about this blog
Welcome on this blog, those purpose is primarily related to the following two points:
A) the transfer of knowledge concerning the traditional Japan, especially in regard to those feudal warriors in the context of traditional martial arts schools (koryû), bushidô (moral code of the warriors) as well as daily life. The application area shall not be absolutely limited to that.
B) the initiation of discussions through texts which demonstrate respectively my actual, very personal (sometimes possibly very arguable) point of view concerning a wide variety of topics.
Headlines like the following ones are imaginable:
„Kata, the martial arts’ (body movement) forms – what they can and definitely can’t do“,
„About soft jûdô, bushidô honor, zen archery and further vexatious misconceptions“,
„The old man with long beard – about the myth of the wise master in martial arts“,
„Peace through loving swords – sometimes there’s just only one way leading to Rome“.
Is the world really in need of another blog like this one? Well, that’s a legitimate question in a time where there are so many of us using the internet intensively and the quantity of blogs is simply unmanageable.
Unfortunately, the truth teary to the core is this: the painted picture concerning the history, philosophy and the daily life of the samurai* (the warriors of feudal Japan) is more often than not plain wrong.
At the best (if a person tries to seriously gain knowledge at least before starting to write texts and so on), this picture is based on wrong conclusions somebody has drawn from the material used to get some would-be knowledge. At the worst, it’s based solely on one’s own fantasy, desire.
Plural in the Japanese language: I’m following the acedemic custom according to which, in Japanese as well as in English, distinction between singular and plural primarily becomes apparent from the context. Therefore, at least concerning Japanese terms, I don’t write e.g. “a samurai” and “many samurais” but “a samurai” and “many samurai”.*
*Samurai:
Samurai 侍 ((a person, who) serves) is the term that we in the Western world do hear most frequently for describing the jap. warrior. Alternatively, bushi 武士 (martial-person = warrior) is used, too. When talking about the Japanese warriors in general, I personally prefer the term bushi as actually the term samurai describes a certain group within the warrior class but not that warrior class as such.
In my blog texts, one will often come across footnotes like the preceding one.
The footnotes in the blog can nevertheless be simply disregarded,
if one just wants to simply flip through relatively short texts here.
In the aforementioned footnotes there are among other things background information and details, which for different reasons I deliberately don’t want to dissect within the corresponding text itself (e.g. to provide for good readability of the blog texts). In particular one will find there – definitely to stand out against the majority of thematically similar blogs, too – consistently corresponding references.
Important hint: an indicator for a footnote (as e.g. * or * * in shorter texts or as e.g. 3 or 12 in longer texts) found in a blog article is actually a special link which will get one directly to the corresponding footnote. One can then get easily back to the text passage one came from by clicking the “same” indicator again.
