Thursday, December 20, 2012

A review of Ashida Kim's review (of "In Search of the Ninja")

Friends,

Today we'll take a moment and talk about Ashida Kim's video review of "In Search of the Ninja" by Antony Cummins.

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCtRDDHsKuc&list=UUemgQzaQIpYfUzpyHNaGySA&index=1

There's pretty much nothing to say.

Ashida Kim starts by showing off his new video software (most likely Windows Live Movie Maker)
by making a theatrical entrance of appearing out of nowhere. I was impressed! Weren't you?

Basically, the film is him reading a script hidden behind his copy of Cummins' book. You can tell because the camera zooms in on the book to hide the fact that his face is looking at the back of his book. When it zooms out, he's obviously reading from it. Not that it really matters, it's just more faking that seems consistent with his entire career.

His comments basically boil down to "This book backs up everything I've ever said about ninjutsu!" Which is of course, false. Most of the claims that he makes in the video about what he has said are absolute lies, and the few that aren't are basic knowledge.

As far as the reliability of Antony Cummins book goes, that's another topic completely. I do not own his book, but from what I've heard he's not the most reliable historian out there. The topic of his book is something you should research in your own time if you're interested in that sort of thing.

To conclude the post, I'll just say that Ashida Kim's new video, "In Search of the Ninja review," has less than one thousand views as of this post. It appears that his channel is getting less and less popular. He has also disabled ratings and comments. It appears that he's heading the right direction - to the "land of no attention." As long as people watch his videos, praise his work, and