Term · Japanese culture
Kendo
Sword fighting reduced to four legal targets, then made deafening.
In Otakana the clue reads: Fencing with bamboo swords and armour
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- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
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- 5 · Normal
Two people in lacquered armour circle each other holding a shinai, a sword made of four bamboo slats bound together. A point requires a valid strike on one of four targets, the head, the wrists, the torso or a thrust to the throat, delivered with correct footwork and announced by shouting the name of the target as you hit it. Silence gets you nothing. A perfect cut without the shout is not a point.
The armour has its own vocabulary: men for the head, kote for the hands, do for the chest, tare for the waist. Practice halls smell of it. Beginners spend months on suburi, cutting the air, before anyone lets them near a partner, and the sound of a hall in full swing carries down the street.
Swordsmanship schools survived the end of the samurai as fencing clubs, the shinai and armour let students strike each other at full speed without hospital visits, and the All Japan Kendo Federation formalised the modern sport in 1952. Japanese schools still run kendo clubs, which is why so many anime characters happen to own a bamboo sword when the plot needs one.
Spelling KENDO
KENDO ends in the same do, the way, that closes judo, aikido and bushido, and it hides the same long vowel that English quietly drops. Five letters, one of each, nothing doubled. Ken is the sword, so the whole word reads as way of the sword. If one of the other do words has already turned up this week, the last two tiles come free.