maybe old news but i found this quite disgusting.

not sure if that was a compliment or not.........

no worries cheers.

 

Could be the way you're saying it. It can sound strange when someone says the reason they came to Japan was to study grapes.

 

Actually I had that same problem a few times. I kind of assumed that everyone would know "budo" so when I would wander into bookshops, I'd ask where the budo books were located. This was invariably met with scratched heads and vacant expressions which could indeed have been my appalling accent. But when I asked for the "Judo books", they knew straight away what I wanted and took me to the "Karate books". Go figure!

 

In some parts of Japan there is no difference between the two words in the way it is said, so it all comes from context.

Much like the Tokyo dialect where there can be little or no difference between the 's' sound, and the 'sh' sound. Check before responding if someone offers you a 'seat'...

 

Bla, bla, bla..

First,
Hatsumi Sensei has provided a wealth of information on Takamatsu. He even released a DVD with photos and moving pictures of him. He has released a whole bunch of books where he go into quite a lot of details about Takamatsu and his life. Even Toda is mentioned in several books; "Essence of Ninjutsu and Ninja secrets from the Grandmaster" are two english sources for information.

Second,
like someone earlier wrote, if Toda was made up by Takamatsu, it would have been a stupid thing to make the claims he did about him; the dojo in Kobe, him bailing Takamatsu out from the police station, his position as chief instructor at a martial art school in Kyoto, et cetera, dont you think ?

Third,
Instead of just throwing one-liners at one and another why dont we try to go after the information and do some research of our own? Here´s a loose end to start investigating. For you guys living in Japan and speaking the language this should be more easy than for the rest of us:

According to "ninja secrets from the Grandmaster", page 96, Toda held position as "a chief instructor" at the Tokugawa shogunate swords school (other sources say martial arts school) in Kyoto around the mid 19th century. He resigned from his position because a certain "Ii Naosuke" was promoted to "Tairo" (Top councellor of the shogunate, the book refers to him as karo). In the schools documents it just states that he resigned. According to other, non-confirmed, sources Toda was suggested the position by a certain "Matsudaira Noriyasu" who was a "Roju", senior Counsellor to the Shogunate. It seems Matsudaira got in some political trouble and because of that resigned. None of the two mentioned names here are hard to track even from my computer. Some check into it gets me to believe that Toda may have resigned in 1855 or between 1858-1860. With access to better sources it shouldnt be too hard to pin point the political happenings between Matsudaira and Ii and to figure out how it is connected to Toda. There is some reference to it that says that Toda did not want to train japanese in martial arts that they would use on their own, suggesting to me that he was politically against a move in that direction (ie something leading to civil war). It should also be possible to locate the shogunate sword/martial arts school in Kyoto in mid 19-th century.

I will continue to research on my part. If anyone finds anything useful, please post a reply.

Best Regards
Skuggvarg

 

Okay here's something connected that you might find useful.

Taken from the February 2006 issue of my own newsletter, from the article "Sakurada-Mon".

 

I also notice that Soke sometimes pronounces 'g' as 'ng' e.g. aringato oinstead of arigato. This is meant to be a sign of a higher-class or more cultured way of speaking but can be confusing when you don't know.