For the past few years Kendo World has been running a Patreon account (www.patreon.com/kendoworld), where for a small monthly fee, Patrons receive different benefits that include early access to articles that will appear in Kendo World, book previews, instructional videos, and live Zoom chats.
For Patrons on the top-level Daimyo-NEW tier, we have a new offer: The Budo Culture course.
The Budo Culture course is a series of video lectures that were originally produced for Kendo World editor-in-chief Alex Bennett’s exchange students at his university when COVID-19 stopped face-to-face lessons. Over seven lectures, students on this course can learn about how budo came into existence, the schools of martial arts that arose, its place as a form of education, its place in Japan today, and many other topics.
Starting in November 2022, these lectures will become available on the 2nd of the month to our Patrons on the top-level Daimyo-NEW tier. Here is a breakdown of the lectures:
Module 1: Swords and Other Samurai Weapons
Module 2: Martial Art Schools and Some Baddass Samurai Swordsmen
Module 3: Evolution of Bujutsu as Art, Sport, and Education
Module 4: Bushido: The Philosophical Underpinnings of Martial Arts
Module 5: Budo in Japan Today
Module 6: Budo as a Lifelong Pursuit
Module 7: The Budo Attitude
For those of you that are very serious about your study, there will also be short assignments after each lecture that you can submit to us that will be checked by Alex and the KW Team. These assignments are purely voluntary and are useful if you want to consolidate what has been studied in the lecture. If you don’t do the assignments, it’s no problem – we won’t be chasing you down and demanding to know where your homework is!
After the submission period of each assignment has finished, we’ll either conduct a review session through Zoom, or produce a video where we go through the answers and make it available to you.
Furthermore, at the end of each lecture there is a “Kendo Practicum” section which explains such things seiza, mokuso, kamae, and kukan-datotsu. These practicums are mainly for beginners, but they’ll be good as a review for more experienced practitioners and could give you some different insights in how to do them, or indeed how to teach them.
These lectures represent a distillation of Alex’s knowledge of budo culture gleaned from over 30 years of research. Usually, these would only be available to his students, but this university-level course is now available to our Patrons for a fraction of the cost of enrolling as an exchange student at a Japanese university.
To access this course, you’ll need to join the Kendo World Patreon (www.patreon.com/kendoworld) and subscribe to the Daimyo-NEW tier. Patrons on the Daimyo-NEW tier will also receive the benefits offered on the lower Ronin and Kerai tiers.
We hope that you’ll take this opportunity to broaden your horizons and learn more about Budo Culture.