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Thread: Weapons from Farming Tools

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    Default Weapons from Farming Tools

    This may seem a bit off for most here but I just can't resist throwing it out there.

    I have worked with bo, jo and other MA weapons over the years.
    I also mentioned the Hoe in the title here because I do believe tools like this can be and should be a good part of training for wooden staff type weapons.

    Ever since I started working with weapons in martial arts classes, I have considdered what was taught about handleing staff type tools (Hoe, Shovel, Rake, what ever) in the most efficient ways. Then when I work with kata or sparring I considder the leverage and most efficient ways to execute my attack or blocks as if gardening with tools.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Here is my question.
    What do you all think about this process ?
    Have any of you found similar examples of the relation between tools and weapons ?
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    To add a little to this I have also spent many hours working with a machete. In classes we used wooden samurai swords. When I had the oportunity to work with a real samurai sword - I found no problem cleaving 2" think bamboo - just like I have seen on demonstrations.
    To me this is proof that the "old way" can add to ones training with weapons.

    I say the old way because besides the lucky farmers that found a martial arts teacher to train them, most of them turned their field tools into weapons and their training was their field work.

    What do you all think about this ?

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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    From what I understand, the link between weapons and farm tools is tenuous at best. Not that farmers didn't use their tools as weapons, but that the weapons used by the warrior class of both Japan and Okinawa did not actually have their origins in farm tools.
    Best regards,
    Bruce Mitchell

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    What I was getting at with my question is from the opposite angle of the warriors.
    I was talking about the average Jo (like myself) that was not interested in taking care of the emperor's demands but trying to defend himself against the emperor's warriors.

    This is where many forms originally came from - isn't it ?

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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    That's sort of a big question. If you want to go way, way back, I believe that most of the early tools made by man were weapons or hunting tools since agriculture came much, much later in human development, but I don't think that is what you mean.

    If you look at Japanese arts, many jo forms come from koryu arts, and in many cases the written and/or oral teachings of these arts say that the jo represents a broken polearm.

    What I think you are talking about (please correct me if I'm wrong) is the weapons ban placed on Okinawa by the Japanese. But from what I have read in more recent years, that ban was actually rather loosely enforced. I find the idea of someone from the Okinawan warrior class being inspired to create a weapon based on the tools that farmers around him used to be far more plausible than farmers developing systems to use their tools as weapons. The first reason for this is that in most cases farm tools are not designed to be used as weapons. For example, a farmer's sickle (kama) has to be thin and light in order to be useful, otherwise your arm would get tired before the crops were in. Where as a sickle (kama) used as a weapon need to be heavy, both in the blade and in the handle. In another exapmle, while the tonfa may have been inspired by a mill handle, I would think that you would usually keep those attached to the mill.

    I do agree with your idea that the more physical lifestyle of the past kept people in better condition than the modern lifestyle does. But I think for teh rst of your theory to hold up, we need to have some examples of farmers using their tools as weapons in systematic way. I believe that most of the historical evidence (i.e. written histories of Japan/Okinawa) shows that the average joe wasn't really able to defend him or herself against the warrior class.

    Finding a link between using gardening tools and weapons may be useful to you, and I see nothing wrong with it, that said, while a farmer's (or your) experience clearing land allowed you to efficiently cut bamboo, it doesn't translate to the combat use of a weapon. Remember that test cutting was intended to test the blade, not the swordsman. While there are things that a swordsman can learn about his cut from test cutting, it is not the primary focus of sword schools, and you see very little of it in the koryu. mastering distance and timing are far more important from a combat standpoint. For my money, I would be more afraid of the butcher, who has experience seperating meat from bone, than a farmer.
    Best regards,
    Bruce Mitchell

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    Read up on jacqueries. According to Froissart, in 1358, some peasants

