Читать книгу Traditions. Essays on the Japanese Martial Arts and Ways онлайн

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There are other inaccuracies in the paperback ryu’s view of martial arts in general and in their depictions of swordplay in particular. Katana frequently triumph over automatic firearms, for instance. I assume most of my readers know that wouldn’t happen too often in real life. Blades cleave bodies neatly at impossible trajectories. The reality is that, given the weight distribution and cross-section shape of a Japanese sword, clean cuts are very difficult; bloody, messy hacking is often the result. Swordsmen don’t have regular jobs but are instead living like warrior-monks in mist-shrouded dojo or plotting world domination according to the mystical precepts of bushido. Well, of course, this is absolutely correct.

Okay, so what’s my point? These are fiction, after all. If you want accurate information about Japanese swordsmanship, you can read scholarly texts on the subject, right? Well, there are two flaws in that argument. One, very, very few books are available in English that provide that accurate information. For every good one, there are at least a dozen that are more like fiction, full of errors, distortions, and pure fantasy. Two, the average reader of these novels rarely pursues a more scholarly look. For every reader who devours well-written factual accounts, how many more will there be who glean all their knowledge from Shogun?