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LEGACIES OF THE SWORD:
THE KASHIMA-SHINRYU AND
SAMURAI MARTIAL CULTURE
KARL F. FRIDAY WITH SEKI HUMITAKE
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997
227 pages. Cloth, $34; paper, $14.95
After a flood of books idealizing the samurai as a proto-bureaucrat or model for the modern businessman, this study of martial training, or bugei, refocuses our attention on the original function of samurai as armed combatants.
The organizations through which samurai acquired their military skills survive in the form of several dozen schools, or ryuha. The present book provides an unusual insider's look into the world of the classical martial arts, as seen from the perspective of the Kashima-Shinryu, one of the oldest schools. Karl Friday, an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Georgia, has studied bugei in that school for many years; he has also published a scholarly book on the advent of private warriors in early Japan. His collaborator, Seki Humitake, is the present head of the Kashima-Shinryu school.
Legacies of the Sword retains heavy traces of its origins as a translation of Seki's Nihon Bud6 no Engen: Kashima-Shir>y, (1976), which Friday describes as...