By pure chance (though I don’t really believe in chance), I came across an old Japanese karate book from 1956 that had been digitized and archived at the National Museum of Hawaii. The author is Konishi Yasuhiro sensei. What caught my attention was how he connects karate with kendō—
Have you ever sailed on a historical tall ship? No? You totally should. Every year, a bunch of us from the neighborhood pick some kind of wild week-long adventure. One summer, my buddy Jirka – the kind of guy who knows everyone and everything – came up with the idea of sailing
Thursday morning, the first day of May, and Japan is in the midst of Golden Week—one of the country’s biggest holiday seasons when many Japanese take time off to travel. I expected crowds everywhere, but to my surprise, the opposite was true. The kind lady who hosted me
For over a thousand years, people from all walks of life in ancient Japan—monks, merchants, samurai, even emperors—have walked the sacred trail of the Kumano Kodo. It’s not just a path through the mountains. It’s a path through time. The Kumano Kodo isn't a