To Omnirizon:
An idea of system looks just great! To me it looks more like Harn than Shadowrun, though...
An idea Lavaere puts out (about schools) was put to use in AEG systems: 7thSea & Legend og the Five Rings and works very well within them.
To Ich:
"I think that in the west it was more or less forbidden for peasantry to possess weapons that were more sophisticated than a club, too, or quite probably a real sword was just too expensive to possess."
That's wrong. Good-quality swords were expensive, of course, but in Germany, for example, many categories of peasants were allowed to possess and carry swords (and there appeared at one time a kind of sword called dusak (sp?) with curved blade often made of wood (!) with edge of iron. it wasn't particularly sharp in any case, of course, but some Rennaisance fencing schools still practiced with it
). At border regions such as Balkans weapons were carried as a matter of course. Main weapons of peasants were various kinds of spears or polearms, of course - something quite deadly and which no Japanese ruler would allow his peasants to have (in China, situation was somewhat different - but then, so it was in different West countries).
By the way, I think some of the difference can be attributed to the fact that book learning was wider spread in the East, so actual treatises on fighting technics appeared earlier and in larger numbers - so more of them survived to later days (even so, most schools we know now are known only from relatively late period - we know that there were some kinds of martial arts at 13th century, for example, but not which technics they actually used - different modern schools have different accounts of them). And a spreading of fighting schools in the West was then checked by an advent of an idea of industrialized warfare in 17th-18th centuries: kung-fu may beat a pistol, but not fire by platoons of line infantry or Vobanic fortress warfare...