Life and times of Miyamoto Musashi

Sorry. The first four minutes were like watching an animated kaliadoscope.

I love the Musashi character, though. The painting of Musashi with the joyful smile on his face is classic.

This one gets a lot better after the first four or five minutes.

Didn't take that long for my annoyance line to cross the interest line. Thanks anyway.

The thing about the Yoshioka clan trying to ambush Musashi seemed worth the price of admission. I thought that was BS from the film with Toshiro Mifune, turns out it's a true story and this little video goes over Musashi's comments as to how to go about actually taking on a number of people like that.

Maybe I'll get back to it. Anyhow, I'll tag it, if you haven't already.

The story of several of Musashi's encounters and the strategies he used to win them are recounted in A Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho).

It can be found on the web: http://samuraiconsulting.ca/5rings/transintro/life.html

You can probably assume that nobody ever survived 60+ to-the-death sword fights by being a nice guy.....

Didn't have 80 minutes to watch it when I hit this thread, but definitely will. Since someone mentioned Mifune, I assume the program talks about the fantastic Samurai Trilogy, starring Mifune, classic films from the 50s or the 60s.

By most accounts, Musashi, especially during his early years, was a first class asshole and a barbarian. In our society he would probably be considered a psychopathic murderer.

I think average lifespan for ronin in that age was about 25. You could only fault somebody so much for wanting to be the exception to a rule like that...

There's another funny sort of a thing about the number 60 here.....

In our age, something like 25 - 30 professional prize fights is viewed as a career; if somebody makes it to that point without serious damage, he's basically succeeded. Somebody like Roberto Duran or Manny Pacquaio who makes it to double that number without damage is almost an impossible proposition for anybody close to his own size, the edge in experience would be overwhelming. Duran ran out of opponents close to his size and had to start trying to beat up progressively bigger people to earn money at it and at that point you'd bee better off switching to tennis or baseball or something.

Size would be much less of a factor in sword fights and in the case of Musashi who was big to begin with, by the time he got to 50 or 60 fights, no sane person should have wanted anything (involving swords) to do with him.