In Musashi's era, meaning the late 1500s, kendo (sword fighting) was absolutely about being as "productive" (read: lethal) as possible.
As it happens, this was also the era when firearms had just been introduced to Japan. In 1575 Oda Nobunaga demolished the Takeda cavalry at the Battle of Nagashino, marking the first time firearms had been used at scale in Japanese combat, and in 1600 Musashi participated in the decisive Battle of Sekigahara where both sides used them extensively.
The end of the Sengoku Jidai was triggered by a warlord (Nobunaga) who equipped his armies with massed ashigaru levies armed with long spears and tanegashima arquebuses. It was absolutely a technological brawl where the valiant highly trained cavalry of warlord's like Takeda Shingen got mowed down by the bullets of musketeers stationed behind well prepared and covered firing positions.
If it was still going on today, the warlords would be adopting drone warfare and vibecoded 3d printed cruise missiles.
Everyone in Sengoku Era Japan had access and knowledge of guns and cannons.
The key for Nobunaga is "Ashigaru". Nobunaga gave the guns to the peasants. That also means that Nobunaga mass produced the guns to a level that no one else was doing.
Yes it was a technological brawl, but inadvertently it was one that worked with and uplifted the Ashigaru into a real combat force.
As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong.
Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
I'm wondering what script the North American Indians† would have replaced the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place and not been all but exterminated instead.
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
> I'm wondering what script the North American Indians
The Cherokee syllabary [0] and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics [1] are both scripts designed for use with North American indigenous languages, and both are still widely used (relative to the usage of indigenous languages in general).
> the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place
Well, history is complicated: it's certainly true that the vast majority of the colonizers were trying to ban the indigenous languages, but there have always been a few people working with the local groups to understand and develop their languages, even hundreds of years ago. And over the last 50 years or so, there's been lots of support for language preservation and education.
> and not been all but exterminated instead
I'm not sure if you're talking about the languages or the people here, but there are some 6 million Indigenous people [2] and 700k speakers of indigenous languages [3] [4] [5] in North America today, so I wouldn't quite call either "all but exterminated".
Yes, my comment was a bit over the top. The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable. And I know there are always good people even when the dominant force is bad.
« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).
So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
> The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable.
Yup, this is unfortunately the case. Colonization definitely made things vastly worse than they were before, but the modern world has become so connected that it's challenging for small languages to survive: young people want to read books, watch TV, and get an education, but it's hard to support all that in a language with only 50k speakers. Bilingualism helps a lot here, but if people can only use their languages to speak to their families, then they're less likely to teach it to their children.
For some further background, I took a class in a local indigenous language last year, so I know a tiny bit of one indigenous language [0], but that language has less than 10k speakers in total. Everyone is putting in a lot of work to preserve it, and it's universally taught in all the schools on the reservation, but unfortunately that's not even enough people to sustain a local newspaper. And to make matters worse, there are two other completely distinct indigenous languages spoken in the same city, so the indigenous people can only use English to speak to each other if they're from different tribes.
> I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
To be fair, there are cases like the Beothuk [1], but that's a rarity.
Actually, before I had looked up the numbers, I had assumed that the populations were far larger than they actually are. It looks like that the US only has twice as many Indigenous people as Canada, yet 10× the overall population. I live in Canada, so I had assumed that the proportions were similar, so you're not the only one here who was surprised by the actual numbers :)
> Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization […] but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Canada has plenty of its own atrocities, but we've thankfully never done anything like that.
Not numerous but specifically Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – all four countries speak Turkic languages, and they chose to do so to align themselves with Turkey. The adoption has been rather slow, and previous Cyrillic based scripts remain in wide use, though.
Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.
That is a total of five countries.
The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».
The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:
«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].
For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.
This somewhat counter-intuitive bolshevist policy of regionalization and decentralisation starts making sense if Richard Poe is right, who says they (them being mostly Jews) were working for the British.
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
I don't eat mushrooms-- can't stand the texture. I heard a podcast episode re: death cap mushrooms and it was chilling. A guy in the podcast talked about tasting a death cap then spitting it out and rinsing his mouth. He said they had a good taste.
Grapes are commonly peeled in Japan, and people will look at you strangely if you eat them skin on. However, Japanese grapes are huge and have a thick, astringent skin that peels off easily.
Likewise, when Japanese people go overseas and start peeling grapes, people look at them strangely. Eventually they figure out that Western grapes are small, hard to peel and the skins are thin and nearly tasteless, so they adopt our barbarian habits too.
Updated to add: Japanese grapes like Kyoho are actually hybrid cultivars of Western grapes (Vitis vinifera) and Concord grapes (Vitis labrusca), which is why they're so different.
