Yabusame – Gunslingin’ Samurai (Japanese Mounted Archery)

Yabusame is a Japanese Shinto ritual involving mounted archery. Archers ride at a full gallop and shoot at three targets set up at certain intervals. Hitting all three, an archer is considered to be very skillful. The ritual is purpose is to bring prosperity and peace.

The video is a complilation of Yabusame events I have been to over the last two years. There are two different schools of Yabusame – Ogasawara Ryu who perform at Asakusa (here 2007&2008) and Takeda Ryu who perform at Meiji Shrine (2006), Miura (2007), and Kamakura (Spring 2007 & Fall 2008)

The song is called “Gunslinger Man” and it fits with the old tradition of samurai on horseback using bows rather than spears and swords as they did later. The Yabusame costume looks rather cowboy-ish.

The music is by the Exotic Ones:

http://www.myspace.com/exoticones

This also a tribute to the memory of a friend of mine who passed away a few years ago:
Jack Hunter Dave, Jr who wrote and sung the song “Gunslinger Man.”

http://my.att.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=87&subpageid=150399&ck=

A Tribute to Autumn

A Tribute to Autumn
Photographic montage celebrating the season

Red Autumn Leaves

Autumn – the season of change where the world gives forth one glorious burst of life and color before succumbing to the long sleep of Winter. Autumn is a season of reflection and poets throughout the ages all over the world have given into this poetic self-indulgence.

Chinese Zodiac draped by Autumn Leaves at Mt. Takao near Tokyo

Fall foliage at a lake in Bavaria, Germany

“No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.”
- John Donne (17th Century England)

“…the end of Autumn is in the color of the last leaves”
- Jaukuren (12th Century Japan)

Autumn leaves at night at Rikiguen Garden in Tokyo

“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (19th Century United States)

Autumn sunshine falls on a golden floor

Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria

“Everyone hates to see the Autumn go by
This feeling would seemed to be shared by the Heavens”
- Tayasu Munetaka (18th Century Japan)

Fallen Autumn leaves as seen from an English church door

 

Painter paints an Autumn scene at Tokyo Station

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.”
- Emily Bronte (19th Century England)

Pagoda at Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo

“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.”
- Albert Camus (20th Century France)

Chuzen-ji Lake, Japan

Watch Tower of old Edo Castle in Tokyo

A Church in Jonesborough, Tennessee

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf’s a flower
But only so an hour.”
- Robert Frost (20th Century United States)

“The autumn wind!
The mountain’s shadow
Trembles before it.”
- Issa (18th Century Japan)

Fall leaves frame Kegon Falls in Nikko, Japan

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it”
- George Eliot (19th Century England)

Cornfield in the Autumn morning mist – Tennessee

Old farm equipment amongst the fallen autumn leaves

A Hint of Autumn at Hikone Castle

View from Hikone Castle

“Ah, it was the Autumn Wind
Not she that I was waiting for”
- Socho (15th Century Japan)

 

View from Neuschwanstein Castle

“So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
- Robert Frost (20th Century United States)

Fallen golden leaves

The sun sets at the end of Autumn

Rain Fails to Dampen Japanese Fire Festival Spirit

Rain Fails to Dampen Japanese Fire Festival Spirit
Kurama Fire Festival in Northern Kyoto

Rain fails to douse giant torches at Kurama’s Fire Festival

Fire and water as a rule generally do not mix as the saying goes. One usually overcomes the other in abundance. Rain has often been the bane of many outdoor-related fire activities from barbeques, to camp fires, to bonfires but the Fire Festival of Mt. Kurama in northern Kyoto refused to be doused despite downpours.

Some of the torches can reach 5-6 meters (15-18 feet) in length

A portable shrine – mikoshi

The Kurama-no-Himatsuri is an ancient festival ritual going back to the late 8th century that come rain or starshine (it’s always at night) is performed every year on Oct. 22. The purpose of the festival is to guide spirits and gods by torchlight along their way through the human world to the spiritual realm. Wayward spirits might remain to cause mischief in our world so the festival served to clear the mountain and the capital below of potentially evil spirits.

