I participated in a training of "JIGEN-RYU":Japanese traditional swordsmanship#1(※「薬丸自顕流の稽古に体験参加してきました！」英語版記事）

※本記事は以下の私のnote記事を、海外への拡散用に英語に訳したものです（This article is a translated version of the article below).

I participated in a training program of "JIGEN-RYU", which is one of the historical martial arts in the Kagoshima prefecture.

Why "JIGEN-RYU"?

Why I made up mind to participate in the training of such a old swordsmanship? Even though my experience of Japanese swordsmanship was only when I participated in hands-on class of Japanese traditional martial arts in high school.

There are two reasons.

First, one of my Turkish friends who is a writer living in Istanbul is writing a weblog about Japanese culture. I'd like to give her a good topic about Japanese tradition. I thought "JIGEN-RYU" would be a nice topic on her weblog.

Because, "JIGEN-RYU" often appears in Japanese Manga, such as "Rurouni-Kenshin", "Golden-Kamuy".

※quoted from "Rurouni-Kenshin" by Nobuhiro Watsuki: Shuei-sha

However, even Today's Japanese people are not familiar with what the real JIGEN-RYU is. Many people have a stereotypical idea about "JIGEN-RYU", the fighting style of a character from Kagoshima prefecture in manga or anime.

A famous author Ryotaro Shiba said that the people of Kagoshima are something special!

Second, I love the history of Japan, so I have been interested in Kagoshima's JIGEN-RYU which trained many famous historic heroes.

Speaking of the history of Kagoshima, there was a story which aroused my interest. 

A popular author, Ryotaro Shiba, once said that when the people of Kagoshima prefecture appeared in the history of Japan, he felt they were something special.

He said the people in Kagoshima had some special diplomatic abilities. Through the history of Japan, Satsuma Domain(today's Kagoshima) was regarded as a dangerous rival of Tokugawa Shogun family. The Tokugawa Shogunate tried to overpower the Satsuma Domain by the economic interference. However, they managed to keep their power.

In the end, they succeeded in overpowering the Tokugawa Shogunate as a leader of revolutionaries, and led the modern-era.

Ryotaro Shiba said that such a strength of Kagoshima is from their traditional education system which has been inherited since the medieval times.

I'm strongly curious about what made him say so.

Because I also like TV drama and novels set in Satsuma Domain! (※One of my favorite TV drama is this↓)

So, I participated in a training program!

I thought that if I participate in traditional JIGEN-RYU training, I would find something to understand what made the people of Kagoshima so strong.

One of Today's JIGEN-RYU schools accepted my offer. Yakumaru-JIGEN-RYU school in Tokyo .

They were quite nice people to teach me a lot of things about JIGEN-RYU, even though I hadn't known anything about Japanese martial arts...!

In the next article, I will show you what I saw in the training in detail. 

Please wait for the posting of my next article!

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