Who needs dance partners?

I caught "Breach" last night while working on my tattsuke-bakama. Well worth staying home on a rainy night for. Creepily compelling Chris Cooper as spy Robert Hannsen, with Ryan Phillipe, Laura Linney and the guy from the Allstate commercials trying to catch him.

The three panels for each leg are assembled and joined at the crotch and the back half of the waistband is attached. Still to go, attachment of the kyahan to each leg and I have to figure out how I want to handle the front fly and waist closure. Love, love, LOVE the fabric, indigo and white kasuri (Japanese ikat).

Came upstairs after the movie to check email and had an IM visit with the lovely and talented gcmadtown81 who has gotten the insane notion to spin and knit me a shawl - just 'cause. "You'll appreciate it," he reasoned. Well, yeah, duh, but I know how much work it's gonna be too! He showed me a bunch of designs from http://www.garnstudio.com/
(I include the link for the other yarn whores on my friends list. You know who you are.)

Who should pop into my inbox but the younger of the two Bushi from the Outlands. R is the young man who squired me around Caerthe Twelfth Night two years ago. Hadn't heard from him from ages - because he joined the Air Force. Turns out he's just been posted to Monterey, sans armor or garb.  I sent him contact info to the local group,  the link to the kingdom Calendar and a brief breakdown on  War College in San Jose for next weekend, all with the instructions to "tell 'em you're a friend of Jehanne's."  I need to find that old blue kosode I put Fujimaki in when he came out for Boar Hunt a couple years ago and mend it. The boy's going to need something to wear!

And who should turn up on Tousando, posting the sort of odd, random stuff that telegraphs "It's after midnight but who needs sleep?!" but the elder Bushi from the Outlands. So I PM him to say hi and tell him that R has just surfaced in the West. He's well, he's been busy on a big project for work, but we can expect to see him at Estrella.

I love my boys, I do, I do.

She Who Sucks The Least Says WTF?

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:

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