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...

  Several weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend an all-day class taught by Russ Mitchell and Kat Laurange on Hungarian sabre, which is well outside my usual sword wheelhouse; I tend to focus on two-handed cutting weapons primarily intended for foot combat, whether it's longsword, katana, or Dane-axe.  I consider it fully appropriate to say that class changed how I approach training and teaching.  I picked up the first in the Austro-Hungarian military saber (I'm American, consarn it, and I'll spell saber like George Patton intended it!) series that day, read it within the week, and have been debating how to review it properly since. The reason for the delay is because I needed to separate the experience from the book, and also because there are at least three things that need to be reviewed when reviewing a historic martial arts manual.  The first is the manual as a book; the second is the martial system described as a martial system; the third is the historicit...

  I would love to give this book five stars out of five, but cannot. I found this book promising but deeply frustrating; it is essentially two books, and each of these books is itself a collection of essays rather than a cohesive whole.  The first book is a historiography of Chinese martial arts manuals, discussing the problems of age, the tendency of martial artists to exaggerate the accomplishments of the past, and the Republican Chinese renaissance of martial arts from a generally military field to a more broadly based cultural phenomenon.  This is the half written primarily by Brian Kennedy.  It is not perfect; Kennedy and Guo are very obviously xingyi practitioners and write what they know, and they are both far more familiar with developments in Taiwan than in China as a whole, including Hong Kong, the mainland, and Macau - again, writing what they know, and in the process illustrating the areas that they don't  know and didn't research as heavily. Before ...

 I have recently acquired Tom Leoni's translation of Capoferro's Gran Simulacro  and a historical survey of Chinese martial arts manuals.  I'll be reviewing these soon enough, but Capoferro specifically helped to crystallize a thought that's been brewing for a while. The thought is this: there are two schools of thought on how to train for combat in general.  One of these starts from first principles then works down to specific examples, the other trains specific examples and the student is expected, via practice, to derive first principles.  Perhaps the greatest historical example of this divide is the argument between Carranza and Pacheco on one side, and Godinho on the other - Carranza being of the opinion that fencing can be distilled to principles and the exacting application of these principles through practice being the key to victory, while Godinho believes that knowledge of the principles is revealed by the practice itself.  I am, of course, ...

There has been a considerable discussion recently on tournaments, tournament fighting, and tournament formats in the SCA.  A lot of what I've seen and read can be generalized to pretty much any organized competitive martial art, though the historical background between, say, modern karate and historical martial arts from any continent is obviously not quite the same. So here's my take on tournaments: I don't like them.  I actively dislike tournaments. Before I continue, I should put some boundaries on that statement.  It is not a statement that tournaments are bad and should go away.  It is also not a statement that martial events  are bad or that fighting should not be competitive, that would be silly and defeat the purpose of fighting.  It is not even a statement of intent to boycott tournaments as a form, because the unwritten rules of the game require that tournaments are where you get people to listen to you. Now, why do I dislike tournaments? There ar...

A conversation at shinkage practice recently got me thinking.  The short version is that any time you pick up a new thing, you come with baggage, both good and bad, and especially early on, putting that baggage away and dealing with the material that is presented can be a challenge.  The specific context was a rapier fighter and montantera trying shinkage and visibly switching what she was doing to Figueyredo's Rule 6 mid-movement, which ruined her footwork, but another example was the deep refusal of the blade in Eisshin-ryu's vertical cuts, which shinkage doesn't do.  Obviously, Eisshin-ryu is more closely related to shinkage than Figueyredo's montante rules, but falling back on a previous body of knowledge can both aid and hinder understanding the art as presented. This leads to a broader problem, at least for me, that of generalists versus specialists.  I started shinkage with an advantage in certain areas; I know how to practice a specific skill or movement deli...

