The samurai version of hitting a bucket of balls

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

It’s not hard to imagine what the samurai version of hitting a bucket of balls entails:

I finally figured out why the Japanese love to go the driving range and hit golf balls instead of play golf on a course.

It ties into the ancient samurai tradition of practicing for battle by first beheading a bunch of criminals. Beheading prisoners is to war as the driving range is to the golf course.

For example, the 60-something retired samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo said in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, from the early 17th Century:

Yamamaoto Kichizaemon was ordered b his father Jinemon to cut down a dog at the age of five, and at the age of fifteen he was made to execute a criminal. Everybody, by the time they were fourteen or fifteen, was ordered to do a beheading without fail.

Last year I went to the Kase Execution Grounds to try my hand at beheading and I found it to be an extremely good feeling. To think that it is unnerving is a symptom of cowardice.

It’s funny that the Japanese have been diligently practicing their swings for hundreds of years, merely changing the size of the sphere they’ve been hacking at on the practice grounds.

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