    "gathered together without any other counsel, and without any armour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. And they then went to another castle, and took the knight thereof and bound him fast to a stake, and then violated his wife and his daughter before his face and then slew the lady and his daughter and all his other children, and then slew the knight by great torment and burnt and beat down the castle. And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein. These mischievous people thus assembled without captain or armour robbed, brent and slew all gentlemen that they could lay hands on, and forced and ravished ladies and damosels, and did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such, and he that did most mischief was most praised with them and greatest master. I dare not write the horrible deeds that they did to ladies and damsels; among other they slew a knight and after did put him on a broach and roasted him at the fire in the sight of the lady his wife and his children; and after the lady had been enforced and ravished with a ten or twelve, they made her perforce to eat of her husband and after made her to die an evil death and all her children. They made among them a king, one of Clermont in Beauvoisin: they chose him that was the most ungraciousest of all other and they called him king Jaques Goodman, and so thereby they were called companions of the jaquery. They destroyed and brent in the country of Beauvoisin about Corbie, and Amiens and Montdidier more than threescore good houses and strong castles. In like manner these unhappy people were in Brie and Artois, so that all the ladies, knights and squires of that country were fain to fly away to Meaux in Brie, as well the duchess of Normandy and the duchess of Orleans as divers other ladies and damosels, or else they had been violated and after murdered. Also there were a certain of the same ungracious people between Paris and Noyon and between Paris and Soissons, and all about in the land of Coucy, in the country of Valois, in the bishopric of Laon, Nyon and Soissons. There were brent and destroyed more than a hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires in that country.

    http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/froissart2.html

    The surviving nobility promptly sent off to Germany for some soldiers. About 40 German knights, under the Count of Foix and the Captal de Buch, and their retainers arrived. A knight normally had a couple men-at-arms and a squire, so this meant somewhere around 150-200 German soldiers against about 9,000 French peasants with pitchforks. And, as you would expect, it was a lopsided slaughter. Froissart again:

    "When those evil men (the Jacques) saw them (the Germans) drawn up in this warlike order -- although their numbers were comparatively small -- they (the Jacques) became less resolute than before. The foremost began to fall back in the noblemen to come after them, striking at them with their lances and swords and beating them down. Those who felt the blows, or feared to feel them, turned back in such panic that they fell over each other. Then men-at-arms of every kind burst out of the gates and ran into the square to attack those evil men. They mowed them down in heaps and slaughtered them like cattle; and they drove all the rest out of the town, for none of the villeins attempted to take up any sort of fighting order. They went on killing until they were stiff and weary and a flung many into the River Marne.

    In all, they exterminated more than seven thousand Jacks on that day. Not one would have escaped if they had not grown tired of pursuing them. When the noblemen returned, they set fire to the mutinous town of Meaux and burnt it to ashes, together with all the villeins of the town whom they could pen up inside.

    After that routes at Meaux, there were no more assemblies of the Jacks, for the young Lord de Coucy, whose name was Sir Enguerrand, placed himself at the head of a large company of knights and squires who wiped them out wherever they found them, without pity or mercy.

    http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/jacquerie.html

    Since then, peasant rebellions everywhere have been termed (at least in English) "jacqueries." Similar results, too.

    An English equivalent was the Wat Tyler rebellion (1381). A Japanese equivalent was the rebellion at Shimabara (1637-1638). A USA equivalent was Nat Turner rebellion (1831). Results were predictable.

    The most successful jacquerie of which I am aware was the series of slave and Maroon rebellions on Saint-Domingue during 1791-1803, and while the slaughter was enormous, Haiti's ultimate independence was owed in large part to the French government having its own problems during the period 1791-1803.

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    Default Peasant uprisings

    Before, but even during the Tokugawa rule, peasant uprisings, or Ikki, were feared by the ruling order of samurai daimyo and bakufu officials. While samurai fought out of loyalty to their lords, who wanted to maintain order (and their status, income, property and so on), when peasants went on a rebellion, they had nothing to lose since they were often starving, oppressed, and fighting for sheer survival. And, in many cases, the beginnings of a rebellion pitted too few samurai against too many peasants. Even if you have bladed weapons and single shot muskets, you would have a hard time against an overwhelming number of starving peasants with rude tools and a ruder sense of combat.

