She Who Sucks The Least Says WTF?

[gurdymonkey]

And lo, for a brief moment, water did not fall from the sky, so in a fit of cabin fever, I went out. I used one of my Christmas gift cards at the local Bored and Snowballs on a copy of Samurai: Arms, Armor, Costumes by Mitsuo Kure. The one that's been noised about as a must have.

Well. It's big and red and shiny and has lots of very pretty photographs of live human beings posing in  armor and costumes. It has a gushy description on the inside of the dust jacket about how historically authentic everything is inside!!!!!

It also has a preface by its author in which he mentions "the curator of a private museum in Kyoto." He finally rambles around to mentioning the "Japanese costume museum in Kyoto." He never, ever thanks or acknowledges Izutsu-san by name either. Nor does he identify any of the collections or reproduction sources of any of the arms or armaments.

Dr. Kure is a doctor of medicine. He got interested in researching samurai militaria while painting models for gaming. This led him to re-enacting. Great, as a hobbyist myself, I applaud that. It's just that if you're going to embark on "an obsessive quest for accuracy," how about telling us where you found this stuff so we can come along for the ride?

Not a single footnote. (Am I weird for reading footnotes?)

Not a single corroborating image from period artwork.

No bibliography whatsoever.

I am willing to cut some slack on some truly clunky prose descriptions of outfits as Dr. Kure is not writing in his first language.  However, there's an awful lot of inconsistent spellings of phonetically rendered Japanese words.  Utiki becomes uchigi and uchiki and wanders back again, for example. Clearly, while Dr. Kure was busy copying information off costume diagrams from the KCM, he wasn't actually reading them. Nor was the lady he credits for "correcting my poor English." This is sloppiness, plain and simple, and it's exactly the sort of thing that's going to confuse a novice costumer or armorer and hinder their obsessive quest for accuracy.

Then there's the Girl Clothes. You know, the reason I bought the thing. O My Readers, I am the first to admit that it is very easy as a re-enactor to focus on What I Need For My Kit and not worry too much about The Kit Of Others as long as it looks right from where I stand. Nonetheless, I've gotten enough inquiries on male Japanese dress that I've actually tried making and wearing a couple of things because not being able to answer those questions made me want to know more myself. 

Now, Dr. Kure could have concentrated specifically on armor and male dress, but no, he includes several women's outfits - and confusion runs rampant. "This samurai lady is wearing a blue uchiki coat on top of a violet hitoe. In being fastened on her upper chest, the obi belt differs from that of later periods." Click here for a similar outfit from the Kyoto Costume Museum.) WTF does this mean????? Well, yes, she's wearing a kake-obi. Now look at the fold in her outermost robe at about the tops of her thighs. What do you suppose is holding up the hems of her layered hitoe and uchigi so she can walk in them?  I'll give you a hint.  Two syllables, starts with "O." Why the kake-obi? To keep all that excess overlap lying neatly while she's out and about because her waist obi is under two or more layers keeping her hems out of the mud. Kake-obi make even MORE sense when one is using a kosode as a veil as shown here.
 
It's not completely useless. The pictures do show a degree of detail that the ones at the KCM website do not. But even the translated "explanation" windows at KCM are better than the muddle that is Dr. Kure's text.

Very disappointing.


Edit: For a good time, call Izutsu-san at http://www.iz2.or.jp/english/  I love the Kyoto Costume Museum website.

And in related news:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
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Comments

[bebemochi.livejournal.com]

Oh, I got this for Christmas and hadn't had a really thorough look at it, yet. Thanks for the review.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

It's one of those helps-to-already-know-what-you're-looking-at kind of things.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

So this is a useful book for the advanced student, but not a beginner text, essentially? That's good knowledge to share on related lists.

[reynardine.livejournal.com]

The "uchigi/uchiki/utiki" problem may have come from whatever dictionary the writer was using to translate into English. I ran into the same issue while working on a translation of a manga set in the Heian-era. The kanji isn't that common and the Japanese/English dictionaries that I have actually differ on how to pronounce it, although the furigana by the kanji in the manga clearly said "uchigi". But that's something the editor should have caught before going into print, to be sure!

[bovil.livejournal.com]

I believe that the editor's first language isn't English either...

[danabren.livejournal.com]

I found the most useful part to be the clear photographs of the lacings on the bug hat.

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

And how much was this collection of shiny-red-covered-footnoteless pretty pictures? I'm with you on the WTF no references. Surely he reads professional journals, so he's aware of little things like bibliography, citations, FOOTNOTES. I'd heard about the book and was thinking about looking it up on Amazon and using my Amazon credit for it, but now I think I'll wait.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

B&N has it on their bargain stack at $17.98.

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

hmmmm, that's not a bad price for good pictures from the Kyoto Costume Museum.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Yes it is. We're talking maybe half a dozen women's outfits. Buy it on Amazon used - you won't feel cheated that way.

[takadai-no-tora.livejournal.com]

Only half a dozen women's outfits? Yeah, definitely used from Amazon sounds like a better way to go.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Kure is good for the pictures; the costumes are KCM costumes off mannequins. The text is iffy. When I suggest this as a resource, that's pretty much what I say.