This book is intended not so much to teach the techniques of individual martial arts weapons, but more to reveal, through examples, those general body movements which serve as the matrix of weapons application. It is also intended to remind the student of the meaning of training with weapons.
With a thorough understanding of karate, most kobudo weapons can be handled with sufficient skill to put forth an adequate self-defense response.
This is one way to learn these general body movements, footwork especially.
Another way is by using various weapons in carefully designed waza (tech-niques) with a partner. Drilling in these waza, it is possible to virtually reshape all your natural skills on the most basic, reflexive level.
When I perform weapons demonstrations, much of what I do is too fast to follow. But, the fighting techniques in this book, which are part of my demonstration repertoire, are frozen in step-by-step stop-action photos so that you can analyze the movements. To cultivate flow and speed, you must practice hard and train constantly. Then these movements will become almost as natural and relaxed as breathing. Naturalness will allow you to flow from one technique to another; being relaxed will give you speed.
Practice these waza slowly with a partner. After a period, you will be able to pick up any of these weapons and respond to any improvised attack from your partner moving slowly. With even more practice, your spontaneous responses to attack will become even quicker, and you will eventually come to see that all these weapons are like the branches of the same tree, the tree of your well-conditioned reflexes.
You will be able to use even the most innocuous tools as weapons in your own defense because the particular virtues of the tool or weapon will become secondary considerations. This is the freedom with which the finest kobudo experts use weapons. "Weapons" are all around. Even a watch can become a weapon of self-defense, but the defender has to be able to see the possibilities.
Philosophically, this image of the peaceful man freely using whatever is at hand, particularly the tools of his work, to defend his life, is one of two most profound influences on modern martial arts.
Whereas in kobudo, the spirit of the art is best represented by the peaceful man with the weapons being of secondary importance, the opposite is true of the warrior spirit, the other major influence on modern arts. This spirit is represented by the samurai sword; and although many swordsmen of old became proficient with the sword through rigorous self-education, their contributions have been distilled into the sword traditions passed down to us to-day. For this reason, the techniques of the sword are unique. The spirit of the warrior was shaped by values in which the welfare of the individual warrior was secondary to his duty.