    Joe mentions the Shimabara Rebellion; that was an interesting rebellion because it was several years removed from the civil wars and the Osaka Summer and Winter campaigns; the last time great armies faced each other using state of the art weapons against each other, and also long after Hideyoshi's disastrous foray into Korea. The forces of the local lord of Shimabara were handily routed by thousands of farmers led by ronin and a charismatic leader, Amakusa Shiro, who claimed to be a Christian. The Tokugawa had to send in a large, overwhelming force of samurai in order to quell the rebellion.

    While the farmers and ronin did their share of slaughter, the bakufu forces, when they finally overran the castle redoubt, also killed men, women and children indiscriminately. It also solidified the Tokugawa government's resistance to Christian proselytizing.

    The details (and possibly, corrections to my short note) are probably on the Internet, if you did a Google search. It's a pretty well known insurrection. Less well known was another Ikki which caused the collapse of the Hattori daimyo. One of the descendants of the famed Hattori Hanzo apparently abused his position as a minor daimyo, which led to an Ikki in his province. The rebellion so unsettled the bakufu, and it was clear that his governance was at fault, so he was...to put it mildly...removed from office. Again, details of this should be on the Internet somewhere. I read of this in an obscure historical passage.



    Wayne Muromoto

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    Thanks for the post Mr. Svinth,
    While it is interesting and stands as evidence of farm implements being used as weapons (very succesfully!), I don't see that the examples provided show that the implements were used in a systematic or codified way. I don't doubt the utility of farm implements as weapons, instead I am questioning the tales of these implements being converted to weapons as a result of the restrictions placed on the Okinawan people by the Japanese. I think that it is far more plausible that these weapons were developed by the warrior class during times of relative peace when they had the luxury of investigating different weapons for dueling purposes. The charactersitics that make a good sword make for a poor axe or scythe, and vice versa, when we do see adaptations, like a western battle axe or an Okinawan/Japanese sickle, the changes to the implement's morphology, while increasing it's effectiveness as a weapon, decrease or exclude it's use as a tool. So I think that it is unlikely that a peasant would choose to weaponize a tool that they use daily in the unlikely event that they would need to defend themselves while tending their crops.
    Best regards,
    Bruce Mitchell

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    I posted this in another thread but I think it has more relevance here

    I remember reading an article in Classical Fighting Arts issue 9 dealing with a similar subject.
    Henning Wittwer stated in the article “Jigen Ryu Swordsmanship and its Influence on Karate-do”:
    “The saber of Jigen-Ryu was not the only weapon of this school which emerged in the kingdom of
    Ryukyu. Togo Shigemasa (2nd generation) created a fighting system relying on common tools rather than
    “real” weapons. This tradition bears the name Jigen-Ryu Bo-Odori (Stick Dance of the School of Manifestation)
    and its purpose was to provide military instruction to as many Satsuma social classes as possible.”

    He goes on to list the weapons taught:
    Sanjaku-bo (3 shaku stick)
    Rokushaku-bo (6 shaku long staff)
    Tenbin-bo (pole for carrying loads on the shoulder)
    Ro (oar)
    Shakuhachi (bamboo flute)
    Kama (sickle)
    Ono (axe)
    Suki (spade)
    Kuwa (mattock)(hoe)

    This could be the start of those farmer tools into weapons story,
    as Okinawa was under Satsuma rule for some time.
    Also I blieve Matsumura held a menkyo kaiden in Jigen Ryu.
    Joe Stitz

    "Black belt and white belt are the same, white belt is the beginning of technique. Black belt is the beginning of understanding. Both are beginner belts."
    - Doug Perry -Hanshi, KuDan -Shorin Ryu ShorinKan

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bruce Mitchell View Post

    What I think you are talking about (please correct me if I'm wrong) is the weapons ban placed on Okinawa by the Japanese. But from what I have read in more recent years, that ban was actually rather loosely enforced. I find the idea of someone from the Okinawan warrior class being inspired to create a weapon based on the tools that farmers around him used to be far more plausible than farmers developing systems to use their tools as weapons. The first reason for this is that in most cases farm tools are not designed to be used as weapons. For example, a farmer's sickle (kama) has to be thin and light in order to be useful, otherwise your arm would get tired before the crops were in. Where as a sickle (kama) used as a weapon need to be heavy, both in the blade and in the handle.

