips with paper – chikara-gami (力紙 – "paper of strength"). And only then do the wrestlers descend to their starting lines.

But still nothing begins. They crouch. They look at each other. They rise. They go back for salt. They throw it a second time. They return. They crouch. They rise. And so on, up to four times. Each approach is an opportunity: maybe this time I will explode. Maybe this time my opponent will place his fist down first. Maybe he will make a mistake and move too early.

This ritual is called shikiri (仕切り) – literally "preparing oneself". In Western sport there is nothing like it: four minutes of stillness during which the crowd watches two men who watch each other. But sumo knows something that baseball does not know: that the duel has already begun. It does not begin at the collision. It begins the moment two pairs of eyes meet at a distance of seventy centimeters. Tachiai is only the finale of something that began much earlier.

And one more thing. Until 1928 this ritual had no time limit. The wrestlers could crouch, rise, go back for salt for hours. Their foreheads sometimes touched during this shikiri (仕切り), this preparation – they could hear the opponent's breath. The time limit was introduced only by radio. NHK began broadcasting tournaments live, and the journalists realized in panic that with such a style there was no way to fit all the bouts into an hour-long program. The starting lines appeared. The limit appeared. The modern form of sumo appeared, known for five seconds of explosion – precisely because earlier the explosion could come after an hour.

Lesson of the one-eyed master

To understand what mastery in tachiai really involves, one must know the story of a boy from Ōita Province.

Akiyoshi Sadaji was born in 1912 into a fishing family on the eastern coast of Kyūshū. At the age of five he was struck in the right eye by a bamboo gun he had made for play. He lost sight in that eye immediately and irreversibly. No one knew about this for the next forty years – he revealed it only after his retirement. In 1927, at the age of fifteen, he joined Tatsunami stable and took the fighting name Futabayama. Five years later he entered the top division.

What happened then exceeds anything anyone has achieved before or after him. Between January 1936 and January 1939 he won sixty-nine bouts in a row. Not six, not sixteen. Sixty-nine. A streak that Hakuhō, sixty years later, tried to break and stopped at sixty-three. Chiyonofuji – at fifty-three. Taihō – at forty-five. Futabayama's record stands to this day, and everyone in sumo agrees that it may never be broken.

So what did Futabayama do that others cannot? First – he never made a matta (待った), a false start. Not once in his career. In sumo this is almost unimaginable. Every wrestler at some point moves too early, loses his nerve, gets provoked by the opponent's rhythm. Futabayama – no. But this was not his main secret. The secret was a technique called go-no-sen no tachiai (後の先).

It is hard to explain, so let us begin with the literal translation. Go (後) is "after", sen (先) is "before", "precedence". Together: "precedence after". Or more precisely: "the initiative one gains by responding". In practice it looks like this: Futabayama did not attack first. He let the opponent move and in a fraction of the same second responded with a counter-strike in which the opponent's momentum was added to his own. The result: the one who attacked first fell, because he had struck a mirror image of his own force, multiplied.

It was not a normal reaction. A reaction in the neurological sense takes about two hundred milliseconds – in sumo this is too long to "escape with one's life". Go-no-sen is something else: a state of readiness in which the body is already in motion before the mind has time to register it. You have to read your opponent so deeply that you anticipate his move at the same moment in which it begins. You do not see him move. You know he is about to.

In modern times Hakuhō understood this best. In 2009, in an interview with foreign journalists, he said that he was studying Futabayama and his go-no-sen. He also said that unfortunately no one would equal him in this aspect – that this is something one can learn, but never copy.

What moral comes from the story of the one-eyed master? That mastery in tachiai does not consist in attacking earlier. It consists in being more precisely ready. Futabayama exploded when his opponent gave him the signal. A weaker signal escapes you. A stronger one – means you are a moment too late. He could catch the signal exactly right.

Butsukari. The hell that teaches one second

Where does this precision of time come from? From training that could not be carried out in any sport other than sumo.

