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This was originally posted to LJ's Gackt Army comm so sorry if you're seeing it again.

Before the excitement of Gackt's appearance at the joetsu re-enactment fades, I thought that I would write something about the position of uesugi kenshin as a warlord in 16th C Japan. This article is necessarily a generalized summary of something more complex so ( Read more... )

[ first posted at Gackt Army LJ comm - apologies if you're catching it twice but I couldn't NOT post it here at Uesugi Gakuto ]

The speculation about You’s appearance in costume at Joetsu beside his lord Gackt-Kenshin reminded me of this picture of Uesugi Kenshin and his page (click for large):


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Thank you to those who keep posting such lovely poems, images and such to the comm! I do indeed read them, and it is a nice sight to see when waking up! I will try my best to be as active as I can. I just need my own internet lol ( Read more... )

The poems and pictures found by mingoes sent me looking again at the confrontation between shingen and kenshin as portrayed by Gackt in NHK Fuurin Kazan version. Somehow it doesn't matter that neither of them won - the willingness to risk everything for a hand to hand exchange of blows seems to be all ( Read more... )

The poems posted by mingoes on 18th Jan are shown in an old book and the translation there follows a conventional but quite dated (19thC) style, which is fun to recite (even exciting to recite) but doesn't always make the meaning (literal or poetic) easy to grasp ( Read more... )

After reading and searching more about the 'Blossoms and Swords' mentioned in my previous post here, I just discovered -well me stupid anyways not having read carefully the postscript of the book- that in the poem 'Sword dance', the mentioned hero here is Kenshin. Perhaps you already concluded it like that, but I wasn't sure myself, as Kenshin ( Read more... )

Okay this turned out to be a lengthy post, with all the pics included. So I'm putting it in a cut.
( Read all about the Battle of Kawanakajima and Kenshin's poem )

I found this in "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon -Japanese Woodblock Prints by Yoshitoshi -"  by Tamara Tjardes (ISBN 0890134383). Though Kenshin here isn't as gorgeous looking as the one we see in Fuurin Kazan, it's still, imo, a sublime piece of work.

According to the author, Kenshin is here portrayed in full armor on the eve of a battle with ( Read more... )

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