Torches of all sizes are carried about the mountain. They range in size from one-handed deals to gargantuan ones that require four or five stout men to carry them. The large torches put off a lot of heat and periodically their bearers are doused with water to keep them from overheating.

A Family’s Treasure on Display

This was my second time at the festival. The first time the mountaintop was crowded with milling residents, tourists, and guiding police. This time the guiding police were still in force but they practically outnumbered the visiting spectators. The reason for this was the rain. For most of the day leading up to the festival, it had been raining quite steadily thus casting a wet blanket over the enthusiasm for visitors to make the journey up the mountain.

An impressive old family heirloom

I almost gave into the suffocating effect of the wet blanket preferring a warm cafe to a cold wet mountain. Fortunately, I was able to cast the blanket off and force myself to make the journey. Not long afterwards, I was quite happy that I had made the effort. Absent were the throngs of visitors that cluttered up the train and mountaintop the last time I had visited. The spirit of the festival, however, was undampened being still “fiery” as ever and this time I could be closer to the action.

Adding to the fun and the surrealness of it all were the number of attending Tengu – Japanese goblins. Kurama’s famous mythical denizen is the Tengu which come in two shapes – redskinned long nose goblins or winged crow-headed goblins. The long-nose goblins make for popular masks and quite a few people were sporting these.

A Tengu Goblin on the way back from Kurama’s Fire Festival

As for the rain, from time to time it did come down but it was only a minor inconvenience. The great torches sputtered and crackled but did not go out. The amount of smoke was considerable though due to this.

Koff! Koff! Must be in the the smoking section!

After the torches reached the shrine, a large bonfire was constructed. Then two large mikoshi – portable shrines – were brought down the steep path from the temple. On their backs rode two men in samurai armor sans helmet. The mikoshi bearers rocked the shrines up and down seemingly trying to knock the fellows off. All around them carrying regular-sized torches were men, women, and children singing the festival’s age-old chant of “sei-rei, sei-ryo!” which means something like “festival, good festival!”

And indeed despite the weather, it was a good festival and I was glad I had made it.

shouldering a hot heavy load

http://samuraidave.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/japanese-fire-festival-on-kyotos-mt-kurama/

Remembering the Great War – November 11th

Remembering the ‘Great War’
Nov. 11 marks 90th anniversary of WWI’s end

Trench warfare – static and deadly – became the norm for most of World War I

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.”
Wilfred Owen – died 1918

Ninety years ago at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the great guns fell silent and Europe experienced a silence it had not known in years. It was the end of the “Great War,” the War to end all Wars. Today, we know that was a hopeful but futile sentiment as the War to end all Wars is now known as World War I.

Two bullets and a lost driver set off a powder keg whose explosion engulfed Europe. In the summer of 1914, a driver made a wrong turn and ended up in the path of a young assassin who had actually given up and was just finishing off a sandwich. The young assassin was a Serbian belonging to a radical group known as the Black Hand. Their target was the Arch-Duke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was touring Sarajevo. They had tried earlier that day to assassinate him but failed. Now Fate through the hands of a lost driver delivered the Arch-Duke into one of the assassin’s hands who took full advantage of his good luck and fired his pistol killing Ferdinand.

The assassination caused the collapse of the house of cards that were the national alliances of the day. Austria-Hungary with German support declared war on Serbia. Russia was allied with Serbia so they entered the war. France was allied with Russia and so they entered the war. Germany in order to swiftly attack France violated Belgium’s borders by crossing it with their troops. Britain had an alliance with Belgium and so they entered the war. Eventually other nations would enter the war as well including the US.

World War I in many ways was the “War to end all Wars” in that it was every war past and future rolled up into one. There were Napoleonic charges, aerial bombardment, a few misguided cavalry charges with actual horses, tanks, machine guns, artillery barrages, air combat, poison gas attacks, flamethrowers, submarine warfare, and primitive hand-to-hand fighting that came down to knives, sharpened spades, and clubs.

