If you’ve come to this page, then you’re either bored, you happen to be a web crawler indexing my site, or maybe you want to know more about the blog. If you’re the latter, I can help with that.

Gisoku Budo came about following some encouragement on local martial arts hangout OzBudo. The current project builds off the previous martial arts blog I kept back in 2007 on my MySpace page, titled Gisoku no Jutsu. The idea was to record my training experiences and thoughts on martial arts from the perspective of an above-knee amputee. Having lost my leg at three months of age, I figure I can offer an interesting view on martial arts training and hopefully encourage other amputees out there to give it a go. I’ve posted a few blogs on some of my medical history throughout my blog, and hope to continue to do so – unless I change my category system, click here to get the full list if you’re interested in hearing my story.

… and Gisoku Budo means?

Given my interest in Japanese society, history and culture, my martial art of choice is karate (I also happen to believe that it’s a good all-round choice of martial art if you’re amputee and are interested in East Asian martial arts). In the spirit of my quasi-obsession with Japan, I’ve decided to do the dicky thing and give my blog a Japanese name. To be honest, it’s probably about as sensible as the many instances of the poor but amusing Japanese interpretation of the English language (Google ‘Engrish’ for some interesting websites), but I went ahead with it anyway. To my credit, the current name was assisted by one of my co-workers who happens to be Japanese, which means its either an appropriate use of the terms, or he’s played a very successful prank 🙂

Anywho, translation time:

義足 / Gisoku: Artificial leg. Pretty straight forward
武道 / Budō (budo or budou): Martial arts; to read more, see the entry on Wikipedia

So, in a nutshell, Artifical leg martial arts. Seems pretty appropriate, and its more catchy than “artificial-leg-martial-arts.com”. For those curious, Gisoku no Jutsu (義足の術) roughly translates to “Technique of the artificial leg”. It also sounds like something out of a trashy anime or Japanese martial arts flick 😉

… and that’s it 😛

Well, I think that’s it for now – I’ll update this page whenever I get around to it next 😛 Thanks for stopping by (and stay classy San Diego). If you want to get in touch, feel free to comment in any of my recent blog posts and I’ll get back to you. Alternatively, click here to send a general message.