There’s an old saying about old pets being unable to learn new things after a while. It’s a phrase often applied to humans as well. At a certain point, people are assumed as being unable to learn, adjust, adapt and change. While there is truth that the brain slows down with age, and cannot learn things as quickly such as new languages, there is no rule or biological wall that stops learning altogether. Yoshio Kinoshita would be the first to argue that point in a very interesting way.
At 81 years of age, Kinoshita can arguably hold the title as one of the world’s oldest skateboarders. And, as anyone knows with the cement-loving sport, skateboarding involves a ton of learning, adjusting, changing and learning. And he’s not too proud to let a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old show him something new everyday at the Osaka skate park he enjoys visiting with friends daily. While most seniors Kinoshita’s age would focus on walks, cooking, gardening and enjoying a bench in a park, the 81-year-old spend his mornings navigating skate ramps and staying on his board in motion without falling off or worse, down on the hard cement.
Many would assume that Kinoshita had been skateboarding for years, simply holding on irrationally to a sport he likely picked up in the 1970s with heavy American influence in Japan. The truth is, Kinoshita just started learning skateboarding only two years prior. He literally started learning a new, physical sport requiring mind, body and balance coordination in his late 70s. He saw his first skateboard, the one he still uses today, at a market selling second-hand goods people lost or left behind at the local train station.
Kinoshita doesn’t skateboard in obscurity either. He’s often targeted for local press stories or onlookers amazed at his versatility and capability at a senior age. Kinoshita takes it in strike. He often refers to his younger teachers as well for the senior’s inspiration. And, Kinoshita also believes the 800 yen he spent on the skateboard as a sudden urge was one of the biggest changes in his life. Instead of being relegated to slowly moving to a chair or bed in old age, Kinoshita focuses on maintaining his strength, avoiding dementia, and staying flexible enough to keep skateboarding another day.
Kinoshita knows his learning process is very different from the kids zipping around him at the skate park, younger by anywhere from 60 to 90 years at least. Instead, his learning process for a new trick or movement is incremental, practiced, repeated and reinforced. Otherwise, it seems to slip quickly from memory at his age. So, Kinoshita makes a point to practice everything he has learned to date methodically, like a carpenter laying on another sheet of wood to a construct, getting stronger with each seemingly weak ply but together incredibly permanent and solid.
The senior skateboarder today enjoys a long family line, as well as grandkids, and he was among the audience watching skateboarding compete at the Olympics recently for the first time. It awed him with the contestant’s ability to deny gravity. And, he admitted with a bit of comical ego, he didn’t think he could quite compete with them either.