    I do agree with your idea that the more physical lifestyle of the past kept people in better condition than the modern lifestyle does. But I think for teh rst of your theory to hold up, we need to have some examplhistorical evidence (i.e. written histories of Japan/Okinawa) shows that the average joe wasn't really able to defend him or herself against the warrior class.

    Finding a link between using gardening tools and weapons may be useful to you, and I see nothing wrong with it, that said, while a farmer's (or your) experience clearing land allowed you to efficiently cut bamboo, it doesn't translate to the combat use of a weapon. Remember that test cutting was intended to test the blade, not the swordsman. While there are things that a swordsman can learn about his cut from test cutting, it is not the primary focus of sword schools, and you see very little of it in the koryu. mastering distance and timing are far more important from a combat standpoint. For my money, I would be more afraid of the butcher, who has experience seperating meat from bone, than a farmer.
    Yes you are correct that I was reffering to the weapons ban as a reason some farmers learned more than farm uses for their tools.
    I am afraid I have little historical background in martial arts weapons and I like your explination of - farm tools being light and weapons designes similar to tools are designed heavier. Makes a lot of sence to me.

    The more physical life style of those farmers is part of what I was getting at too.
    The cutting of bamboo may be a test for the blade all right but without knowing cutting technique, there are many dangers of trying to hack through bamboo with a samurai sword. The possability of a deflected blade, glancing toward ones own legs and even head are great and could be very injurious. The proper angle, slice motion as well as chopping motion does not come naturally.
    Mastering distance and timeing is essential for the farmer and the repetition can be ones worst enemy as well as best teacher. With sharp tools the least lapse of concentration leads to a poor cut and can cause injury.

    I guess what I am trying to get at is - These days I have been working with weapons a lot again. It has been over 10 years since I have been in a class due to my age and moving into the mountains where there are no classes.
    After working with Bo,Jo and cane....then....working in the gardens with tools....I discovered that many of the actions to get a job done are similar to the moves in kata, or some of the hand positions from a kata form are similar to what I do with garden tools.
    Working the garden tools is always very repetitious. These repetitions seem to me to be good practice for many reasons.

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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    As I read on through these previous posts I see a lot of history and tales of the way things were in those days. Interesting.
    However this is not what I was really getting at.

    First let me say my ma background is mostly in Goju. Also I have taken some years of Shotokan style, Ki Aikido and a little TaiChi. We did some weapons training in Goju and more in Aikido but in all - mostly I worked with my original Goju sensai, at my dojo or his - one on one. We worked with Bo, Jo and wooden Sword sometimes for years at a time without going back much to our original Goju training. Basically it added up to lots of free sparring. This all ended about 10 years ago. Now I do my workouts solo.

    If I am talking about a class of people in history that incorperated tools to defend themselves...it would be the Chineese more than the Japanese. They developed many types of weapons from anything imaginable.

    I realise that weapons and garden tools actually have little in common - yet - as I mentioned earlier, I think that someone that only trains in classes for a few hours a week (at most) has little or no advantage over someone with a basic background in the arts and regualrly puts 8 hour days in - working with staff type tools in his gardens.
    I find I can not do one without seeing its benefits for the other.

