Reclaiming the Blade Page #5

Out of the Philippines

you have escrima or arnis.

Out of Thailand

you have muy thai.

Out of Burma

you have bando

and I'm sure there are

many, many others.

When you hit a target area,

you have to say

where you're hitting;

so, "head," "wrist," "side."

Hua-mo-ah!

Just coming in and hitting

is not considered a point.

I have to have

proper etiquette.

I have to make

a pronounced step.

I have to hit the proper part

of my sword which is in between

this leather piece

and this leather piece.

Ah-oo!

I have to either go

forward or backward.

Hua!

My body, my mind, and my sword

have to be all in unison.

The idea is you're becoming

one with your weapon.

In the '70s and the '80s,

movies increased our interest

in Asian martial arts.

Hey, wouldn't

a fly-swatter be easier.

Man who catch fly with

chopstick, accomplish anything.

Today when people hear

the term martial arts

they immediately bring to mind

fighting arts from the East

such as karate and taekwondo.

There's a more esoteric concept

to kill someone efficiently

that is more than just

killing someone and that,

in my opinion, is absent within

the Western swording styles

as opposed to Eastern.

In many respects you can say

the West had the same attitude

that the Japanese had

but we handled it differently.

So there's nothing really

different in these things.

We have a tendency

to forget that the West

had their own tradition

of martial arts as well.

European fighting skills

tend to sort of get relegated

to something that was very

sort of crude and basic,

which it wasn't.

What's funny is they

don't seem to remember

that the human body's

the same the world over.

And it depends on

how your body moves

and that's governed

by body mechanics.

It's somewhat amusing to have

a dbute of the oriental

martial arts glancing through

a European manual on,

say wrestling,

or hand-to-hand combat and say,

"Oh wow, this is done

almost like the Japanese."

Things from Asia and Japan

are viewed as being sort of

pinnacle of fighting skills

and as skillful as they were,

we were just as skillful here.

But what we did was

we forgot about them.

As you're comparing the 2,

look how quickly the West

seized on the firearm

and made great use of it.

Whereas in Japan it was used

for a brief period of time until

once the Tokugawa Shogunate was

established, they were banned

because this would destroy

the social culture.

When a peasant could blast

a samurai from 50 yards away,

it was unthinkable.

Martial arts from the East

of very hierarchical

being orally transmitted

from one person to the next.

Pretty much, it was

a heredity thing

because you had to be

born a samurai.

So it was essentially father

to son, master to disciple.

When of course the big

difference is the schools

and some of the oriental schools

continued to flourish.

How far they're teaching

exactly the same sorts of things

they taught in the past,

is only anybody's guess.

You remember the game where you

whisper and then you whisper

to the next, by the time

it gets to the end

this thought

is all different.

Eastern martial arts have a long

and continuous history where

in the West martial arts,

with the sword in particular,

died down a lot after

the Renaissance.

As the gun improved

the sword was relegated

and became

less and less important.

People stopped training

and teaching in the old arts.

There was no necessity, no need

to learn those things anymore.

So we have essentially a break

in the history of the sword

in the Western world.

What was the sword,

and how was it used?

Before practical

swordplay developed

into a gentlemen's ritual

of single dueling,

masters of defense

flourished across Europe.

Many of the surviving

manuscripts detailing

their combative systems remained

largely obscure for centuries,

until now.

Today historical fencing

studies are on the rise

and an unprecedented revival of

these extinct combative systems

is now underway.

The West had its own

martial arts tradition

exactly as the Orient did,

exactly the same.

There's been a renaissance,

so to speak,

in the study of the sword

offering us a lot of insight

that had been lost in

the several hundred years

since the sword was truly

relevant to combat.

The work of people in making

very accurate recreations

of the sword in terms of form

as well as the manner in which

they would handle, and then

those martial artists

who are taking these

accurate recreations,

moving them in space,

and working out

what was possible

and what isn't possible.

All across Europe, the Americas

and around the world

historical European fight clubs

have emerged with the desire

to study the original

combative systems of both Europe

and the ancient world.

They have set out to practice

with a different kind of energy

and intensity separate from

the reenactment

and sport fencing groups.

We're trying to discover

something that's always

been there and has been

forgotten and it's a lot of work

to obviously, to try to

understand what was lost.

It's a part of

our history in Europe

and I think that's

very important.

This is actually

our history.

This is actually

how we fought.

Historical European

martial arts is the study

of Europe's traditional

fighting systems.

I'm doing this because

I had previously studied

Asian martial arts and I

wanted to study martial arts

related to my own culture

and the place that I'm from.

Martial arts from Japan

or China or southeast Asia,

as valid as they are,

I wanted something

that was from

my culture and for me.

I came from a long background of

doing martial arts so I wanted

to see how modern arts compared

to the old arts and it seems

that their standard was every

bit as complicated as ours,

and possibly more so.

If you look at modern sport

fencing and kendo, and the like,

they've actually become

simplified versions

of these great complex systems,

which are actually brutal.

It's our past, it's

part of our culture actually.

Today historical European

martial arts groups

are reclaiming the ancient

fighting techniques

and studying the diversity

of arms and armor.

For me I think the sword

is like what it was

in the medieval time.

What matters is the man

on the other side.

The difference between

the medieval sword

and the Japanese sword

is that the Japanese

put their soul into the sword.

In medieval time,

what matters was

to put the other man

into the sword.

There's no such thing

as just a sword.

It's a weapon

for killing people

and I'm learning how

to do it efficiently.

To me the sword is...

cool.

For centuries these

ancient fighting skills

have not been practiced.

Historical fencing students

are now learning to reconstruct

martial arts that have

been until now, extinct.

We're having to try

and rediscover

what the fight masters

of the time were thinking

and how they formulated their

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