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 ...

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 discussed indirectly in the cases of William Marshal and Yamamoto Tsunetomo, there is a correlation between being well-rounded and being virtuous.  It is not causation; it is possible to be a well-rounded scoundrel, as, for instance, Gilles de Rais.  However, being a jack of all trades, and master of at least one, is a good way to stand out from the pack.  It should be at least an entertaining exercise to highlight what someone does best, because there should be multiple reasonable choices. So it is with Yagyû Munenori , who was the personal sword instructor and advisor to three generations of Tokugawa shoguns, Ieyasu , Hidetada , and Iemitsu .  He was the head of the Edo line of Yagyû shinkage-ryû and author of what could be described as its school text, the Heihô Kadensho , which has a singular advantage over the better known Book of Five Rings , in that Munenori also gave a series of drawings illustrating his school to an actor with whom he was especially im...

When I started this series, one of the points I raised was that virtue carried too far becomes vice.  It is difficult to find a good example of how loyalty carried too far becomes a vice; we typically find reasons that a person who carried their loyalty too far was acting for some other  reason, such as with the German army hiding behind the "sacred honor of the German soldier" and the fact that the influencers of the German army generally agreed  with Hitler or at the very least did not find him objectionable, but were more concerned with his incompetence.  They were not holding their noses and doing it out of professional loyalty, they were doing it out of self-interest from beginning to end. Instead, I will consider a man who carried expressions of loyalty to such extremes that they became absurd and weakened his credibility.  That man is Yamamoto Tsunetomo, subject of Hagakure.   We know relatively little about the man outside of that book, so the book ...

As with most of the figures I have discussed so far in this series of posts, it is very difficult to assemble an accurate picture of Minamoto no Yoshitsune; one might reasonably describe him as in the same company as Arthur and Roland in terms of historicity.  There's something clearly there , but exactly what is subject to vigorous debate.  What we know is that the man existed, that he was an influential figure in his time, and that his memory was strong enough to pull even the most extravagant tales to attach themselves to him - raised by goblins, capable of impossible feats of grace and swordsmanship, loyal to his brother beyond all reason. Minamoto no Yoshitsune.  Not shown: Bishounen. Let us first set the man in his place.  In the middle of the twelfth century, Japan was not so much a country as a loose grouping of families bound together by a reverence for the imperial line.  Simplifying things tremendously, a shift between the old court aristocracy and t...

Apologies for long delays between posts; recent events have kept me distracted and busy.  Perhaps most significant of those is that I signed a contract as a contributor to Ulisses Spiele 's Torg Eternity line.  I'm not going to get into details on that, but it turns out that an eclectic skillset, and knowing someone interested, turns you into an RPG author.  That has been occupying much of the runtime that this blog had been. The other significant-to-me development is that there's an aikido group on the north side of Austin that includes, among its other activities, Yagyū shinkage-ryū lessons (and, since the Yagyū family's involvement in the school, never mind the school's existence, predates 1600, that makes this an A&S post!).  The irony of this is that the park where most of those lessons take place is the same park where Austin's SCA group, the Barony of Bryn Gwlad, does most of their combat practices, and it is theoretically possible, if BG ever holds ...

 Last time, I discussed the four-kanji problem and the problem with medieval Japanese female names in the SCA - simply, they just don't get all the fun that men's names get in terms of wordplay and, in period, often look a bit like an afterthought in terms of naming.  "My son's name is Noble Truth; my daughter's name is... uh... Pine Tree!" This time, I will discuss the four - yes, you read that right, four - writing systems found in medieval Japanese.  First, and "best" in terms of prestige, is kanji, which is to say, Chinese characters imported during the earliest period of Japanese history and used based on their meaning.  They may deviate from modern hanzi characters because hanzi have been simplified, and even here there are two forms, a "proper" form and a cursive form, which will be important in a moment.  The second is manyougana - the use of kanji not for their meaning , but for their sound .  Thus, the character 由 can be read a...

Women portraying a Japanese persona in the SCA get left out of half the fun of making a Japanese persona - the name.  Japan's traditional aristocratic naming conventions are, to put it mildly, completely bonkers, and the fact that female names have traditionally been almost an afterthought means that women don't get to play the game of "which kanji are you today?" that men get to play.  To give the most notorious example of women getting shafted on Japanese names, the "lady daimyo" Ii Naotora (井伊 直虎) (d. 1582) is known primarily by the third or so of her names - she was a child, then a nun, then finally a feudal lord, naming gets complicated as you'll soon see - and by a clearly masculine name that, to give you an idea of the fun that can be had here, can be read as "Lady Ii, the Straightforward Tiger."   Depicted - Lady Ii, a Straightforward Tiger, from "Meow Meow Japanese History," Ep. 55 In contrast to Ii Naotora, most aristocra...