[prearpaccew]

Please be polite, all - and stick to questions and facts (assuming he turns up). No worries about being polite. However, politeness is not usually enough for those in invented arts such as this one. They are generally hunting acceptance, not politeness. I know this because I was involved for quite a number of years in just such an art very similar to this one, and the story was pretty much the same. Those who invented the art did so based upon their many years of experience with various instructors. No teaching licenses were attained. Instructors names are Japanese sounding, but no way of contacting or verifying information was available. I was content with this for many years until I happened to stumble upon a koryu group headed by a friend of mine. After practicing the koryu for a while, I began seeing that the things that I was originally taught as complete, are just the very tip of the iceberg. The invented art had nowhere near the depth or cohesiveness that I found in the koryu arts. As I learned more in the koryu, the shallowness and anomalies in the invented art became too apparent, and I finally gave it up to concentrate all my efforts on koryu sword arts.