I suppose that in the RK epilogue, since the dojo was still teaching Kamiya Kasshin Ryuu, it was a point of honor for Kaoru to've retained her original family name instead of renaming the style "Himura Kasshin Ryuu". Or it could've been retained as a professional name-- if geisha and other artists (incl. Hiko as a potter) used professional pseudonyms, why not martial artists?
(Brief vision of Kaoru declaring that from now on, inspired by Hiko, every master of KKR after her would have to adopt the name of "Kamiya Kaoru". No wonder Yahiko (and everyone else) would've apparently ditched the dojo by the time of Seisouhen.)
Aha, I finally found the passage in Clara's diary again (July 15th, 1878): she and her mother went to visit "the Tokyo Chiji, or 'Governor,' Mr. Kusumoto" in his house, where he welcomed them in a Western-style parlor with sofas and chairs. Clara's father had been forced out of the local missionary school at the end of May, so her entire family had lost their sponsored housing and had been forced to move to a nagoya "longhouse", like the one Sano (and later Yahiko) lived in; the governor found this very distasteful and promised to do his best to intervene. Back to the keigo, though:
The governor had no interpreter so I had to do the translating. He used very formal Chinse words which is the speech of the official and higher classes. I can understand this difficult language, but can use very little of it myself,. The speech I use is the samurai dialect which is very polite and far superior to the heimin, or "merchant," speech. All ladies of the better classes use it.
I don't have enough aural comprehension of Japanese to know much about the dialogue level in the first OVA, other than Kenshin not having yet adopted his later "sessha/de-gozaru" speech patterns. There's a fairly recent newspaper essay here (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070901td.html) that indicates that keigo is still used in particularly formal occasions, but Akihito (and presumably all subsequent members of the Imperial family) had a much less sequestered upbringing than had previously been the case so that (iirc) keigo is no longer his primary speech pattern in normal conversation, esp. since he married a commoner whom he met while playing tennis.
wrt Shinto weddings, iirc before the restoration, Shinto was a very decentralized folk religion that was mostly concerned with local kami, and marriage was primarily a civil affair; if there'd been any religious connection, it probably would've leaned more toward Buddhism-- the OVA does show Kenshin and Tomoe making a pilgrimage to view some carved Buddhist images (identified in Gilles Poitras' second Anime Encyclopedia, which has a ton of little details from the OVA)-- but I can't recall offhand whether there *were* any Buddhist wedding ceremonies during the Shogunate. OTOH, my brain is feeling all Swiss-cheesey today.
(Another note from Clara's diary-- no wonder the contemporary Japanese were so revolted by milk products; butter was imported all the way of Europe and (as the wombat-consort noted) would've had to've been shipped through at least two tropical zones. Cheese must've been even stinkier. Guess there must not've been many domestic dairy facilities before whatsisname, the paternal grandfather from one of the previously excerpted books, set up one for the orphanage he was in charge of.)
As a handwave/retcon for "Himura Tomoe", an alternate explanation from a straightforward blunder by Watsuki might be that Kenshin deliberately identified Tomoe in that anachronistic way because by the time he was telling the tale to Kaoru etc., the change in wives' family names had become routine, so he was tweaking the nominal details to emphasize the underlying fact that they'd been married.
Re: KenshinxTomoe
(Brief vision of Kaoru declaring that from now on, inspired by Hiko, every master of KKR after her would have to adopt the name of "Kamiya Kaoru". No wonder Yahiko (and everyone else) would've apparently ditched the dojo by the time of Seisouhen.)
Aha, I finally found the passage in Clara's diary again (July 15th, 1878): she and her mother went to visit "the Tokyo Chiji, or 'Governor,' Mr. Kusumoto" in his house, where he welcomed them in a Western-style parlor with sofas and chairs. Clara's father had been forced out of the local missionary school at the end of May, so her entire family had lost their sponsored housing and had been forced to move to a nagoya "longhouse", like the one Sano (and later Yahiko) lived in; the governor found this very distasteful and promised to do his best to intervene. Back to the keigo, though:
I don't have enough aural comprehension of Japanese to know much about the dialogue level in the first OVA, other than Kenshin not having yet adopted his later "sessha/de-gozaru" speech patterns. There's a fairly recent newspaper essay here (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070901td.html) that indicates that keigo is still used in particularly formal occasions, but Akihito (and presumably all subsequent members of the Imperial family) had a much less sequestered upbringing than had previously been the case so that (iirc) keigo is no longer his primary speech pattern in normal conversation, esp. since he married a commoner whom he met while playing tennis.
wrt Shinto weddings, iirc before the restoration, Shinto was a very decentralized folk religion that was mostly concerned with local kami, and marriage was primarily a civil affair; if there'd been any religious connection, it probably would've leaned more toward Buddhism-- the OVA does show Kenshin and Tomoe making a pilgrimage to view some carved Buddhist images (identified in Gilles Poitras' second Anime Encyclopedia, which has a ton of little details from the OVA)-- but I can't recall offhand whether there *were* any Buddhist wedding ceremonies during the Shogunate. OTOH, my brain is feeling all Swiss-cheesey today.
(Another note from Clara's diary-- no wonder the contemporary Japanese were so revolted by milk products; butter was imported all the way of Europe and (as the wombat-consort noted) would've had to've been shipped through at least two tropical zones. Cheese must've been even stinkier. Guess there must not've been many domestic dairy facilities before whatsisname, the paternal grandfather from one of the previously excerpted books, set up one for the orphanage he was in charge of.)
As a handwave/retcon for "Himura Tomoe", an alternate explanation from a straightforward blunder by Watsuki might be that Kenshin deliberately identified Tomoe in that anachronistic way because by the time he was telling the tale to Kaoru etc., the change in wives' family names had become routine, so he was tweaking the nominal details to emphasize the underlying fact that they'd been married.