For an intersting (not suer how accurate) story about Fencing, read Phule’s Company. Main charater starts a ragtag military band, and has a competition with an elite “show” company to see who wins a posting. In addition to parade marching and obstical course, they do fencing.
Brian
I wish they’d have real sword fighting at the Olympics
They need to film a version of Hamlet where they fencing goes as quick as it does in modern fencing. 
Err, I meant that I wonder if kendo is as divorced from its real sword fighting “ancestor” as fencing is.
Pretty sure that’s what he meant.
Kendo is sport and it’s about as related to the actual martial art as modern sport fencing is to it’s historical counterpart.
I interpreted your comment to refer to fencing in general. I think we have no disagreement.
About this, I had no idea. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Given that sport fencing has transformed dramatically in the past 50 years, the pressure requirement looks pointless and arbitrary. Still, it makes me a little bit sad.
Yes to both. Once upon a time, it would have been pretty obvious to a layperson what attacking and defending meant. With a stiff weapon, you have to extend it and shove in your opponent’s general direction. This is less true nowadays. Think about a foil as a whip rather than a sword. If you want to give something a good whipping, all you have to do is pull your hand back subtly to crack the whip.
One of the best ways to score a touch is, essentially, to whip your opponent with the foil. An “attack” is a motion that enables the delivery of a touch. So pulling your hand back a little to get a good whipping on is an “attack” that requires a response before your opponent can deliver an attack of his own. That such a subtle movement would constitute an attack is not at all obvious to anyone who thinks that fencing has some connection to swordplay.
And yes, when the fencers close the action stops. This is pretty consistent with academic swordplay going back to the 18th century. If you are close but not too close, you can score a touch on your opponent by whipping him on the top of the shoulder or on the back.
I am not a kendoka, so the best I can do is say that I know quite a few of them both from the martial arts scene and because a bunch of my Japanese in-laws do kendo. My understanding is that despite some superficially traditional aspects, kendo is about as divorced from iaijutsu as sport fencing is from western swordplay.
I think that classical fencing is pretty spectator-friendly. It is more conservative and lacks the obvious athleticism of modern fencing. Speed and power are less important than timing, distance, and control. A good bout is a conversation between the two fencers. But it’s not totally impenetrable to watch.
There are some great examples from old movies, actually. Movie actors like Basil Rathbone and Danny Kaye were excellent fencers and much of their technique is orthodox and admirable. Danny Kaye in The Court Jester is magnificent. I am sure I have mentioned on the boards before that my favorite movie fencing scene is between Basil Rathbone and John Barrymore in the 1936 Romeo and Juliet. I’d fly to London myself to watch something like that.
I thought, and Wikipedia seems to agree with me, that Iaijutsu is the art of specifically drawing the sword and attacking, while Kenjutsu is the name for Japanese swordsmanship in general. The first sentence of the Kendo Wikipedia article, which cites the All Japan Kendo Federation, states that Kendo “is a modern Japanese martial art of sword-fighting based on traditional swordsmanship (kenjutsu)”.
I believe Max the Immortal was asking about the differences between Kendo and Kenjutsu.
I am not a sports fan, so possibly this remark is stupid–but the rules of most sports seem impenetrable and subjective to me. What is the purpose of disallowing carrying the ball in basketball, for example, other than to make the game more challenging? I can’t see that foil rules are any different.
You are right. Kenjutsu is the Japanese martial art of fencing.
The answer doesn’t change. One is sport one is martial art.
Now, I don’t know much about modern Kenjutsu, so I’m not sure exactly how accurate it is to what was used in medieval/renaissance battlefields and duels.
Maybe someone can comment on that?
The above is correct, but Maeglin is also correct that kendo is about as close to kenjutsu as fencing is to duelling. And for many of the same reasons -
[ul][li]The bamboo practice sword (shinai) is much different from the standard Japanese long sword. [/li][li]The allowed target areas in kendo are (IIRC) only the ribs, the wrists, the sides and top of the head, and a thrust to the throat. [/li][li]You don’t have to hit very hard to score a point in kendo. In kenjutsu, you had to land a blow hard enough to cut into your opponent (obviously) so as to kill or disable him. If he was wearing armor, obviously it was more important still not just to tap, even with a ki-ai. [/ul][/li]The traditional practice weapon in kenjutsu is a wooden sword called a bokken, which many swordsmen consider a weapon in its own right. Japan’s most famous swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, won his most famous duel using a wooden sword, and allegedly preferred a wooden weapon because it was less brittle than steel and therefore harder to break.
The Japanese had almost the identical discussion as the Japanese sword retreated from a weapon used in combat to a sporting endeavor, about combat realism.
Regards,
Shodan
I once witnessed someone get beaten to within an inch of their life with a bokken (long story). It is a serious weapon in the hands of a trained user.
Yeah, but in kendo you need to hit them with the full force of yer *zanshin *too, and that oughta count for something ! 
For the benefit of non-kendokas: zanshin means something like “fighting spirit” or “warrior disposition”, and if you hit a point scoring area in the proper form but what the judges deem wasn’t enough zanshin, you don’t get the point. How do they judge what kind of spirit you got ? Beats me man, but they know that stuff ! Having zanshin coming out the arse certainly seems to involve a lot of frowning and bellowing though. And really, if you don’t yell like you’ve just stepped on your own balls while striking, it can’t really count, can it ?
I’m being facetious here, but it really is pretty hoky stuff sometimes. I once witnessed a kendo fight between two legit, properly ancient Japanese masters. They slowly circled each other for quite a while, taking occasional turns to bellow at each other. Sometimes you’d see the point of a shinai twitch ever so slightly. Eventually one of the masters just up and conceded, without a single blow exchanged. Reason given: “His zanshin was so much powerful than mine. I couldn’t make a step forward.”
Well OK, then. I still want my money back, you old hacks !
Yeah, but games like basketball feel like they’re supposed to be arbitrary because they aren’t related to real world actions. And I wouldn’t say they are impenetrable, seeing as you figured out the rule. With fencing, someone here had to ask what the heck a rule meant. In other sports, you get a pretty good idea of what the rules are by just watching.
No kidding. It’s a big long piece of bloody hard wood. It’s like beating someone with a baseball bat, only it’s lighter, more maneuverable, and the striking area is smaller, resulting in a lot more concentrated force. I would -not- want to be hit with one of those things. You just need to HOLD one to know that they’re not kidding around.