Kreth said:
Just a small correction. All three you mention were frauds that made money knowing that they were spreading lies. But only Ron Duncan and James Loriega were Koga ryu frauds. Robert Law claimed to be the 43rd head of the Meijin ryu. His is a familiar story to those used to dealing with ninja fruads. No mention of his art at all in Japan and he never even gave the name of the teacher that supposably made him the head of the art.
As an aside, I think that at the beggining Hatsumi contributed articles to try to get some good info about ninjutsu out there. But it really was obvious that the magazine was more of a benefit to frauds than the legit folks. As silly as most of us find Honraku Hoshino and his silly outfits, to the target audience that was the reason they bought the magazine. The frauds were able to make stories that sounded interesting since they were not bound by the truth. And you can tell the target audience of something based on the advertising. In this case- they were running ads for x-ray glasses and fake vomit.
So, the articles by Hatsumi seemed to have tapered off and they started re-running old ones as often as they could. But they lost the legit practicioners once that happened and the x-ray specs folks all dropped off and moved to the next fad.
I liked a lot of the articles, but I am not sorry to see it gone.
