Ah, Kendo. The epitome of weeaboo skirt wearing, yelling, stomping - and even stick slapping, which other martial arts cannot claim to engage in! Not meant to simulate swordplay anymore, it is now a way to develop one’s character and mind, supposedly, and of course learn manners. Lots and lots of manners.
Like deferring to angry stubborn old Japanese men that argue semantics and spew utter bullshit out of their ass. And also only promoting men past a certain point. And only Japanese men past a yet higher point. The first and only person AFAIK who passed an 8th dan exam in Japan but was born out of Japan was Roberto Kishikawa, from Brazil.
OK Credulous, but why do we care about Japan being exclusionary and shitty?
Mental Bullshido is often some of the worst. Also, it’s fun to poke at, and it’s even a little unsafe! Like Kendo’s unsafe poking technique, Tsuki.
Starting with safety, we’ll address the Ago, the neck-flap part of the helmet (Men) that is really fucking unsafe but will never be changed BECAUSE TRADITION. But you can buy a bigger, safer flap to go under the Tsuki flap: 
To clarify, Tsuki is to thrust at the throat, but only the throat, not any other part of the body whatsoever. It is said one needs to have years of experience to “control the shinai”, because of safety. Because the recipient has to keep their head down for their shitty armor to protect them, unless they have the extra flap.
Meanwhile in HEMA fencing you wear a gorget from day one to protect your neck, and you can thrust anywhere you like as soon as you start sparring, since you wear good gear from the beginning. Same for Modern Olympic Fencing.
Huh.
So not only is it something held as a mystery to reveal after having multiple black belt ranks, there’s also un written rules about who can do it to whom, and when! If you earned the right to practice it, people who rank higher will state it is time to do so, and then promptly give you ‘controlled’ stabs to the neck that bend their shinai (bamboo training sword) that shove the recipient back. So much for control.
As far as rank goes, you don’t Tsuki people above you, or they literally yell and melt down. I’ll link and paste:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kendo/comments/6lur9g/when_is_appropriate_to_do_tsuki/
I recently attended a seminar with sumi sensei,a japanese 8th dan .In the final jigeko a girl(3rd dan) execute tsuki on sumi sensei and something very strange happend, he froze for a fraction o a second and then grabbed her shinai with both hands and screamed :‘‘never do tsuki agani!!!’’.I know tsuki is an advance tecnique so I never attempt to execute one,the only exeception is when someone take a jodan stance and this does not happen very often. The girl who tried to tsuki sumi was third dan tought,can you do tsuki only with people that have your same grade?are there any unwritten rules on tsuki that I should know?
LOL.
If only there was a way to practice partial arts without having to deal with fragile egos. Oh, yeah, MMA. And apparently HEMA if you want to swing swords.
OK, so stick-slap-tag in hakama has a ton of rules on it, is that all?
No, I got this hilarious post here that archive.org saved for all posterity:
The magical thinking and argued semantics are what really got my goat. Kendo likes to say things like “we do not feint, we get in their heads!”
As this now deleted article on ‘Kizeme’ explains, in Kendo one does not fucking feint. Feinting is wrong. Instead you have to get in their head! To fully explain why there are such mental gymnastics, one has to look at the mindset of Kendo.
Kendo is aggressive - more aggressive than your martial art, of course! Kendo never blocks or merely defends, it attacks while defending. Or attacks first. Or counters. Also, of course, it never feints, it dominates your mind with spiritual pressure like Bleach or something? Huh.
Whatever, I’ll quote again.
At first I would like to quote Shimokawa Ushio sensei. He’s know as the writer of “The development of kendo” which has been used as a kind of kendo dictionary in the kendo community for years.
[blockquote align=“center”]Western (i.e European) fencing styles, be it in their kata or there competition, generally tend to rely on defensive techniques, with attacks (ripostes) coming out of defense. Even when on the attack, the tendency is to protect or escape from opponents attacks skilfully, taking the chance then to attack. In our (Japanese) fencing, the most — is to use “sen sen no sen”, the exact opposite of the general Western style, which we would call “go no sen.” In other words, their fencing places a heavy emphasis on protecting the body, and we could say its a negative style of fighting. In comparison, Japanese fencing is generally a positive attacking one, where we aim to strike first, disregarding even our body (sutemi).
Even if we are in the path of the opponents blade we chose to throw away our physical body for the purpose of cutting down the opponent in one strike. This attacking, selflessness style can be said to be the number 1 characteristic of Japanese fencing.[/blockquote]
The next is from the posthumous transcripts of someone that everyone knows: Takano Sasaburo sensei.
[blockquote align=“center”]Japanese fencing has no ‘blocking’ or ‘defending’ techniques. Against an enemies attack, we evade, cut through their blade (kiriotoshi), or deflect and strike (ukenagashi). These cannot be categorised as blocking as these actions are done with the objective of cutting or thrusting the enemy. All these techniques are used to place yourself in an advantageous position. For example, when you are doing kiriotoshi the goal should be to cut the enemies body, and the instant you perform ukenagashi you must turn your blade and strike him. While doing this you must not even allow the tiniest opportunity for the enemy to attack you.
Its useless simply to just stop or block the enemies attack. In deflecting or receiving a blade you must instantly turn it into an attack. Simply blocking/stopping the enemies attack is not beneficial (in defeating your enemy).
Therefore, the merit of kendo is using “sen sen no sen” to take the lead and attack with strong resolution and overwhelming power, all the time without leaving any opening for the enemy to attack you. This will lead to a superb victory.
If you stop to think for a while, this method is not simply about flying blindly into an attack; rather its about spending a long time working out when the right time is to attack, learning about what works when and what doesn’t (the principles)… only after you do this can you gain (true) victory.[/blockquote]
See, I’d give Kendo a bit of a pass if not for being so blatantly shitty, xenophobic and just haughty. HEMA sources (from 500 fucking years ago) regularly feature someone of a given nationality poo-pooing rival nationalities; Germans vs Italians is common. Everyone mocking Spain for it’s inscrutable Destreza fencing that made a few masters and many fools is also found in these old texts.
But for Kendo to just stand there and say “we’re so great and you’re so bad and dumb” and clearly spend literally zero effort to cross train with western fencing traditions is just too much. And as a westerner, I’ll do what westerners do: call it out and shit on it and let defensive people have a fun meltdown over it.
If you were wondering, no, HEMA is not defensive. HEMA coaches make a point of making sure people learn how to be aggressive; even if people specialize in ‘counterstriking’, which is perfectly valid here as it is in other martial arts, they still have to learn how to make openings.
“But at the time HEMA didn’t exist.”
Fair. But MOF exists, and to say that’s not aggressive is fucking hilarious. It’s hyper aggressive. It’s so fast given the light weight of the swords defending is almost pointless.
In conclusion, Kendo is hilarious, and to think that stick wiggling beats actually making plays, and having everything come down to who attacks first with a little bit of not-feinting that’s actually feinting get over yourself is hilarious.
If you’d like to look at what Kendo considers good vs HEMA considers good, well, watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA3nv5GpkcU&t=14s 7th Dan Kendo sparring. I would hope they were skilled, given their rank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3A-Od7dfp0 Martin Fabian with no rank and a lot less wiggling and a lot more actual exchanging.
Decide for yourselves, wear a mask, stop the virus, and be excellent to one another.
