New Years Greetings in the Year of the Monkey!

1/2/2016

Renaissance means rebirth, and we celebrate the New Year with the Rebirth of the website www.samurai-walk.com

Well settled now in Yamanashi and with an excellent view of Mt Fuji, it is the perfect time to launch a new platform for sharing the many ideas, books, resources, and projects which have taken shape since moving to Kofu and working at iCLA (International College of Liberal Arts). Many of these projects have a Samurai theme, not only in the courses I teach, but also in the history of Takeda Shingen, and Samurai Culture of the Kai Province, now known as Yamanashi.

It is with great pleasure that I release this new website to share these exciting themes and projects, many of which I have been working on for years, but which have marvelously come together in the last year in Yamanashi. Join us in the journey as a Renaissance Samurai.

Will Reed

1 Comment

Krista Mullen link

7/10/2022 10:43:30 am

Greaat reading

A poem is born, or reborn?

A piece of calligraphy comes to life. Short version.

May 1987?
My teacher Morioka Koshu paints a Tehon for our monthly Shodo magazine in the Sogeikai in the 1980s, and of course I have kept them all as a treasure.

Feb 2017
30 years later I meet Rogier Uitenboogaart in the mountains of Kochi at Yusuhara, where he himself has been making Japanese Washi paper by hand for 30 years!

April 2017
Almost exactly 30 years after I first saw the Tehon shown here, my friend Iwamoto-san at iWeave kindly presents me with the work I painted in February, wonderfully mounted on a scroll, which now hangs in my office.

Here is my translation of the the Chinese poem:

Laughing in the Spring breeze
The dancer swirls in veils of silk.
This is the time to drink up!
How can you leave now,
When we have hardly begun?

I am not sure who wrote the original Chinese poem, but I have an idea that it was 白居易 Bai_Juyi, a Tang Dynasty poet from about 1200 years ago.

A poem is born, and reborn across time and many communication platforms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bai_Juyi

Author

William Reed is a full time professor at iCLA (International College of Liberal Arts) Yamanashi Gakuin University in Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. He is a 7th-dan in Aikido, and a Shihan in both Shodo and Nanba Jutsu. He teaches these arts at iCLA, in addition to a course on Spiritual Dimensions and Traditions in the Japanese Martial Arts. Detailed Profile on the About Page.