Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

I am real big on paper projects. I do love them and have made lots of them. And, I was very surprised to stumble across a paper art that I hadn’t heard about before. It is the lost Japanese art of Tatebanko or Paper Dioramas. While in Japan I found a couple of these projects and made them.  These projects are not easy to come by and the art is still very much unknown. But I thought it would be cool to make a complete package that other people could download and put together. So this is what I did. I designed a project I call “The Tatebanko Castle” It’s a nice little castle scene. You can download it, print it up and put it together yourself. Nice little project and should only take you an hour or so.

You can find the Project here: The tatebanko Castle project

If you are following along with my quest for a Samurai sword which I have here in Part 1 and Part 2 here is part 3. I do have a part 4 of this on my youtube channel: The quest for a Samurai Sword Part 4.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IX3fjXFco[/youtube]

I was sitting in my hotel room (which was pretty darn small) and I was just trying to unwind after a very long day of adventuring around Japan. I had missed that days opportunity to get myself a samurai sword but I had some solid clues and had actually visited a couple of places that were closed. You can see this part of the adventure in my first video (The quest for a samurai sword part 1)

Anyway, I was sitting in my hotel room and turned on the television. There was a lot of very interesting stuff on! It is true that the Japanese love their crazy game shows, but these get to be quite an overload if you don’t understand the language. Surfing through the channels I found the Schwarzenegger movie “End of Days”. Well that’s a pretty fun movie and it was a real hoot to hear Arnold in a Japanese voice…. So… I took some video of it. And well, low and behold it gave me an idea about the next part of my quest to get a samurai sword.

The image below is not a real video player. It is just for display. To watch part 2 of my quest for a samurai sword click on the link below the image and either download the file or play it in your own PC player. Fun video to make!

Here is the link to watch Part 2: The Quest for a Samurai - An American In Japan - Part 2 (9.9 Mb)

 Here is a video of the beginning of my adventure in Japan.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OceFbtzJ4w0[/youtube]

Yesterday I returned from my trip to Japan and wow, what an amazing experience the whole trip was. And i have so much stuff I am going to be showing you and writing about. I purchased a sword which is being shipped to me and I visited some of the famous medieval castles of Japan. I also went to a couple of Origami museums and visited a world famous bonsai village.

There is so much stuff that is really amazing about Japan and I will be developing a lot of it into projects and articles that you are absolutely going to love. I will also be writing comments and thoughts about the Japanese Culture and some guides for traveling there. But for now, I am pretty Jet Lagged and will be taking a couple of days off just to decompress. But, stay tuned because I have some remarkable stuff coming!!

Here is a summary of some of the things I have planned that are derived from my trip to Japan.

• All About Samurai Swords, how they are made, how much the real ones cost and where you can find them. Tracking down real Samurai swords was a bit of an adventure for me and I will tell you all about it.
• The Medieval Castles of Japan - There are some remarkable castles in Japan that have been around twice as long as America. I visited a few of these and I visited the most famous one of all. This is Himeji castle and it was used to make Tom Cruises movie “The Last Samurai” - I also purchased a scale replica model of this castle which I will be making.
• Origami, Bonsai, Woodcutting, Tatebanko, Puzzle boxes and more. — I have a whole bunch of stuff that I will be doing projects on including miniature castles, miniature tatebanko, puzzle boxes and so much more. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Himeji Castle 

A priceless Samurai Sword