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Bennison N




Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Joined: 06 Feb 2008
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Posts: 416

PostPosted: Fri 25 Apr, 2008 12:45 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Chinese Martial Arts make very frequent use of two dao, used everywhere... and of course the infamous hudie shuang dao, or "butterfly swords", more popular in the South of China. It is very common indeed to use two swords at once there, and very, very effective.

Musashi killed people with his bokken/bokto. Lots of them. He killed Sasaki (with one blow... apparently...) with a bokken/bokto carved from an oar (longer than Sasaki's famous long sword... apparently...).

"Never give a sword to a man who can't dance" - Confucius

अजयखड्गधारी
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Lafayette C Curtis




Location: Indonesia
Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Reading list: 7 books

Posts: 2,698

PostPosted: Fri 25 Apr, 2008 4:05 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Max Chouinard wrote:
Actually Musashi rarely fought with the daisho, and actually I think there are no solid base of evidence to consider he ever used it in a duel. Fiction popularised this image of him with two sword and being an innovation, actually his school focus much more on the single sword and it seems that nito was known before him.


Hmm...the discussion in this thread: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t...;start=132 shows that he possibly did use the nito combination once in a duel--but only once, and only in a duel against a single unarmored opponent. And today's Niten Ichi-ryu does seem to focus more on the use of the single tachi or kodachi rather than the simultaneous employment of both.
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Kelly Powell




Location: lawrence, kansas
Joined: 27 Feb 2008

Posts: 123

PostPosted: Fri 25 Apr, 2008 5:59 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

AArgh! people beat me to my points Big Grin ...But I've never let redundancy stop my redundancy stop my redundancy....
1: Shayan G., Sir I must disagree with you on shields being passive....yes the larger ones would be limited to what they could do, but bucklers & targes & similar shields were very agressive and were used offensively...And they have that dancelike grace that truely deadly styles posses...not just brute smashing.

2: Some more chinese paired weapons....Hooked swords...duck razors, deer antler knives, sun& mon knives...."scribes" needles(may be off on the name of the last....basicall a 11" double pointed steel pin that rotates on a finger ring)...And melon maces.....How many were actually used as pairs outside of form and styleized duel is unknown to me (admited ignorance on my part.....anyone please feel free to correct me)

3: Concerning japanese weapon styles....Isn't there documentation for matched tanto like blades sheathed opposite each other (one on each side of a common base) would not that imply they were used together?
And musashi's use of boken or hastily carved boat oars is, in my opinion, a older mans trick to beat younger opponents....a upstart young samurai trying to make his bones on the old master probably did not think about him being able to break his blade with a wooden weapon or his ability to power through blocks with it....This is my .02 cents worth on that and is about what it is worth.
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Anders Backlund




Location: Sweden
Joined: 24 Oct 2007

Posts: 629

PostPosted: Fri 25 Apr, 2008 7:09 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean Thibodeau wrote:
Vincent thanks for your comments and please take my comments only as theoretical speculating: I appreciate the dialogue. Big Grin Cool

As a left hander I decided to train as a right hander for the sake of simplicity i.e. not having to have reverse in my head the swordmaster's instructions. At least that was the theory. Laughing Out Loud In practice it turned out being ironic since the instructor is left handed himself and often shows us what to do left handed. Eek!

Oh, he can switch lead hand at will but still favours left handed handling.

One thing I have noticed with a new skill is that if one start learning with the weak hand one tends to be more comfortable continuing training this way.

Now if I wanted to change to left handed training I think it would feel strange at least for a while. I do seem to be able to visualize the mirror image positions fairly easily though !

I guess although left handed I'm very ambidextrous.


I'm slightly ambidextrous myself. In my limited personal experience, the tricky part isn't to mirror your positions but to learn to mirror your movements. So, cuts that should go to the right go to the left instead, etc. It takes a while for the body to understand this.

Bennison N wrote:

Musashi killed people with his bokken/bokto. Lots of them. He killed Sasaki (with one blow... apparently...) with a bokken/bokto carved from an oar (longer than Sasaki's famous long sword... apparently...).


Well, the legend goes something like this: on the way to the duel with Sasaki Kojiro, Musashi carved an improvised bokken from a wooden oar of the boat he was traveling in. Apparently this was a clever tactic, since the oar-bokken was slightly longer then Sasaki's Monohoshizao, taking away the laters advantage in range.

Long story short, he arrived to the island, defeated Kojiro and declared that he didn't need to use real swords any more and only fought with bokken henceforth.

The sword is an ode to the strife of mankind.

"This doesn't look easy... but I bet it is!"
-Homer Simpson.
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