A little announcement.
Hatsumi has recently started to release from Quest a new series in his Bujinkan series. These are called the Hikan Densho. I should point out that he has made a pun and the charecter for "sho" of Densho is not as it normally is. Instead of "transmision writings" the new word roughly means "transmision illumination."
What these DVDs contain are the tapes during training that Hatsumi has had made for the last few years. There has been a lot of specualtion over beers as to what he meant to do with them. Now we know.
Each DVD seems to have 4 or 5 sessions on them, either at Ayase or the Honbu. Hatsumi introduces the tape at the beggining, and has a comment on the previous session between them. But other than that, there are no subtitles. Most of the time you can hear the guy translating for the night and they take time to focus on him when they can. But sometimes the only guy willing to step forward and translate may not be the same quality as we see on the Daikomyosai DVDs. It is real easy to Monday morning quarterback and these guys are not getting anything for helping others to understand.
Another difference between the Daikomyosai tapes and these is that it was a student taping everything. It looks like a lot did not get caught, at least in the early sessions, because it took time for the guy to grab and turn on the camera after Hatsumi screamed for everyone to watch him.
But there is no scenes of guys training like there are on the Daikomyosai tapes. Nor are there any scenes of when Hatsumi gets people to come up and demonstrate their level of understanding. This does bring the time down, but it still seems that there is a lot missing from the sessions. The time for each DVD seems to hover between 90 minutes to 2 hours for 4-5 sessions. What is left is still a heck of a lot of information to process.
Since the tapes are running during normal classes, sometimes you can barely hear what Hatsumi is saying over the yells from the Shorinji guys and such training next to us. This is a minor problem for the most part.
Everything seems to center around Hatsumi, at least in the first few tapes so far. If you train with him, you know that he typically will have someone else demonstrate the katas and after some time he will step in and start to isolate certain aspects with different drills and such. They have not appeared in the DVDs I have so far. whether that is a good thing or not is something people will be talking about in the near future.
The DVDs are starting with January of 2003 and the third DVD has gotten as far as February 11th. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of these things coming out. I do not know if they will last. The first few tapes will be snatched up of course. But as they keep coming out, people will probably be restrained by financial matters and drop off. At that point, I do not see how future ones would be profitable to produce anymore. At what seems to be a rate of about one DVD for every two weeks, the 4 years to catch up to the present staggers the mind in terms of how many could come out.
I suspect that people will start to go over their notes to see when they were in Japan and then try order the DVDs covering that time. Some of us will still have to shell out for a lot of the tapes even so.
The easiest way to get them if you are not in Japan seems to be Tenguweapons.com since they get the DVDs straight from Quest and deal in dollars.
I do not reccomend these tapes for those with no knowledge of the Bujinkan. Most of the sessions I have viewed so far were of small groups that knew the basics and the training was geared for that IMO. If you do not have the background that these people did, then you will be very, very confused and draw some wrong conclusions. If you have the background of a few years, you may get some insight out of what is going on. The parts where philosophy and such are discussed are quite illuminating even if you never try the exact techniques shown. As such, many advanced Bujinkan members would be well served by these.
Hatsumi has recently started to release from Quest a new series in his Bujinkan series. These are called the Hikan Densho. I should point out that he has made a pun and the charecter for "sho" of Densho is not as it normally is. Instead of "transmision writings" the new word roughly means "transmision illumination."
What these DVDs contain are the tapes during training that Hatsumi has had made for the last few years. There has been a lot of specualtion over beers as to what he meant to do with them. Now we know.
Each DVD seems to have 4 or 5 sessions on them, either at Ayase or the Honbu. Hatsumi introduces the tape at the beggining, and has a comment on the previous session between them. But other than that, there are no subtitles. Most of the time you can hear the guy translating for the night and they take time to focus on him when they can. But sometimes the only guy willing to step forward and translate may not be the same quality as we see on the Daikomyosai DVDs. It is real easy to Monday morning quarterback and these guys are not getting anything for helping others to understand.
Another difference between the Daikomyosai tapes and these is that it was a student taping everything. It looks like a lot did not get caught, at least in the early sessions, because it took time for the guy to grab and turn on the camera after Hatsumi screamed for everyone to watch him.
But there is no scenes of guys training like there are on the Daikomyosai tapes. Nor are there any scenes of when Hatsumi gets people to come up and demonstrate their level of understanding. This does bring the time down, but it still seems that there is a lot missing from the sessions. The time for each DVD seems to hover between 90 minutes to 2 hours for 4-5 sessions. What is left is still a heck of a lot of information to process.
Since the tapes are running during normal classes, sometimes you can barely hear what Hatsumi is saying over the yells from the Shorinji guys and such training next to us. This is a minor problem for the most part.
Everything seems to center around Hatsumi, at least in the first few tapes so far. If you train with him, you know that he typically will have someone else demonstrate the katas and after some time he will step in and start to isolate certain aspects with different drills and such. They have not appeared in the DVDs I have so far. whether that is a good thing or not is something people will be talking about in the near future.
The DVDs are starting with January of 2003 and the third DVD has gotten as far as February 11th. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of these things coming out. I do not know if they will last. The first few tapes will be snatched up of course. But as they keep coming out, people will probably be restrained by financial matters and drop off. At that point, I do not see how future ones would be profitable to produce anymore. At what seems to be a rate of about one DVD for every two weeks, the 4 years to catch up to the present staggers the mind in terms of how many could come out.
I suspect that people will start to go over their notes to see when they were in Japan and then try order the DVDs covering that time. Some of us will still have to shell out for a lot of the tapes even so.
The easiest way to get them if you are not in Japan seems to be Tenguweapons.com since they get the DVDs straight from Quest and deal in dollars.
I do not reccomend these tapes for those with no knowledge of the Bujinkan. Most of the sessions I have viewed so far were of small groups that knew the basics and the training was geared for that IMO. If you do not have the background that these people did, then you will be very, very confused and draw some wrong conclusions. If you have the background of a few years, you may get some insight out of what is going on. The parts where philosophy and such are discussed are quite illuminating even if you never try the exact techniques shown. As such, many advanced Bujinkan members would be well served by these.
