Martial Context

I recently had some constructive disagreements with other fighters immediately after the last Tipon I attended. One of my unpopular assertions was this: "I don't think you can really understand Traditional Martial Arts scholars without learning to fight with a weapon. You don't understand the 'Book of Five Rings' with your bare fists."

In today's world when we talk about weapons we are talking about guns. But most people who talk guns don't carry them, and most of those who do carry them haven't done much pressure testing with those guns. But throughout most of martial arts history, affordable, safe-quality easily-portable firearms weren't available to most people with needs to defend themselves.

And let's be real about a few things here. First, if you are planning to attack someone and really be successful at it, are you going in WITHOUT a force multiplier, without a weapon? Of course not. If you are expecting trouble from someone with a weapon, are you going to arm yourself in some way to protect yourself against them? Of course you are.

The warriors of the ancient battlefields NEVER did the following: line up ready for battle, take off their boxing gloves unsheathing their bare fists, and then charge each other with their leaping side kicks demonstrating the power of their unarmed Karate technique in mass combat. ALL traditional martial arts have a context, and that is an armed context.

Knife defenses are popular in every traditional martial art because of the obvious reason that if you have to defend yourself, it will probably be against someone with a weapon. I think a very big part of why Aikido is so misunderstood is because modern practitioners forget that the Hakama part of their uniform speaks to the weapon side of their art, and that the founder of Aikido spent a tremendous amount of time training in and lecturing on weapon martial art technique. On the martial side of his art, he clearly intended weapons to be used for self defense - because he realized that was the best way to defend yourself - when getting attacked - because you will be attacked with a weapon.

But same goes for most other TMA. Why aren't Hun Gar or Choy Lay Fut simply considered styles of Chinese Kickboxing? Because a very great deal of time is spent in those arts teaching people how to fight with weapons:

Most cultures have some kind of weapon martial art, the most famous of which is Filipino Martial Arts:

But there are also several styles of African stick fighting:

And several styles of European stick fighting:

Not to mention South American "Cowboy Fencing":

And all the way up through the 90's it was a staple of law enforcement training in North America:

From a historical perspective, if you are doing martial arts without any weapons training, you are studying martial arts out of context.