It is called butsukari-keiko (ぶつかり稽古). Butsukari means "striking each other", "colliding". Keiko – "training", "practice". Together: training of strikes. It looks like this. The higher-ranked rikishi stands at one end of the ring and offers his chest. The lower-ranked one throws himself at him with all his strength and must push him across the entire width of the dohyō, to the edge. The higher-ranked one resists but does not attack. He just stands and receives. The lower-ranked one must push him, even though the other weighs twenty kilograms more. He does this ten times. Then twenty. Sometimes fifty.

At some point he begins to fall. His legs shake. His lungs burn. Sweat fills his eyes. He vomits. The higher-ranked one waits. The lower-ranked tries to get up, but is sometimes too weak to do so. Then the senior throws him onto the clay. Sometimes he forces him into the "monkey walk" – crawling on all fours around the perimeter of the ring. And then makes him get up again and strike once more. And again. And again.

A famous recording from 2017 shows Hakuhō leading butsukari with the young Onoshō. Onoshō at that time has twenty wins from his first two makuuchi tournaments – he is debuting, fighting ambitiously, becoming recognized. Hakuhō drives him to complete exhaustion. After a dozen or so strikes Onoshō falls to his knees. Hakuhō shouts to the prone Onoshō: "stand up!" (tate! 立て!), "again!" (mō ichido! もう一度!), mocks him for his weakness, taunts him loudly, in front of the audience and the other rikishi. This is a training technique – social pressure as fuel. A wrestler cannot give up in front of witnesses. He gets up with his last strength, because worse than the pain would be to withdraw publicly.

So Onoshō tries to get up – but cannot. Hakuhō turns to the audience and gestures for them to support him. The crowd starts to clap. And then Onoshō rises. With the last of his strength he throws himself again at Hakuhō's chest and pushes him with fury. The recording ends with the moment when Hakuhō offers him his hand, and Onoshō bows low.

To a Western viewer this looks like bullying. It is not. It is the construction of a psyche that endures explosion after explosion. Because that is exactly what this profession is. In a tournament a wrestler fights fifteen times in fifteen days. Each fight must be his first tachiai – the first explosion after a motionless second. The body, meanwhile, remembers yesterday's bruises, the broken rib from the day before, the months of back pain. But it cannot, simply cannot. The first second is the only second.

Butsukari also teaches something else, easy to overlook. It teaches both wrestlers at once. The lower-ranked learns explosion from stillness. But the higher-ranked learns to receive the impact. This is the second half of tachiai – the one Futabayama knew. You can explode first, but you can also receive the explosion of the other and turn it back. In Japan the second is often more highly valued. Because every good wrestler knows how to explode on command. But to receive the explosion and turn it to your own side – that is true mastery.

The rikishi who do butsukari in the stable continue until the end of their careers. There is no moment when one acknowledges that this stage is finished. The best yokozuna train butsukari until the day of the last fight of their lives. Because tachiai is not a skill one masters once. It is a skill one maintains – like the sharpness of a razor. Stop sharpening, and it dulls in a week.

Reading the breath of another body

Physical training is only half. The other is something invisible from outside.

In almost every combat sport there exists the concept of "reading" the opponent. A boxer reads the guard and the angle of the shoulders. A chess player reads the structure of the pawns. A tennis player reads the line of the hip before the serve. In sumo, reading is called mikiri (見切り – literally "to see and cut", or "to cut with sight"), and it is on a completely different level of detail, because the time in which it must act is one tenth of a second.

What does it consist of? Mark Schilling, the most well-known Western commentator on sumo, describes it as concretely as anyone: an ideal tachiai happens when both wrestlers, at the same second, draw in air, briefly hold it, touch the clay with their fists – and explode. A literal synchronization of breath. Of two bodies, two pairs of lungs, two chests. Like two dancers in one dance.