It feels appropriate to me to begin with the very first line of Munenori, as the first few paragraphs sum up much of his worldview. Hathaway: There is an old saying, "Weapons are in-auspicious tools.  They are shunned by Heaven's path.  Keep them ready without the intent to use them; that is Heaven's path." HPB (Ridgway): From antiquity it has been said, "Weapons are an inauspicious instrument, abhorred by the Way of Heaven, and to be used only when unavoidable.  That is the Way of Heaven." Satô: Here's what was said in the past: "Weapons are unfortunate instruments.  Heaven's Way hates them.  Using them when there is no other choice - that is Heaven's Way." Footnote 2: Allusion to Section 31 of Lao Tzu: Good weapons are unfortunate instruments.  People hate them.  So someone with Tao does not rely on them... Weapons are unfortunate instruments and not the wise man's instruments.  When he uses them because there is no other choice h...

I own four English-language editions of of Heihô Kadensho .  I actually own more than that, but the others are copies or extracts of these four.  Two of them, the Satô ( The Sword and the Mind ) and Wilson ( The Life-Giving Sword ) translations, are what could be called "mainstream" translations - that is, they are either at least partially informed by, or endorsed by, members of the school, and are relatively complete, with supplementary material that will help make sense of the original and provide it further context.  They are broadly similar; Yagyû Koichi, the head of the school today, prefers Satô, while Dave Lowry and a handful of other American budô practitioners encouraged Williams to make his translation.  In other words, in quality terms there is little to choose between them, other than personal preference, and one cannot really go wrong with either.  The third was a copy that I happened to pick up at Half-Price Books that did not match either of...

Having completed my review of the various editions of Fiore currently on the market (I suppose I should write up the Hatcher edition of the Getty, but it's been out a few years and is kind of a gold standard!), it's time for a project I've been delaying for months. That project is a comparison of the four editions I have found of Yagyû Munenori 's first volume, "The Killing Sword."  To understand why I'd be doing that, and why there have been delays, one must first understand who Munenori was, what the formative environment of Yagyû shinkage-ryû was, and why the school persists. First, the Yagyû themselves.  All Japanese noble families trace themselves, at least nominally, to one of three origins, the Taira, the Minamoto, or the Fujiwara.  The Taira and Minamoto (or, if one is feeling particularly fancy, the Heike and Genji, after their On'myo, or "Chinese-style," readings) were descendants of emperors who had been mediatized as nobles no l...

As I've said elsewhere, I believe that book reviews should provide what the reader really  needs to know up front, so here it is: I wanted very much to like this book.  The Hatcher and Chidester editions of the Getty and Morgan manuscripts, respectively, are impressive books both as Fiore manuscripts and as works of scholarship.  Unfortunately, the Paris manuscript is easily the most frustrating publicly available edition of Fiore, and that trend continues here. To understand why the Paris manuscript, before translators get involved, is so damn frustrating requires a little bit of explanation.  The Getty, the Morgan, and the Pisani Dossi were all at least made by someone familiar with Fiore's system, almost certainly Fiore himself, and by a series of linked artists - fairly well established in Chidester's edition of the Morgan .  The Paris manuscript, meanwhile, was made by someone who had no idea what the hell they were looking at, but sure liked the fancy draw...

We live in a golden age for the accessibility of historical sword sources for English-language readers.  Take Fiore, for instance.  In addition to Hatcher's excellent version of the Getty manuscript  we have Marsden's translation and interpretation of the Paris manuscript  and this - Michael Chidester's HEMA Bookshelf edition of the Morgan manuscript .  The only known Fiore that doesn't have an English-language release is the privately held Pisani Dossi. Reviews should tell you what you need to know up front, so this is the headline: the Morgan isn't my favorite Fiore manuscript (I think Getty's progression is better for training, and it's more complete), but I think this is probably my favorite of the modern Fiore manuscript editions.  That is a very tight race, but Chidester wins. Chidester is not a Fiore partisan, unlike, say, Windsor , but has a deep western sword background, such that he is the chief editor and director at Wiktenauer .  His backg...