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Examiner’s Report on Alexander C. Bennett’s Ph.D. thesis: “The Cultural Politics of Proprietorship: The Socio-historical Evolution of Japanese Swordsmanship and its Correlation with Cultural Nationalism” This is an excellent thesis, well-written, well-argued and well-structured, and it makes an important new contribution to scholarly knowledge about its subject. The author, Alexander Bennett's, mastery of the subject is obvious on every page — clearly he has studied it ...
The Chuseikan Dojo in Christchurch, New Zealand See Chuseikan Video Here!! The earth didn’t rock, it exploded under our feet. That was the February 22 earthquake in Christchurch last year. Not long after that, when I had arrived back in Japan, the March 11 Great Tohoku Earthquake happened, followed by a massive tsunami and the unnerving nuclear disaster. In terms of scale, the Japanese earthquake was far bigger, and the casualties inconceivable. How do you come to terms ...
Assisted by my brother Blake, and supervised by Satō Nariaki-sensei, for the past year I have been working hard on a translation of the Kendō Shidō Yōryō (The Official Guide for Kendo Instruction). This book, as the title suggests, is the official be-all and end-all textbook authorized by the All Japan Kendo Federation. This is the book that outlines the “correct” way of executing all of the kendo techniques, and definitions for terms and concepts. It is ...
I thought it was all just superstition, but yakudoshi really are the “years of calamity”. This is a Japanese belief that people who are at the “age of yakudoshi” are likely to experience some kind of catastrophe or illness. If you believe that new-borns start at one year old (kazoedoshi), yakudoshi for men is generally believed to be the ages 25, 42 and 61, and for women 19, 33 and 37. One’s yakudoshi is measured by adding one to your actual age, and as I was born in 1970, I fall plum into the 42 ...
Recently, a new book regarding the history of kendo was released by the publishers of Kendo Nippon Magazine. The book, A Bilingual Guide to the History of Kendo, is, as its title suggests, a bilingual guide to the history of kendo. The author is Sakai Toshinobu, expert in sword history and professor at the University of Tsukuba. The English translation was done by me. The book is comprised of a number of essays outlining the earliest sword ideals ...
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