A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

The easiest way to justify a Sengoku Japanese persona in the SCA is not the usual "ambassador" route, or even the "ronin" route; it's the wakou route.  Japanese pirates were a problem in coastal China, and all the way down to the Philippines, all the way back to the Kamakura shogunate; stopping the pirates was part of the reason that the Mongols wanted to invade in the early 1200s.  With Japan locked in a period of war so significant that it's become a cultural touchpoint from about 1450 to about 1600, piracy, maritime trade, and the flip-side of piracy, basically naval protection rackets, became a reliable way of making money in western Japan at all social levels. Thus we have Japanese ships putting in at Manila, creating a Japanese colony there (in the sense that Intramuros was the Spanish "colony" in otherwise Filipino Manila, not in the sense that the archipelago was a Spanish colony), and even hiring out as enforcers and bodyguards in Spanish

 A conversation this weekend about longsword got me thinking about the specific relationship between Fiore and the Liechtenauer tradition.  My current sword read is the Stephen Cheney collation of the Ringeck-Danzig-Lew glosses, for which there will be a review soon as I write up my review of the "Japanese Pirate Sword" manuals... which should happen about when I finish reading RDL, but it means I'm digging more into German traditions. My premise is this: The difference between Fiore and Liechtenauer is one of pedagogy, not specific technique. THE BEARDS MATCH! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE! Consider that Fiore is open about his having learned from Germans in his Italian-language prefaces in both Getty and Morgan versions: I learned these skills from many German and Italian  masters and their senior students, in many provinces and many cities, and at great personal cost and expense. and And the aforesaid Fiore did learn the aforesaid things from many German masters. Also from many Ita