2015-04-13: Learning Time!

Back in Nagoya. With our burned faces after two days in the sun.

Even Tommy Lee Jones and his Robot are sad

Everyone else in Nagoya is sad as it is still raining. Normally it should be 30 degrees and sunny at this time of year.

Some Half Arsed History

When Admiral Perry turned up here and said I have lots of guns, let's make some guns versus swords history so Tom Cruise can do a samurai movie in New Zealand and get that whole Libertarian love of New Zealand thing going the Japanese started modernising everything at a quick pace. Certainly it lead to some odd things like taking the new European "invention" of Callisthenics and trying to mix it with Naginata (which does make a certain kind of sense but also looks ridiculous to me now).
One of the things they modernised was learning bayonet fighting. From the Stinky French. They already had some bayonet stuff developed over the previous few hundred years but the modernisation thing sort of pumped it up into a whole separate martial art called Jukendo.

His house was easy to find; it was the one with wooden guns mounted in the garden

When the French got beaten up by the Prussians the Japanese changed the whole bayonet thing to be more of a style they were comfortable with, i.e. more along the lines of traditional Japanese spear / sword techniques than the French fencing roots. Thanks to some helpful friends in the Naginata community we had our first Jukendo training today.

Rating: 9/10 (except for the whole We found New Muscles thing. Eventually we must get to a point where we already have the muscles a new activity demands)

The only way I see it being happy is if it mostly to do with monkeys riding robots, the rest of science is generally depressing

Ewa won at Jukendo by doing more stabby stabs than I could in a 15 second interval.

The All Japan Jukendo Teams Championships are on this weekend in Tokyo so I think we have to revisit any plans we had made. Fortunately neither of us remember making any plans so this should be pretty simple.

Not as cheerful as the mountain town in the spring.