“What Musashi established with the sixty-one years of his life was a legend and an ideal for the Japanese people for which there is no equivalent in Western culture.” Much has been written about Miyamoto Musashi, he is perhaps the … Continue reading
“How could there be no one else in the world who knows what I know? Secret things are for the sake of beginners. If they were not kept secret, beginners would not believe in them. This is one of the … Continue reading
Some weeks back I spoke about one of the first martial arts books I ever read, this week it is the last. Sensei Brinkhurst gave me this particular book during his recent visit, as he had just finished reading it … Continue reading
This is one of the first martial arts books I ever owned, so it has been over a quarter of a century since I read it; my recollection of its content may not be as fresh as it is with … Continue reading
Given my academic background, how could I resist reading this book? The book aims to rediscover the martial arts of the ancient Mediterranean and analyse those techniques in the light of similar contemporary applications, it finishes off with an examination … Continue reading
This book was first published in 1900 and was written in English rather than Japanese. Its purpose was to inform the West as to the ‘true’ nature of the Japanese people at a time when Japanese society itself was undergoing … Continue reading
This is a collection of writings taken from various Japanese authors ranging from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Topics they cover range from psychology to foreign policy to religion to history to internal administration to, well, almost everything that … Continue reading
This book is a collection of articles originally published in the magazine, Martial Arts Training, between 1988 and 1995. The author is both an aikido practitioner (Aiki Kai), and a Zen Buddhist priest and his biases are apparent and clearly … Continue reading
These authors first made a name for themselves in martial arts literature with their book: Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere, (I will do a review of that work at some future point), whose illustrations were illegally incorporated into almost every … Continue reading
Probably best to state my biases up front: I much prefer books such as these over the how to do technique, picture books, (though we will be looking at some of those also in future reviews), and I like the … Continue reading