Soldiers dehumanized by their gas masks

While fighting took place in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Russia, and the borders of Italy and Austria, the bulk of the fighting took place in the area known as the Western Front. The Western Front was a long series of extensive trenches where most of the intensive fighting of the war took place. So many men died in such a concentrated place.

While WWII had a far higher casualty rate, this was widespread throughout the globe. The majority of WWI casualties, however, occurred along the several hundred kilometers of the Western Front from the North Sea to the Swiss border. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the British lost over 50,000 in dead and wounded in the space of a few kilometers.

Stretcher-bearers trudge through the mud with a wounded victim

The trenches were hell on earth – mud, water, snipers, artillery barrages, barbed wire, machine gun fire, and the rotting corpses of those who fell in No-Man’s Land, the deadly area between the opposing armies’ trenches. Plus there was rampant disease, lice, and rats grown fat from feeding off of corpses.

“In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.”
Siegfried Sassoon – 1918

The Second World War often gets more attention in the popular imagination. Countless movies, books, comic books, documentaries, TV shows, magazines and so on focus on the many aspects of the war. Battles, generals, strategies, policies, ideologies get constantly battered about from academic circles to office water coolers. It’s a subject many have some knowledge of whereas World War I only brings to mind to some (particularly Americans) the Red Baron, the imaginary nemesis of the Peanut’s comic strip character, Snoopy.

Manfred von Richthofen – the Red Baron – Germany’s Flying Ace

And there’s a good reason for that. With World War II there was a clear reason to fight. For the Allies, it was to defeat the conquering Nazis and Imperialist Japanese. For the Germans, it was to revenge their humiliation with the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. For the Japanese, it was believed they were saving Asia (though they didn’t bother to ask the rest of Asia). It is easier for modern day audiences to understand the rationales and motivations of those who fought in that war.

The reasons for fighting the First World War, however, are rather vague. The motivations for the soldiers fighting are also vague. It’s hard to understand the patriotic fever which led to so many men signing up to fight a war that appeared to have been fought for the sheer hell of it and no other reason. In modern academia, the “isms” of nationalism, militarism, imperialism are blamed for causing the war.

For war enthusiasts, World War I is a hard one to get enthusiastic about. Most of the literature and films on the subject have been anti-war save for a few on WWI pilots and Sergeant York released when America was entering WWII.

Then there’s strategy. With WWII battles there was often a lot of planning and logistics that went into major battles on both sides. Armchair military historians can easily while away the hours discussing the many stratagems of WWII generals.

The battles of WWI on the other hand appear to have been planned by generals who were either appallingly stupid or monstrously callous to causalities that their battles produced. At the Battle of the Somme, soldiers were ordered to advance at a walking pace. This was to keep the lines orderly and lower the chances of friendly fire – it also made the British soldiers perfect targets for German machine gunners.

Soldiers make their way on catwalks over flooded trenches

The whole war in retrospect seems a comic-tragedy of epic proportions. Men died in the thousands for a few yards of earth. The British comedy series Black Adder brilliantly showed the insanity of WWI strategy in its fourth season – “Black Adder Goes Forth.” In one episode, a general is looking at a scale map of the last battle and asks his aide for the scale. His aid answers “one to one, sir!” and the general shows no surprise but is glad that 17 square feet of mud is no longer in German hands.

The Great War ended 90 years ago but the consequences still live with us to this day. The war changed the maps, changed class systems, changed the way wars are fought, and changed technology. Iraq is one of those changes having been created out of the territory of the old Ottoman Empire.

Ultimately, Nov. 11 is a bittersweet day to remember the end of a terrible war and all those who died in it. Nov. 11 is also a day to reflect on the futile hope of the time that there would be no other wars to follow.

