The Lighthouse

If you take a look at the JKA trick tables, you’ll find that the last trick on the beginners list is the Lighthouse. Look at yourself, after this article and a bit of practice, when you’re nailing this trick with ease, you are no longer a kendama newbie; isn’t moving towards mastery oh so exciting?! Okay so it’s just a wooden toy, true, but Lighthouses are definitely something to be a little excited about, it’s a milestone for most people, as it should be, it can prove to be quite the troublesome maneuver.
 

Lighthouses are not by ANY means a “beginners” trick, and you will much sooner pull off more advanced moves (according the the JKA tables) than this one. The reason for this is simple, your kendama. EVERY kendama is different and when it comes to lighthouses, the lack of friction between the tama and the ken sometimes make the move way to difficult for many people due to nothing but the glossy finish on your tama. In general TK-16 Masters and Shin Sakuras are very slick, while Mugens and Oozoras are much more tacky, making lighthouses much easier. Don’t get me wrong, the first two are wonderful kendamas, but right out of the package they are unlikely to perform well with lighthouses. I HAVE heard accounts otherwise though, so it really does just depend on your specific kendama. Do not fret though, TK-16 owners, for lighthouses will become easier and easier as time goes by and your kendama gets more and more worn, whereas the Ooozora and Mugen owners will experience exactly the opposite.

With this in mind, let’s get to it!

The lighthouse really isn’t all that complex. From the tama grip, you will pull the ken straight up, let the center cup fall onto the tama, and balance the ken on it, spike pointing straight up. Despite this simple explanation, there is a lot more at work behind this trick.

This trick will rely on a new skill for you to acquire: balance. Up until this point, balance has only played a minor role in anything you’ve done. The cups  have been on the downside of gravity and have been generally receptive, acting like little bowls. But now that bowl is upside down and the base for you to work with is a structure that is convex, the tama surface. This means that no longer will your active structure (what you are not holding onto) WANT to stay in the correct position; without constant focus and adjustment, the ken will simply slide right off.

To perform this trick, settle into your tama grip and make sure that the hanging ken is very still; no rotation or swinging. Now flex your knees and utilize them to give a small tug to the ken directly upwards. Most people will tell you that contrary to a lot of the other things you’ve done thus far, it is NOT best to let the ken reach it’s apex and FALL back onto the tama, but it is much better to come up under the ken during it’s ascent and give it a smooth, helpful push upwards for a split second in order to catch it.
The reason for this falls back to the idea of friction. The idea is that we don’t want the ken sliding around on the tama, we want it to be steady and “sticking”. In order to understand why this small “push” upwards is so necessary, we need to have a kendama -physics moment, but most of you DO NOT want to hear the physical ramblings of why this is important and will just take our word for it. This is fine, but for those of you like me who like justification, A more detailed explanation is at the bottom of this article.

With this little upward push, back off any upward movement steadily, but quickly until you hand is still, and hopefully you were accurate enough so that the ken isn’t sliding around and is stable on the tama. Sometimes however, you will need to “chase” the ken around trying to get it balanced. This is possible, but much harder to do, especially on a slick tama.

Congratulations, you’ve landed a lighthouse.

I know it seems like there really isn’t much too it, and the truth is, there isn’t, it just requires a good feel for the trick, which will come with time. Just remember to use your knees, make sure the ken is steady, and come up under the ken instead of letting it fall back down onto the tama. A little practice with these in mind and you are golden.

This balance thing will be a new feeling. You are so used to the fact that once you’ve landed something, you’ve landed it, but this is no longer true, and true success is a bit less defined than other tricks. Mainly, it’s determined by two things: a three second count or moving on to another trick from the lighthouse.
According to the JKA, a lighthouse is legitimate if the ken is on top of the tama for three seconds. However, if you are like many, a TRUE success is only when the ken is stable enough that you can safely look away from the ken and state that you’ve landed the lighthouse. Another more obvious form of legitimately calling a lighthouse a success is if you go into a “falling” or some other trick right from the lighthouse.

After juggling between the cups, spiking the tama, the airplane, and now the lighthouse, it’s time to say goodbye to the beginners kendama world and ascend to the next level of kendama tricks. It welcomes you.







KENDAMA PHYSICS MOMENT:

Here is the further explanation of the “upward push” method is much superior:

Firstly, in newtonian physics, there is a force known as “Force Normal”. It is a very basic principle but it sometimes conceptually hard to grasp. Force Normal is simply the force that objects push back when things like weight are applied to them. Say you are on the second story of a building. In order for your weight to be held up, the floor itself has to exert a force equal to what you and gravity are together exerting on it. That is Force Normal.
Lighthouses rely on this little force, because it plays a key role in friction, which is what gives you all your stability for this trick. Friction is mathematically defined as  Ff = μFn, where Ff is force friction, Fn is force normal, and μ (the greek symbol Mu) is what is called the Coefficient of Friction. μ is simply a constant that is unique to any two surfaces that are to have friction between them, for our purposes, this is the surfaces of tama and the ken. We want the friction to be as high as possible for the lighthouse, but this constant cannot be changed by us in the process of the trick. So we must alter the other part of the equation, force normal. Now we cannot add weight to our kendama to make it easier, but since we are deciding to push upward on the ken, Force normal is now the weight of the ken PLUS whatever force we are pushing upward with. Now technically it’s not just the friction we want, it’s a smooth transition from this extra friction we are creating by pushing upwards into the normal, motionless friction the ken and tama normally have. We want to utilize this higher level of friction temporarily until we balance the ken, then slowly transition into it’s normal amount of friction when we stop pushing upwards and remain still. Pushing upwards on the ken gives us control on how smoothly and slowly we can adjust to this natural level of friction. 
Now if you think about it, letting the ken fall down and slam onto the tama allots for a higher amount of friction as well, but you cannot NEARLY as easily usher the friction into it’s normal range as you can when pushing it upwards and the jostle from the kens descent will make landing the lighthouse MUCH harder.

So there you have it. The EXTREMELY technical explanation as to how to land a lighthouse, I just hope there are some technical people out there to appreciate it.