Martial Arts Weapons
Martial arts weapons is a broad category and covers everything from bowie knives to medieval broadswords to the African assegai. Any time a weapon is used in hand to hand combat it becomes a martial arts weapon. Today many martial arts weapons survive in sport combatives or culture fighting arts, and they still impress people with their power and beauty.
In the Philippines practice Eskrima which comes from the Spanish term for fencing. Their fighting art primarily uses knives, swords, shields and spears and is used by the United States military as part of their hand-to-hand combat training. For training, they use sticks to simulate blades. The sticks are made from hard and durable, yet light weight woods like Rattan and Kamgong woods that are cheap and common in the Philippines to make the Eskrima staffs and sticks needed for fighting. The sticks and stave range in size depending of what style of Eskrima is being used. In China Kung Fu includes many traditional Chinese weapons like swords, spears, and daggers. Today the modern art of Wushu stages theatrical performances with many of the same weapons though it is more like a gymnastics display than a form of martial arts.
Today when most people think of martial arts weapons, though they think of the samurai and his deadly arsenal. The katana is a brutal yet refined sword which is capable of taking off limbs of an attacker. The wakazashi is much the same only smaller and can be used together with the katana for devastating attacks as legendary swordsmen, Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his famous Book of the Five Rings. During the days of the samurai, the tanto was used for seppuku, ritual suicide which a samurai would commit if he lost honor or seize control of their own destiny, ending his own life denying his enemy the opportunity to kill or capture him in battle. These weapons were used for centuries by samurai who drove off Mongol invaders, and later captured by American G.I.’s throughout the Pacific.
With the invention of firearms less and less time was put into developing traditional martial arts weapons, but there is a handful of devoted followers still practicing ancient customs and training methods. Still though some weapons training remains part of modern close combat, and it would be a mistake to neglect the lessons learn by those who came before.
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