World War One Airmen Heroes of the Skies Air technology changed drastically throughout the war The patriotic fever that led so many to enlist to fight in the Great War soon died in the mud of the trenches. The mud tended to swallow up heroes and with men dying in droves in the matter of minutes, the glory of war faded in the wake of grim reality. However, there was one area in which war romanticism found a new home. The Great War ushered in the age of aerial combat and it was here that heroes could be found or made. Flight was still in its infancy at the beginning of the war but it became caught up in the technological race. Planes went from observation scouts to reconnaissance observers to bombers to fighters. Fighter pilots were a new breed of soldier and they quickly became the apple of the public eye. The best of the pilots became celebrities and were and dined by the rich and famous. Canadian Fighter Ace William “Billy” Bishop had an audience with Britain’s monarch even. But fame could not ward off the spectre of death and even the best went down in flames. The difference though between the death of the landlocked soldier and the pilot was that the former often died anonymously while the other could reap headlines and a formal funeral. The death of aces, though, could also shock an entire nation as did with the death of the famous Red Baron and French ace Georges Guynemer.

A Tribute to WWI Airmen

In honor of November 11th – Veteran’sDay/Armistice Day this video is a tribute to the airmen of World War I using photographs, paintings, and prints.

90 years ago at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Great War (WWI) came to an end but its consequences live with us to this day.

WWI produced the first fighter pilots and their names live on to this day most notably Manfred von Richthofen – the Red Baron. They were the national celebrities of their day and their deaths could shock a nation.

Music by the Secret Commonwealth
The Secret CommonWealth

Q&A with Samurai Dave on the Tokyo Yamanote Halloween Train

I was in the Kansai/Nagoya area recently to take in a geisha performance in Kyoto and to tour a castle or two in the Nagoya area.

While I was there I met Maggie and her owner Gimmeabreakman from Youtube. Gimmeabreakman interviewed me on the controversial Tokyo Yamanote Halloween Train which caused quite a bit of furor on the internet. Internet denizens were either up in arms against it or that they missed it.

Here I discuss how overly-demonized the event is and how many people are just experiencing internet faux rage over something that they probably never heard before they saw it on youtube or some other forum

Decadent Halloween at Tokyo Decadance – Vid and Photos

Decadent Halloween at Tokyo Decadance

Here are some photos from Tokyo Decadance’s big halloween party shindig.

God, I love Japan!

Tokyo Decadance is a semi-monthly club event that serves as an eclectic gathering for goth, lolita, cyber, fetish, and what-not. Really it’s practically Halloween everytime you go.

This is her usual get-up

The Halloween event was held in Christon Cafe which is a church-themed restaurant.

One can do some soul searching while waiting for bread rolls.

She wears this to the office – the S&M office where she works

Just Chillin’ Out!

This was Tokyo’s Decadance’s 3rd Anniversary – yes, those are dicks on the cake.

A little light lesbianism at Tokyo Decadance

Tokyo Decadance Founder – Adrien Le Danois (on the left)

When Angels and Ewoks mate…

Somewhere over the rainbow…

Too much Decadance

Alas, poor Yorick! We ate him well!

Hey, now!

Tempted by the devil

A trio of sleeping beauties

Is that a wand in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Tengu Goblin is a hit with the ladies for some reason

A look at Tokyo Decadance

Samurai Dave, JR, 2channel, and Japanprobe get Halloween RickRolled!

Well, I was out and about looking for yet another Halloween Train set for Halloween itself. I had some misgivings about this one though because:

1) I had already ridden on one on the 25th and made a video on it. I didn’t really feel like making another one though naturally I would have been compelled to do so.

2) It was set on a Friday. Normally in most countries at 9 such a halloween party would not run into much problem but in Tokyo it means commuters going home after late hours. I find that worse than any halloween train party!

Turns out it was a hoax or it’s a hoax of hoax designed to save face because no one showed up. I got a video response by someone claiming they organized the hoax who then put up a video claiming to have footage of the 31st Halloween Train along with complilations of other people’s halloween train videos including mine.

The intro lures the viewer into thinking you’re going to see the “carnage” as the video states then suddenly it switches to – you guessed it! That Rick Astley video – what is up with that BTW? I still don’t understand rickrolling but this one was funny because bits of video from different people’s halloween train videos are put within the video dancing along with the music.