The Sword Scroll: Gunpo Heiho Ki: Kenjutsu no Maki Paperback – September 24, 2016

This is a compiled book from several ancient Japanese and Chinese strategy / martial arts books. In old dynasty times, Chinese generals compiled war strategies (like infantry / horseman forms, terrain tactics) with the applications of several most commonly used weapons together to summarize what his had learned / created from the battlefield in his life. Those books are dozens and a lot of them are quite famous and later exported to Japan and Korea. In Korea, Chinese characters were totally replaced after WWII. In Japan, Chinese characters, which exists more in ancient Japanese writing, are still heavily used nowadays.To understand / translate old books or scrolls, especially for westerners, one of the biggest challenges is to find the right way to start with. It depends on which book you are reading. When using the pronunciation instead of translation of terminologies, you should make sure what you pronounce is in the "correct" language. Here, the most obvious error is Bubishi, which is a Chinese book, should be spell as Wu Bei Zhi, which means "the book of war preparation". Imagine if a Chinese translator spells Tokyo as Dongjing (which is the Chinese pronunciation for 东京), or translates Ieyasu Tokugawa as Duchuan Jiakang (德川家康), that's very unprofessional.In this book, there are a lot of photo copies of Japanese old scrolls, which is the most valuable part. Calligraphy is quite popular art in East Asia. People should be able to recognize and verify the old writings. The way we usually do first is to list each character clearly, then expand and translate them into modern language. But in this book, because of the skip of the first step, dozens of missing or translation errors are distributed in the whole book. Some poem should be have 20 Chinese characters (4 lines x 5 characters each) now only has 19 or 18 words, which eventually twisted the meaning. Different from Korean or Japanese, which are spelling language (even they use Chinese characters for long), Chinese is a symbol imaginative language, which has hidden meaning above the basic understanding, and exists in old scrolls very often. :)I'm not a professional translator and I totally understand how hard the translation for ancient Chinese / Japanese into English will be. Based on this, I'm very appreciated for the translator's work. Here are some advice. If you want to translate ancient Japanese, please map the calligraphy character to character first. Some ancient Japanese can even be self-explained if you Kanji (Chinese character) vocabulary is large enough. If you want to translate ancient Chinese, please find a Chinese version (most of them can be found in China) so that you won't miss any info by a second translation.Mao Yuanyi's Wu Bei Zhi is not in ancient Chinese. As a martial artist, I can map 99% of the moves / techniques into traditional Chinese martial arts samples we are practicing without any hesitation.

I kinda bout this on a whim as I have chatted with the author a few times in the past. Having enjoyed his publications before and the price fit my wallet, in the cart it went.Well, pleasant surprise when I found out that a sizable portion of this book was on a subject that I have been conducting a sizable amount of research on (Kage no ryu of Aisu Ikosai). I haven't even finished the book yet and have been enjoying it immensely. there are tons of document pictures, illustration comparisons (which I have been procrastinating on building myself), and quite a lot of investigation into the early curricula of swordsmanship!Contents include Yamamoto Kansuke's (primarely) Gunpo Heiho Ki: Kenjutsu no maki, Bo Genki (Mao Yuanyi)'s Bubishi ( something that I've been working on quite a bit lately) - which includes Aisu Ikosai's Kage no ryu scroll, and many other important works which all appear to have a very direct connection to one another (essentially the thesis of this book).This book hasn't left my desk since it arrived!

so freaking awesome so awesome........i have one request eric if any you or any of your peeps read this PLEASE PLEASE put out the igs/koka ryu kusarigama gunpo heiho by same author he made only available to takeda fife...of course you guys know this... please but this is awesome!!!!love the direction you guys are taking as usual!!

eric shahan has done us all a great service with his work. I can read the Japanese, but the contents are so hard to come by that this is still worth the purchase. Thank you, sir!

Buy from this seller, excellent translated martial art resource for those interested in a deeper look into traditional Japanese Budo.

In this book you can find interesting historical material of Kenjutsu Scrolls as well as a historical background on the Takeda clan and their greatest General...my favourite Japanese General.

somthing that requires a lot of pondering over, but very good. if you want a teaching book, for basic straightforeward techniques, forget it, this is a bit cryptic, but it makes you think to try to apply what your using.

Highly recommended. Very interesting historical material associated with the Bubishi. A must have.