Except that in this dance both try to use this synchronization against each other. Because you synchronize in order to start together, but the one who places his fist first transmits the starting signal to the other. So if you breathe in the same rhythm, but place your fist a quarter of a second after him – you have the advantage. Not because you cheated. Because he has already decided, his body has already moved, and a quarter of a second later your body moves into a point where you know exactly where he has gone. You have entered his movement with a perspective that he does not have, going blind.

This game one learns over years. Not from books – no one has described it precisely enough. One learns it in the stable, in butsukari, but above all in moshi-ai – exhibition sparring in which you watch hundreds, thousands of tachiai, and slowly the body begins to recognize the pattern. A master of mikiri sees things a layman would not notice: the small twitch of the shoulder a millisecond before the start, a micro-smile, a change in the rhythm of breath by one fifth. Each of these is a signal that the opponent is about to move.

In July 2010 Hakuhō had sixty-three consecutive wins to his name. He had six bouts left to Futabayama's record. A story circulates from those days. After training, one of the lower-ranked rikishi, who was to fight the master the next day, approached an older sumo expert. "What should I do?" he asked. The reply was brief: attack him after the first shikiri approach. So did Futabayama. So did Taihō. In their time no one waited the full four minutes.

The next day the rikishi did just that. Instead of waiting, he stood at the line after the first approach. Hakuhō, fully accustomed to his own ritual, was disoriented. The opponent had taken the rhythm of his preparation. Hakuhō remained calm – but barely won that fight. He saved the record, but it became clear: someone who breaks your rhythm of shikiri can defeat you by that fact alone.

Four months later Hakuhō lost. Kisenosato defeated him, a young wrestler no one had picked. Sixty-three wins, end. Six bouts from the record. A master who had studied Futabayama all his life stopped six steps short of him.

Why am I writing about this? Because it shows what pressure acts on a master who can lose everything in less time than a single breath. Tachiai is not power. It is precision of time. A quarter of a second of disturbance is enough for the best wrestler in the world to lose to a young man twice less experienced. Sumo knows that the deciding moment forgives no one, not even heroes.

The island of Funashima, 1612

Tachiai as a sporting technique has existed for centuries. Tachiai as a Japanese theory of the deciding moment – longer still. To see it in its form outside sumo, in its pure, raw form, one must go back to the thirteenth of April 1612, to a small island called Funashima on the Inland Sea.

The island was uninhabited. Two men met there: Sasaki Kojirō, one of the most celebrated swordsmen of the Edo era, favorite of the shōgun's court, master of the long two-handed sword nodachi, famous for his "swallow reversal" technique – tsubame-gaeshi. Facing him: Miyamoto Musashi, a twenty-eight-year-old rōnin, known for his peculiar style of fighting with two swords and for the fact that he usually arrived dirty, in rags, with a piece of wood instead of a blade.

The duel was set for early morning. Kojirō arrived punctually, in a well-kept outfit, with the best sword he could afford. Musashi was late. According to some sources – by an hour. According to others – by two. He sailed by boat from the mainland and on the way carved from the oar a bokken (a wooden sword). When he finally stepped onto the sand, Kojirō was furious. He drew the nodachi, shouted something about the lack of honor, and charged.

The whole fight lasted a few seconds. Kojirō attacked in fury with all his strength, executed his famous technique – a stroke from above passing into a cut to the side. Musashi received the strike, deflected it in the same motion, and simultaneously struck the wooden oar against the temple of his opponent. Kojirō fell. Musashi checked whether he was alive. He was not. He boarded the boat and sailed away before anyone could come to avenge the master of the shōgun.

One blow. Years of preparation on both sides. The tradition of kenjutsu called this logic of the duel ichigeki hissatsu (一撃必殺) – "one strike, certain death". It sounds brutal. And it is. If you have to strike a second time, it means the opponent has the chance to land his own blow. And there is the risk that his blow is enough.

