Ryuseiken Battodo

Japanese swordfighting

Rawnshah's Blog – September 2009 Archive (3)

Myth: That "Zing!" sound when you draw

Another myth from many movies: Swords should make "Zing!" sound when you draw them from the sheath.



Perhaps for other swords, but this is generally a bad idea for Japanese swords.



First, most, perhaps all, sayas are made from wood (or wood on the inside). Some have metal or horn fittings at the koiguchi (the opening entry point for the sword), but that is mostly or entirely on the outside. So there is not really any other metal on the inside to make that metallic… Continue

Added by rawnshah on September 26, 2009 at 8:30am — No Comments

Myth: sharpening stone inside the saya

I was asked about this the other day:



I do not have a definitive answer to this but I think it highly unlikely that people would line the inside of their saya (sheath) to let them sharpen the sword every time they draw it. It's one of those movie ideas: cool in theory, terrible in practice.



Sharpening a sword is not a something you can just run once quickly across the nagasa (length of the open blade) to get any significant benefit.



Here's… Continue

Added by rawnshah on September 24, 2009 at 8:08am — No Comments

New camera and practice

As you can see from the recent videos, I've been testing out the new high-speed Casio EX-FH20 camera to record some of the activity. It takes high-speed video at 210 frames per second. This really is helpful for cutting to see what we've done.



One problem however is that the files are huge, and on this site each video can only be 100MB maximum, although we can have as many of them as we wish. Even a minute of highspeed film is 60MB. From Saturday's cutting session, I have an hour or… Continue

Added by rawnshah on September 14, 2009 at 10:32am — No Comments

Web sites & Resources

Matsuri: A Festival of Japan (2008) - Phoenix, AZ, Feb 23-28, Heritage Square

Battodo Ryuseiken in Japan. Also a partial site in english.



The Kodenkan of Tucson



The UofA Ryuseiken Battodo on the ASUA site



Tameshigiri.com - where we get goza. The ordering and shipping process are given.



Hanwei/Paul Chen swords



The Knighthawk Armoury builds some interesting realistic looking goshinken. They're expensive but they claim to be pretty durable (not yet tested by us).



Folding a Hakama the proper way



Woodall's Custom Workshop makes nice cutting stands for tameshigiri.


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