[Gregster]

It's been ages since I last broke out my beat-up old copy of The Book Of Five Rings which I got...I dunno, somewhere. I don't recall where, I just wound up with it. Though it was not too hard a book to come by, as I do recall that right about that period when I made a couple passes through it (mid-80s to early-90s) that everyone from cubicle-dwelling middle managers to big swinging corporate dicks with MBAs was reading The Book Of Five Rings. I recall that this was because together with Sun Tzu's Art Of War it was-- for all intents and purposes anyway-- required reading for Japanese white-collar grunts who were thoroughly indoctrinated in the prevailing "business = war" attitude of Japans' corporate sector and who thus were expected to draw lessons in conducting business affairs from a centuries-old treatise on swordsmanship and warfighting.

Since the Japanese corporate/business juggernaut at the time appeared to be on an unstoppable jag of growth, acquisition, and expansion, and it seemed the Japanese could do no wrong (that being the sort of perception which, like with the US economy in the 1920s, the 1980s, and again with the dot-com economy in the '90s was ruined when the Japanese economic bubble popped and the end of the '80s, right after ours did) the conventional wisdom was that since your company was either going to compete or get bought out by the Japanese (or, God willing, succeed like they were in Japan) it was imperative to learn to think as they did, do as they did, and ultimately prosper as they did by untangling the heavy mysteries and deep secrets of their social and business culture. I think this mostly worked about as well as it did when jazz musicians started shooting heroin thinking that since Charlie Parker was a smackhead and an extremely gifted jazz musician, he must have been getting his inspiration and talent intravenously (and they were, of course, wrong).

As far as Musashi being, more or less, a sucker-puncher when it came to fighting: the samurai believed, per the ethics and philosophy of bushido, that life was essentially cheap (though I admit I am over-simplifyimg a bit). As soon as he woke up in the morning, the samurai was expected to accept, and be at at peace with, the idea that today could be the day they punched out. Given the circumstances of the time and place, it was not a far-fetched idea for them. Within the sometimes complex and convoluted social etiquette of the samurai, the simple act of allowing the scabbard of your sword to clash against that of another samurai you passed on the street was an insult, a grievous affront that instantly precipitated a fight to the death; for this reason, over time many samurai worked to develop techniques allowing them to draw their sword, turn to face an opponent, and cut him down all in one smooth, deft, and lightening-fast motion.

Within this sort of culture, I believe that once you so much as indicated your willingness or desire to fight, then it was officially "on." Masashi, as I recall, was one of many samurai who disdained a lot of the protocols and window-dressing of dueling and took the simple, straightforward view which held that if you were gonna bring it, you became fair game, and if you were divested of your head before you could even get your sword unsheathed...well, then it just sucked to be you,

Then again, Masashi was so at one with the samurai ideal that at some point (so the story goes, anyway) he quit bathing, apparently so intent was he on not being caught off his guard that he didn't want to disrobe and set his sword aside long enough to wash his increasingly funky-smelling ass (I believe this is why he is often depicted in period as being a tad dishevelled).