In truth this idea does not come from Musashi (who, by the way, became widely known only decades after the end of the Edo period), but reaches even earlier centuries. Over time it passed from the art of the sword to other disciplines: to karate (where it functions under the same name), to iaijutsu (now iaidō) – the art of drawing the sword from its sheath in a fraction of a second and cutting the opponent in the same single motion, to aikido, where everything begins with the perfect sense of the moment in which the opponent loses stability. And of course to sumo. Tachiai is the development of ichigeki hissatsu. With the difference that instead of one cut with a sword, we have one strike with the body.

All these disciplines share one assumption: the right moment occurs once. You can prepare for it, you can wait for it, you can take advantage of it. But you cannot repeat it. The art of the master consists in fitting into that one second everything he has learned over a lifetime.

In the European tradition of combat – in fencing, in boxing, in wrestling – there is sometimes room for a second attempt. The first thrust is only an opening. The second action, the third combination, the fourth move – that is the essence. The Japanese tradition goes in the opposite direction. You raise the sword once, so raise it in such a way that you never need to raise it a second time. The first second contains everything.

The art that fit in seventeen syllables

The same logic governs things that on the surface have nothing to do with combat.

Bashō, the wandering master of hokku (which from the perspective of years we now call haiku), spent the last ten years of his life on foot journeys across the seventeenth-century Japanese islands. He wrote then poems composed of seventeen syllables – five, seven, five. His entire art fit into one short line. Each hokku contained: an image of nature, a seasonal word – kigo (季語), indicating the time of year, and a cut – kireji (切れ字), the moment in which one image becomes another. Seventeen syllables. One moment. The rest is silence, in which the reader fills in the image himself.

This is not the art of the abbreviation, but of compression. Bashō, when composing a hokku, could have written a poem of fifty lines about the same thing he expressed in one. He chose one because he knew: fifteen words can say more than five hundred, if each word is the right one. A logic identical with tachiai. You train your whole life to fit, in one motion, in one line, in one strike, everything you have learned.

Then: ikebana. The art of arranging flowers. You can place fifty roses in a vase, you can place three. Traditional ikebana chooses three. Because what matters is not the number of flowers, but the space that arises between them.

In ikebana this is obvious: three flowers, one tall, the second medium, the third short. Between them, space. Looking at it, the eye reads not only the flowers but also that space. In sumo it is exactly the same principle: between two rikishi there are seventy centimeters. That distance is tachiai before it begins. The whole ritual of shikiri consists in producing this space – tightening it, loading it with tension, until it finally bursts. You train the space in order to learn how to break it.

It is most strongly expressed in the concept of ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) – a formula forged in the Japanese tea culture around the figure of Sen no Rikyū and his disciples. Literally: "one meeting, one time". Each moment, each meeting, each fight is unique. It will not repeat. The next meeting – even with the same person – will already be different, in a different moment, in different light, with a different heart. That is why one must live it as if it were the last. That is why tea is drunk as if it were the last tea in life. That is why tachiai is trained as if it were the last fight in life.

Japan noticed something most cultures do not name explicitly: that the essence of life lies not in its length, but in its points. In moments in which everything is decided. The rest is their fortification. These points appear rarely – but when they appear, you are ready, or you are not.

Your tachiai

All this would be only a beautiful theory about sumo, if it had no reference to the lives of people who will never stand on a dohyō. But it does. And very directly.

Life consists mainly of shikiri. Of four minutes of preparation in which seemingly nothing is happening. Of years preceding the moment when suddenly everything is decided. Days at work that no one sees. Training sessions to which no one will come. Books that no one will check whether we read. Conversations with oneself that no one will overhear. And then, sometimes once every five years, sometimes once in a lifetime, tachiai arrives. The first second of a job interview. The first minute of a presentation to a client. The first exchange with a partner about a matter avoided for years. The first successful trade on the stock market. The first move in a decision that may no longer be undone – to leave a job, to sell a company, to invite a woman, to confess a mistake. This moment arrives, often without warning – and it is fast.

