Japanese kobudo.
These weapons are all made of red oak, the hard Japanese oak.
Sometimes you get weapons made of Japanese white oak.
To is the sword.
In practice we use the wooden bokken.
For sparring we use the shinai, split bamboo, and armour.
One of the WTMA innovations is to use rattan bokken. We make these simply by cutting a rattan Bo in half.
Bo and Jo are staff. If you take the average Japanese man as being 5 foot tall, a Bo is 6 foot and a Jo is 4 foot. For westerners we need to adapt this slightly. A 6 foot staff to a 6' 5" man would be more a Jo than a Bo.
So is the spear.
Just as when we are practicing with bokken it represents a real sword, sometimes when we are practicing with the Bo we are sometimes practicing spear work.
To-So-Jutsu is also an entire system in it's own right, the use of sword vs spear.
The hanbo is the half-staff, a 3 foot staff, the length of a walking stick.
For this we just cut a Bo in half to make 2 hanbo.
Hanbo-jutsu is a great self defence system, as it allows a walking stick to become a weapon. Favoured in Japan by the elderly.
A lot of Filipino Eskrima masters who settled in California use largo mano with their canes for Self defence.
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