Fight like samurai

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IamRonin

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Is kendo the way to do this, if it's an interest?

I had the black girl with the sword in Walking Dead in mind and looked for a local kendo club and watched some of their videos from competitions which looked very tense and not very elaborate affairs.

Is kendo what I'm looking for or is there something else?

I'm going through a bit of a Japanese obsession at the moment after reading enson inoue's book, watching the last samurai and also getting into watching all the old Pride FC shows.
 
Real weapons fighting is nothing like what you see in TV/movies. Movement is a lot more compact and efficient; anything extraneous could lose you a match in sport or your life in a real fight.

Kendo is a game of millimeters and milliseconds. It takes crazy discipline and crazy explosiveness to be good at it.
 
Kendo looks fun, but I doubt it looks like what you saw in the walking dead.
 
So one can take kendo to mimmick katana fighting and fencing for sabre duels - what about longsword and axe?
 
Kendo, while a very worthy art is nothing like actual swordplay. To learn real japanese style swordfighting your options outside of Japan are very limited. Shinkendo is fairly legit and can be found in many north american cities. Haedong Gumdo, whilst Korean is basically Toyama-Ryu kenjutsu with some wushu added in, and is growing quite common. You can go with the ninja groups like the x-kans, but they are loaded with silliness.

There are also options if you don't want to limit yourself to Japanese swordfighting.
 
Kendo isn't swordfighting any more than boxing is streetfighting. So no, don't take Kendo to learn swordfighting. Take kendo to learn kendo.
 
When you do kata in kendo, it is similar to using a katana
 
I did aiki-jitsu for a while. Randori from brown belt was basically mma with gis and black belts added weapons training. Saw a 5th and 2nd degree black belt grapple with kendo swords.

Not sure if that makes sense, but was like kendo and judo at same time.
 
Kendo is not a koryu, so no, kendo is not going to teach you how to fight like a samurai. You would do much better at learning how to fight like a samurai as far as swordsmanship is concerned learning something such as fukashima ryu.
 
supernova said:
Kendo isn't swordfighting any more than boxing is street fighting. So no, don't take Kendo to learn swordfighting. Take kendo to learn kendo.
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That's giving kendo too much credit IMO.

A more fair analogy might be Olympic TKD to street fighting. Both forms (TKD and kendo) are so highly abstracted from its origins that they are almost completely at odds with the original purpose.

At least a boxer is much better off and can be expected to perform decently in a street fight.
 
Doughbelly said:
That's giving kendo too much credit IMO.

A more fair analogy might be Olympic TKD to street fighting. Both forms (TKD and kendo) are so highly abstracted from its origins that they are almost completely at odds with the original purpose.

At least a boxer is much better off and can be expected to perform decently in a street fight.
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I completely agree.
 
Toyama ryu is what you want. It's practical drawing and cutting, using bokken early on. Got to the point I was using an iato (metal, dull blade) on 3 opponents.

It's everything you ever want. Hard to find legit teaching.
 
Toyama ryu is what you want. It's practical drawing and cutting, using bokken early on. Got to the point I was using an iato (metal, dull blade) on 3 opponents.

It's everything you ever want. Hard to find legit teaching.
 
Personally I would trust an olympic kendo guy to fuck pretty much anyone up if you give him a katana.

In any case way more than these iaido guys who seem to be something more spiritual than physical.
 
KBE6EKCTAH_CCP said:
Personally I would trust an olympic kendo guy to fuck pretty much anyone up if you give him a katana.

In any case way more than these iaido guys who seem to be something more spiritual than physical.
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Olympic kendo, eh?
 
:redface::redface:Isn't kendo an olympic discipline ?
 
A sword and a shinai are totally different things. You could not efficiently use a sword the way a kendoka uses a shinai. Shinai are very light, they are balanced differently, they do not have any sense of fuhlen nor do they bind upon a cross. In kendo the object is to get the hit..in swordfighting the object is not to get hit. It leads to a completely different mentality and set of techniques. Two kendoka fighting with swords as if they were doing Kendo would kill each other very quickly.

A kendoka has many valuable skills that would translate well...quickness, timing, distance, but the actual mechanics of sword use are not really one of them.
 
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