Sumo knows that this second can be wasted or won. It also knows that the result has little to do with luck. It has everything to do with what one has been doing for the last five, ten, twenty years. That rikishi who has just shot from the starting line with perfect precision – woke up every day at four. Did five hundred shiko. Fell a thousand times in butsukari. Studied Futabayama. Read the breaths of a hundred other wrestlers. Synchronized with them, separated, synchronized again. The second you saw during the fight was luck, but that luck was made of twenty years of shikiri that no one saw.

The first lesson is obvious and at the same time the hardest: you will not be able to react in the deciding second if you have not earlier done four minutes of preparation. Or four years. Or four thousand hours of repeating the same movement until the body no longer needs the mind to know what to do. None of the masters of tachiai think in the first second. The brain is too slow for that. What works is the body's memory, built over years. This is the praise of slowness – not of a fast career, but of patient practice.

The second lesson is less obvious but equally important: mastery does not consist in attacking first. It consists in being ready for every second in which the moment may come. Futabayama did not commit matta (false starts) because he did not try to guess when it would begin. He was simply ready at every moment, as if it were about to begin. Patience was his strength, not his limitation. In life it is similar: the restless person who attacks earlier in order to seize the initiative more often loses than wins. The wiser strategy is to be ready longer and better than the competition is able to endure. The signal will come. Your task is not to miss it.

The third lesson is perhaps the most uncomfortable: the first second is the only one. A second attempt usually does not come. Ichigeki hissatsu does not mean "be aggressive". It means: prepare yourself in such a way that you do not need a second chance. Many things in life that we regret could have been done once. Words spoken at the right moment. A decision made before the opportunity disappeared. A confession for which courage was lacking. An investment you know is good, but "you will wait a little longer". You do not regret what you did badly – you regret that you did nothing, although you sensed that this was the moment. Sumo does not allow itself such regret. The first second is the only one, and one must use it completely.

***

I return for a moment to the dohyō. After a lost fight the rikishi crouches at the edge of the ring. His breath is still uneven, his chest rising sharply. He stands. He bows. He descends.

Tomorrow he will return. The day after, too. For fifteen days in a row during the tournament he will live through one such second each day. Each will be the first in its small universe. That wrestler who has just lost will never again recover that fight. But tomorrow he can win another. No one will take from him the fact that he still has one second ahead of him.

In this there is something Western civilization often loses – the conviction that the deciding moment is not a punishment. It is a gift. The second in which everything is decided is also the second in which everything is still possible. As long as you have not placed your fist behind the starting line, the world is waiting for you. The four minutes of shikiri are a gift, not a trial.

The question that sumo leaves me with is simple: am I using the time given to me to prepare for those few decisive seconds that may yet come in the life that remains?

Sources

1. Kozuma, Yoichi, Mental Training Program for a Sumo Wrestler, Psychology in Professional Sports and the Performing Arts: Challenges and Strategies, 2016

2. Schilling, Mark, Sumo: A Fan’s Guide, The Japan Times, 1994.

3. Tochinoumi Teruyoshi (栃ノ海晃嘉), Sumō no kokoro to gijutsu (相撲の心と技術 – „Spirit and Technique of Sumo”), Baseball Magazine Sha, Tokyo 2003.

4. Naruse Masakatsu (成瀬正勝), Sumō no kokoro (相撲のこころ – „The Heart of Sumo”), Tairyūsha, Tokyo 1985.

5. Yamamoto Tatsurō (山本辰郎), Sumō no shinri to seishin (相撲の心理と精神 – „Psychology and Spirit of Sumo”), Fumaidō Shuppan, Tokyo 1998.

6. Bickford, Lawrence, Sumo and the Woodblock Print Masters, Kodansha International, Tokyo 1994.

7. Cuyler, Patricia L., Sumo: From Rite to Sport, Weatherhill, 1979.

8. Hall, Mina, The Big Book of Sumo: History, Practice, Ritual, Fight, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley 1997.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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