crits an comments welcome
bash away on the modelling please 
Nice picture, rogerm3d! How did you create the plant? I tried plants in the past with dupliverts, but the meshes (leaves) kept overlapping. Your plant looks lively and real.
Robert
I love the bonsai tree - very nice.
Couple of suggestions:
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Use a different font for the “way of the samurai” text" - it’s easily recognisable as the default Blender font - try something that looks a bit more handwritten/ asian script styled.
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Do something with the ground plane. The grey, shiny plane is really disrupting the feeling and the realism. Try giving it a texture map of some sort - Personally I think a nice wooden texture map would work well - it could make it look like those items were sitting on a wooden verandah, outside a samurai’s room. Which brings me to:
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Experiment with some more interesting lighting. It’s got the standard hemilight dull grey look, without much contrast or highlighting. If you were to try with a wooden ground plane, it might look nice to use a yafray sunlight, angled down low - it could create an impression that the samurai has laid out all his gear on the verandah of his house to meditate at dawn before battle.
Hope that was useful 
I love it except there seems to be something wrong with the reflection on the cup. Can’t quite put my finger on it though. Hehe I was thinking of making my guy doing calligraphy, but it looks like you already went and did the less typical scene, so maybe I’ll just go with a sword or spear for mine. 
<<<EDIT>>>
I figured out what was throwing me on the cup. It’s the grey color being so similar to the color of the surface that it’s on. It is slightly confusing to my eye.
I like the bump stripes of the japan ware. very realistic model.
and the potted bamboos is interesting
That looks very nice! The plant and the bowl appeal very much to me.
How and with what was it rendered? The Unified Blender renderer? or YAFRAY?
The plant is created using extruded tubes (to create the bamboo stalks) then a duplicate of the mid to upper sections was used as the basis for dupliverts of a double leaf structure (one small leaf, one big leaf) which is both rotated out of edit mode, and rotated/moved in editmode (this gives for a little more control of directions)
Broken: thanks, will play round with all those suggestions 
Modron: Why should that make you not do a un-typical scene, I want competition
MG:all modelling was done in blender, was rendered in yafray
8)
updated:
changed the font and playing around with the light right now
crits in all areas wanted
Cool update, But I think you should add a candle, because the details of the plant are now hard to see, and it’s too light, the whole sfeer is gone.
The update looks much better! There’s some pixalation in there “tea”…
Stunning, but does a table have that much reflection ?
Nicely polished?
This new render looks nice, but I agree with JD-Multi about it having slightly lost it’s atomosphear though.
Keep us updated!
Cativo: The update looks much better! There’s some pixalation in there “tea”…
Mmmmh,… I never tried that tea flavor. You must get very pixelated when you drink that. 
updated:
its a sword instead of a giant knife, no more pixel tea, some work on materials, and there was more work on the lights
Crits, bashing, comments, and lots of money wanted
Its beautiful. You’ve got my vote. (I promised not to vote for myself ya see, and yours is definitely better)
I love the wood with the varnish on it…thats really nice. And the tea looks great. And that bamboo…and the sword! Geeze…really beautiful. Good luck in the contest! You don’t need it though because this thing is great
thanks thanks
You mentioned all the elements except the book, does that mean you think the book needs work? %|
I think it does
Oh nonono…I think the book is fabulous as well. The only problem I have with it is that I think the cover might be a tad too thick…not sure. But other than that I think its great! No problems with it at all. Great work man. Keep it up!
Wow, what an awesome improvement! I love this last image. The lighting’s much nicer, everything’s more visible (rather than murky), the new sword looks excellent and the details on the handle come out much better now, too. The tea looks great now, too - it was hard to see what it actually was before - perhaps sake? :P. I think the previous ribbed cup was more interesting, though.
Very well done.
Really nice man. One crit: A katana has an eliptical handle. Looking really fabulous though.
yea, people can tell its tea 
sake there we go thats what it originally was gonna be, but I was having trouble making a drunken samurai and his bottle 
The ribbed cup, yea I also thought it looked better but thats what made the drink pixelated 