June 5, 2011 - 1:21 am
Tags: Chōmei, hut, SCA
Posted in Crafts | No comments
I’ve long planned on making a hut based on the one described by Kamo no Chōmei in his An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut, and I’ve finally put some actual time into building it. Chōmei, after a political failure, fled the capital to become a Buddhist hermit, and while doing so wrote an account of [...]
November 10, 2010 - 10:53 am
Tags: links, Sengoku period
Posted in Meta, Mon | No comments
I’ve been busy with many things (including crunch time for a LARP set as Commodore Perry and the Black Ships arrive in Japan) and haven’t been able to do as much research as I’d like. However, I’d like to pass on a great gallery of Sengoku samurai banners from historical sources. Thanks to Tomoyuki of [...]
August 15, 2010 - 11:03 pm
Tags: kimono, kosode, SCA, sewing
Posted in Crafts | No comments
One of the classes I enjoyed this week at Pennsic University was Lady Roxanne’s Guide to Sewing Kosode and “Kimono” (handout soon to be available online at Yama Kaminari). I learned how to make kimono many years ago from my friend Chisato, and have made some modifications along the way, so I thought I’d post [...]
Today we discuss a controversial mon element (and one you definitely cannot use in the SCA): the swastika. The swastika (卍 or 万字/manji), among many other symbolic uses, has always represented Buddhism in Japan, a use that dates back to the 5th century BCE in India. In Buddhism, the swastika represents dharma, harmony, and the [...]
Just a quick one this week, since I’m off to the war. I was looking through translated excerpts of the Nihon Shoki(SoTJ:48), and I came across some imperial edicts very similar in style to the award scrolls used in the modern Society for Creative Anachronism. Since the Nihon Shoki, as an early Nara period work, [...]
Here we have an interesting mon. Unlike many of the mon we’ve discussed recently, this mon has died out, and is no longer in use. In fact, finding information about this mon at all is quite challenging! It was used by Ōno Harufusa in the Battle of Ōsaka.(SH:62) What do you think it is? My [...]
As time progressed, the daimyō gained power, and the samurai class came into its own in the Sengoku Period, mon became more universally used for identification among samurai, and the variety of mon used increased. While other forms of identification heraldry were used, including a wide variety of giant objects on poles, mon had the [...]
January 9, 2010 - 9:08 pm
Tags: calendar, Flowering Fortunes, Kagerō, Kamakura period, monoimi, rokuyō, Sarashina, shintokumaru
Posted in Beliefs, Literature, Toys | 2 comments
It’s a new year,1 and that means a new calendar. My new calendar, given to me by a mysterious benefactor, is a Japanese calendar with very nice pictures of Japanese castles. One thing I did not expect is for each date in the calendar to be annotated with an additional label in Japanese, in a [...]