Fun fact: a lot of people think artificial grape flavoring doesn't taste like grapes. And that the "Welch's concord grape jam" variety of jams is artificially flavored.
Yeah, Concord grapes are based on Fox grapes; when the new Welch's headquarters opened on Baker Ave they included a plantation started from cuttings from the original farm (which is just a house now but they still maintain their own grapes.) Welch's downsized and moved the HQ to Waltham last year, apparently the vines got distributed to local historic places and farmers https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/04/06/the-grape-esc...
I've had this conversation and the way I explained it is that our grapes are closer to the boba in bubble tea. It's not quite right (they don't pop quite as much) and boba isn't Japanese, but it gets the point across.
Like my parent said, the grapes in East Asia are thick-skinned, and people either peel them or suck out their flesh. The ones sold in Europe are very thin-skinned, and peeling is largely impractical. I'm relating the latter to boba.
I split my time between Europe and China so I'm aware of the differences in that regard. My question was specifically regarding the comparison between European grapes and boba because I was struggling to identify any shared attributes from the varieties I have experienced. Is there a variety of grape which is more chewy in texture, perhaps?
I'm unclear why such a simple question appeared to offend at least one person.
That comment makes more sense if you read it as referring to popping boba [0] rather than the "normal" chewy tapioca boba. Grapes don't pop but the feel of the skin is similar enough.
big purple concord grapes grow wild in the US and are thick skinned and you squeeze or suck out the grape inside, skin significantly more tart than the sweet grape, pretty sure those are the tannins that you get in wine from skin contact even those those are different grape varieties.
I've visited a number of European winegrower family farms and they frequently also grow table grapes for their own consumption. The table grapes they eat are much much less sweet than vinifera grapes where the yeast consume all the sugar into alcohol and which are basically too sweet to enjoy.
Similar hybrids are becoming more popular in the states, for example the "Thomcord" or "Cotton Candy". They're absolutely delicious and have either small seeds or none at all. Recommend to try for anyone who hasn't yet!
I'm 45 and only recently realised the grapes in the UK are "seedless". Grapes with seeds was not a pleasant experience when I accidentally ate one whilst in Croatia.
I much prefer grapes with seeds. They are much tastier and have a nicer texture in my opinion. The difference is enough that I almost consider the seedless variety to be a separate fruit altogether.
If by "genetic modification" you mean "random genetic mutation" formally known as stenospermocarpy.
Seedless grapes existed in the Mediterranean centuries ago. The now-popular Thompson seedless was brought from the Ottoman empire in 1872.
Similar story with bananas and the parthenocarpy mutation. Then you layer selective breeding on top of that to create complete sterility due to triploidy.
Others like the babaco papaya are just simple sterile interspecific hybrids.
So nature actually does make seedless fruit by accident quite often. It's just that you need humans to come along and clonally propagate them.
I live near a Korean pan-Asian convenience store, and I've been enjoy the variety of beverages and ramen available there. Oceania today exports foods with significant influence by Italian cuisine, in particular.
There are some fruit drinks which contain whole fruit, like green grapes. It's sort of on the spectrum if you imagine canned grapes, which come in a "light syrup" but the beverage is a thinned-out version of that, not tart or sugary like American grape juice.
But you pour the can out, and a couple of fresh grapes come out as well. I suppose they are peeled. I was a little disappointed when the pear juice didn't include sliced pears. But there are many more fruits to try!
TL;DR: for some biomarkers, "sprint-interval exercise" (SIE) bursts as short as 5 min can be as effective as much longer periods of "moderate-intensity exercise" (MIE).
Specifically: MIE consisted of 90-min of continuous cycling at 90%–100% of the predetermined first lactate threshold, while SIE consisted of 6 sets of 30-s all-out cycling at a resistance of 0.075 kg·kg−1 body mass, with 4-min rests between the sets (Figure 1A).
The study's sample size was small and the period studied fairly short, but they did measure the levels of several thousand proteins.
"The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter"
EDIT: This book is maybe a bit old but covers a lot of ground on high intensity interval training vs. traditional training. I guess this study adds to the body of evidence that HIIT is effective. My take as a random person interested in this stuff is that ideally you are mixing both high intensity and longer duration workouts for their different benefits. But if you are limited in time it seems high intensity is a winner.
As it happens, this was also the era when firearms had just been introduced to Japan. In 1575 Oda Nobunaga demolished the Takeda cavalry at the Battle of Nagashino, marking the first time firearms had been used at scale in Japanese combat, and in 1600 Musashi participated in the decisive Battle of Sekigahara where both sides used them extensively.
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