{"id":61,"date":"2006-08-13T23:39:05","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T04:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2006-08-14T09:22:25","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T14:22:25","slug":"japanese-swordwork-in-conan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/archives\/61","title":{"rendered":"Japanese swordwork in… Conan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day I was browsing through various videos on YouTube, and I ran across some clips from Conan the Barbarian<\/a>, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first star role in a big action movie. There were quite a few clips, but the ones that I really liked were this classic line<\/a> (evidently this is originally a quote from Ghengis Khan, which is certainly plausible) and the climactic battle<\/a> near the end of the movie. Watching it brought back some nostalgia from 80’s action movies, so I got hold of a copy and watched it. Maybe I’m getting wierd, or maybe it’s just that Hollywood spewing out nothing but crap for the last decade has really lowered my standards, but I really<\/em> enjoyed it. It’s probably one of the best action epics I’ve ever seen. James Earl Jones and Mako<\/a> (Makoto Iwamatsu, r.i.p.) give excellent performances, even though their screen time is pretty short. And Arnold? He wasn’t bad at all. He plays a very convincing barbarian (don’t know if that’s a complement or not though).<\/p>\n

Another thing that really surprised me is that the majority of the swordwork seemed, well, solid<\/em>. It wasn’t the clang-swords-together-until-I-stab-you-because-that’s-what-the-script-says that is the de facto<\/em> standard in movie fight scenes, and it wasn’t the gymnasticly-impressive-but-ridiculous type of thing that is the norm in kung fu movies and the new norm in post-Star Wars Ep. I and The Matrix Hollywood. Take this scene<\/a> where Valeria kills a couple of Thulsa Doom’s guards. You just don’t see that kind of fight scene in other movies. In fact, a lot of the sword work seemed somehow familiar. It turns out there is a good reason for that.<\/p>\n

So according to imdb, the ‘sword master’ for Conan the Barbarian is someone by the name of Kiyoshi Yamasaki. Certainly Japanese, and most likely a Japanese martial artist, which would explain the familiarity of the swordwork I saw. So a quick google search found this site<\/a>, which explains that he is an iaido and ‘tate-do’ instructor in Anaheim, CA. There is an old post<\/a> on e-budo that explains most of his background with links to other pages with info on him.<\/p>\n

Bonus: He also did the fight choreography for the 2nd Conan movie Conan the Destroyer, the Conan spin-off Red Sonya (although I wonder if he willingly admits to this one, since this movie is universally lampooned), and Dune. I’ll have to check up on those too, although I might need an antacid to get through Red Sonya.<\/p>\n

Also, it turns out tate<\/em> (\u00e6\u00ae\u00ba\u00e9\u2122\u00a3) is the Japanese word for stage combat, which makes sense. The Japan Tate-do Society even has a dojo in Shinjuku<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day I was browsing through various videos on YouTube, and I ran across some clips from Conan the Barbarian, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first star role in a big action movie. There were quite a few clips, but the ones … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moroha.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}