duels with bokken

[Cliff Judge]

It is pretty obvious that duels between Japanese swordsmen were often with bokken instead of shinken. Musashi comes to mind immediately. In Old School, Ellis talks about an important figure in Nen Ryu who carves a bokken from loquat, splits a rock with it, and then kills an opponent in a duel with one blow. The opponent was said to wield a bokken four feet long. As another example, I have it on good authority that Kamiizumi originally conceived his fukoro shinai as a dueling weapon.

My Aikido teacher is always yelling at us for treating bokken as sticks or baseball bats and not real swords. But I am curious if, in the world of real sword arts, there are any schools that take into consideration the practical matters of dueling with a wooden sword instead of a live steel one. Does anybody know of ryu that teach "bokkenjutsu?"

I guess this is actually two questions for discussion: is there a better way to wield a bokken in a serious duel than to wield it as if it were a live steel sword? The many differences between the two weapons make it likely. Secondly, then, is the question of whether any ryu that we know of make a study of these differences.