View Single Post
Old 7th May 2010, 08:42 PM   #11
fearn
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 1,247
Default

One addition that may help:

We're dealing with a couple of different time periods here.

The Tokugawa shogunate caused substantial changes in Japanese martial culture, and the techniques shown here are useful for countering "peacetime" samurai. This is what most classical budo is: these are traditions that developed under the Tokugawa. The classical bujutsu that preceded the Tokugawa is preserved (AFAIK) mostly by the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu.

One good way of seeing the change brought by the Tokugawa is the mitsu-dogu. These are three weapons used in concert to restrain swordsmen. The classical trio were three polearms used in concert: the satsumata, the sodegarami, and the tsukubo (Image). Under the Tokugawa, these became symbolic, and the mitsu-dogu used by Tokugawa police were the jutte, the manriki-gusari weighted chain, and the rokushakubo, or six foot staff, and they were employed independently, rather than in concert. This may say more about the relative quality of the swordsmen, rather than that the smaller weapons were better than the polearms.

Systematic uses of war fans documentably date back to the sixteenth century (Shinkage Ryu), and they're certainly older as weapons. Still, the forms have evolved over the times.

(source: Draeger's Classical Bujutsu).
fearn is offline   Reply With Quote