Weapons

Very often in Aikido you will hear or see a reference to 'tegatana' - literally translated as 'hand sword' or 'hand blade'. The history of aikido, which developed from the roots of Japanese sword handling, means that even with no weapon we use our hands in a similar way to a sword. The 'blade' of the sword runs down the edge of the little finger and hand, and occasionally refers to the side of the forearm too. The hand movement exercises are developed from sword strikes, and several techniques rely on these sword-style movements.

The competition tanto is a soft imitation knife. OK, it doesn't even look that much like a knife - the black strip is supposed to be the blade, and the black end the tip. There is a very good reason why we use a soft rubber/cloth stick instead of a wooden or plastic knife: we are training, which leads to two things:

1. If you get hit with it, it doesn't hurt. Even if you really mess it up, bang it into your fingers, fall over on it - it still doesn't hurt. Very handy when training.

2. More importantly, if your attacker knows it's not going to hurt, they can put full force and speed into an attack, without worrying about hurting you, or 'pulling' it so you can get out of the way. I have had personal experience with this: while training with a wooden knife in jitsu, I had a training accident where I stabbed my best friend in the head and caused him three stitches and a trip to casualty. It took quite a while before I could relax again and I am still careful with wooden weapons even years later. However, I will quite happily attack you full force with a competition tanto, without worrying if you can get out of the way.

The bokken (or bokuto) is a curved wooden sword, shaped like the traditional Japanese Samurai sword (the Katana). We use wooden swords for practicing sword strikes and sword defences - where a lot of the aikido movements originally came from. If you are thinking about buying a bokken for Aikido, check out our Buying Weapons page for some useful tips.

The Katana is the traditional Japanese sword, that almost everyone knows from films, either samurai films like Yojimbo, or more recently films like Kill Bill or Matrix Reloaded. Despite how 'cool' they are in the movies, a real katana is a killing weapon and used incorrectly can cause extremely messy damage to yourself or others very easily. For this reason, Katanas are not used in our form of Aikido.

The jo is a straight wooden shaft, and is used in Aikido for some techniques and katas, including unarmed defence against a jo and jo versus jo katas. It is different to a bo (staff) in that a jo is shorter (around 4ft) compared to a bo (6ft). There is some useful information on our Buying Weapons page if you are thinking about buying a jo for Aikido.