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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    I see your point, and I agree with you. There is a history of goshin, or "farmer-warrior" in Japan (there is a good thread on it here:http://www.e-budo.com/forum/showthre...ghlight=goshin) and I am in total agreement with you that the physical lifestyle of the farmer-warrior in any culture would put them in good stead in times of trouble. While it was just a movie, the scene form Kurosawa's Seven Samurai with the samurai who practices by cutting wood springs to mind.
    Best regards,
    Bruce Mitchell

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    This has been happening to me almost every day lately. I think the reason I am taking notice of it is because my workouts lately have all been with the Bo and walking cane.

    2 days ago I was sweeping moss off of my roof with a large push broom. I believe this was mostly an indurnace and strength exercise session for bo.

    Yesterday I pretty much took the day off from my regular chores and took a walk to the near by park. I have an area there that is perfect for workouts, it gives me more room than my downstairs dojo has and the whole park is pretty much mine through all but the warmest summer months when tourists dominate.
    Because of my worn out hip I am in the habbit of useing my home made walking cane. When I got to my favorite spot....I just had to work on my cane technique a bit before going on to a great overview spot for some deep breathing exercises.
    The winter was tough on my workout area. Tree branches were all over the ground as well as several small (4" across the base) trees that tipped over in the heavy snow that we had a little while back.
    Naturally I started cleaning up my area and with the cane in hand....everything turned into training.

    First I used the handle end to pick up trees and larger branches and toss them off to the side of the area. Then I did some block and strike exercises against one of the trees that had tilted into my area - knock, knock, bang bang, knock, knock sounds echo through the park. Then useing the handle forward I practiced pushing tilted trees back to their upright position, switching to handle in hand and slinging the stick end to snap off dried branches that hung into my area of practice. Then I did a few sets of my latest forms and continued on my way.

    Then today I was washing my wife's car and my truck. Naturally I use a brush on a handle as long as a jo. All done with the best form I can find for each position.

    These are all practices that give one the automatic hand positions, leverage and hitting power available for any staff type tool.
    Having a MA background does make a difference in the way one thinks when doing chores like these. Guess this is why I wanted to bring it up here.

    Sorry if I am rambeling......my bad .

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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    Well.....Shucks !
    It is quite difficult to find a topic or way to get a conversation going, with a topic like - learning self defense techniques useing "old style" or "natural ways" to hone self defense techniques, beyond what can be done with bare hands or to assist one with evening up a potentially bad situation of self defense.
    Not actually having much formal instruction with weapons, in my 35+ years working at martial arts, any use of formal language or words to describe techniques is pretty much useless to me.
    However.......
    As the weather here is feeling a lot like spring and I have been practicing Bo, Jo and walking cane techniques almost every day, plus - doing lots of garden work for myself as well as a few of my neighbors that need a helping hand.....
    I have been discovering new things that are taking my abilities (in some ways) to new methods of weapons uses.
    I can't help but think that someone else out there has gone beyond the normal teachings in classes and personalized their ablilties a little bit.

    So - I have a little question that might help us get into the same gear for a bit of a discussion. It is not about anything I have recently found , it is about one I used for many years, back when sparring with weapons was our dominating practice for years at a time.

    What would be the name or definition of a form that - offers one's opponent a portion of one's weapon (such as the bo), in a way that feints a threat to the opponent and causes the opponent to hit or pull one's bo away from their center ?

    This method is something that I have used regularly while sparring and it has proved quite beneficial. The reason being......which ever direction they decide to push or pull the forward (and preferrably the shorter end) of my weapon - turns out to be the acceleration boost for my offense.

    Did that make any sense ?

    What happens when this sequence works properly is......the end of my weapon that was behind me and basically not on their mind (due to the forward end of my bo being the teaser) comes at them so fast that sometimes I have trouble holding back from clubbing them very hard and fast. We are just sparring and my intention is in light contact sparring. Their acceleration of my bo is often so intense it gets hard to hold back, all I do is aim and let them tell me what direction to stear my attack.

    It works beautifully and if any of you do much sparring give it a try, it workd beautifully.

    Richard Mineo
    For every thesis there is an antithesis

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