Article in The Sunday Business Post

There is a small article on the upcoming Beginner’s Course in today’s Sunday Business Post newspaper, on page 38 of the Agenda magazine.

It reads well, but for some odd reason, they put a picture of someone doing kendo with it, but hey, that’s not a big deal. It’s good publicity and it presents the Bujinkan in a positive light.

The article is titled – “So you want to become a samurai” – as that conforms to the format of this weekly column in the Sunday Business Post – the headline is always “So you want to . . .be/do something.”

I would like to say that in the Bujinkan we don’t train people to ‘be samurai’ – as that’s not actually possible. The samurai were a social class in Japan’s feudal era and to ‘be a samurai’ you’d have to be born into a samurai family. It was not a profession or job, in that sense.

We do train in some of the techniques and practices people of samurai birth used in fuedal era Japan, but it’s not quite the same thing as teaching people to become samurai.