Crossing The East Sea

4 Ryoko

Shinsou had given himself two weeks before meeting up with the martial arts enthusiasts' group, and that fortnight passed before he knew it. Now that he was working as a covert operative he had become more cautious about appearing as his real self, and so he duly turned up at the gymnasium wearing the same disguise that he had worn to the Korean church, and armed with his white karate gi, or uniform.

The group was friendly, and most of them were into karate, but there were several exponents from other disciplines too : aikido, judo, and so on. Shinsou had been hoping that there might be some who did taekwondo, because this was one of the main Korean martial arts, and the one he was most likely to encounter in North Korea; but there were none. Still, the composition of the group changed every night, so there was still hope that one might turn up. And he was still at the beginner's stage; sparring with a taekwondo exponent could come later, when he was more proficient.

There were a few regulars in the group who came every night, and they were happy to spar with Shinsou and point out his mistakes, and make suggestions. He began to drop by a few nights every week, and stayed for one or two hours. He stuck to sparring with the karate exponents at first, thinking it would be better until he was more proficient, but he also found it useful watching all the other exponents, and taking note of their technique. The regulars also had endless suggestions about videos that he could watch online, which turned out quite helpful.

He couldn't be sure how well he was progressing, but as the weeks passed his instructor at the Directorate seemed pleased, and during sparring sessions with the beginner class he soon began finding it too easy to defeat his opponents. When the instructor told him to move to a more senior class for the sparring, Shinsou decided that he must be getting somewhere.

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His other preoccupation was with mastering Korean. In the one month that had passed, he didn't feel that he had learned much. The weekdays were filled with his other training sessions, and at night he was spending time practising karate. Weekends were the only chance he had to spend more time on Korean, and he crammed in as much as he could then, but he still felt that the going was slow.

Besides studying the textbook, he had found numerous online lessons teaching Korean, and he was spending most of his time looking at these and reviewing them, over and over.

He usually had meals with Kanako Hoshide. She was a very gloomy companion to be with, and she and Shinsou actually hardly spoke except to compare notes on each other's progress. They spent all their meals sitting opposite each other trying to cram in as much Korean or Chinese as they could in between swallowing their food. She had her nights free for studying Chinese because she wasn't under pressure to master any martial art the way he was; but even then, she claimed that she was learning very little.

Shinsou privately wished that he could skip his Korean language lessons with Teacher Kim and just study on his own, but his attendance there was being recorded, and he knew that Kaneshiro wouldn't agree to it because the Directorate had officially employed Kim as a language teacher. He was far ahead of Tomonaga and Noriyuki, because neither were in much of a hurry to learn Korean, and so the first hour was rather boring for him. The only useful period was the half hour in which he brainwashed the teacher in order to get his questions answered. The remaining half hour consisted of Teacher Kim droning from the textbook, something Shinsou felt he could have done by himself in half the time.

His only hope of improvement was the Korean church. Magnetron, in one week, had come up with not only the translator that Shinsou had requested, but a smartphone with an app as well that could translate Korean chat messages into Japanese. This was useful, because Kim Minjun had asked Shinsou for his phone number, and had promptly added him to the family chat group. The Kim family chatted a lot, and Shinsou soon felt as if he knew every tiny detail of their lives – they posted photos of all their meals and what they were doing at work or in school. Before getting the app he hadn't been able to read the messages much, since they were all in Korean, but he later realised that some of them had been directed at him, asking when he was going to come back to the church again.