Install Raid for Free ✅ IOS/ANDROID/PC: pl.go-ga.me/0wrlh7v2 and get a special starter pack with an Epic champion ⚡ Drake⚡ Available only for new players Thank you Raid: Shadow Legends for sponsoring this video, and thanks to Universal Studios Licensing
@@beepboop204I think it's not really comparable, on account of the fact that there are a bunch of HEMA competitions where the regulations are relatively system-neutral. MMA arose from an environment of many highly insular and regulated living martial arts traditions: boxing, wrestling, wing-chun, judo, karate, kickboxing, Muay-Thai, etc. all represent systems descended from the continuously evolving unarmed combat traditions of their respective cultures as they became increasingly systematized and sportified over centuries, and the desire to mix those traditions and pick and choose what works best was only really compelling because of how rigidly the forms had been divided previously. Because HEMA is largely reconstructed, we don't have the same sense of completeness (both true and false) that allows for such extremely idiomatic divisions of principle. There is an exception, of course, for clubs that rigidly stick to only what is attested in treatises by specific masters (i.e. Meyers or Lichtenaur) in what they practice. Even in those cases, however, there is still a need to interpret the material. This means that you are likely to find as many versions of a Meyers' system as there are people practicing it. The final consequence is that you can't as easily test Lichtenaur's longsword versus Meyer's longsword in a meaningful way, like you can test a master of a tradition of Karate against a master of another school of Karate or of Kung Fu.
@@beepboop204 Does not exist. While MMA still has safety rules and restrictions, it is still pretty close to unrestricted hand-to-hand combat. HEMA has a variety of rules restricting thrusting and grappling, which are fundamental combat techniques. Same with Asian martial arts. Ultimately, they are all just sports, but MMA seems most analogous to actual combat.
@@mouseutopiadystopia24601 thanks for sharing thoughts and not being a dick about it 🙂 i guess that would be the difference between sports and combat sports
What a timely video - my HEMA guild just held a fundraiser in conjunction with a Mugai Ryu Iaido school. We had students from both schools have demonstration bouts against each other, both for the entertainment of the attendees and so we could learn from each other. Learning the similarities and differences between our styles was fascinating (and a lot of fun!)
I have to ask did they think that you were doing a legitimate martial art or did they think it was… I’m not sure what word to use but let’s say fake or pointless.
I come from mostly Asian, generally unarmed traditions. Even without the challenges of realistically training with lethal weapons, living traditions suffer creep very quickly when not under the constant pressure of immediate lethal combat. Bruce Lee termed it the "classical mess." Deconstructing and rebuilding from first principles is vital. If there's no chance to find out that "oh wow, my buddy tried that thing we do and died, we should fix that" then the art collects dead wood and becomes stagnant. No set of written instructions can define everything about how an art works, so interpretation slips generation by generation. And manuals or treatises often skip basic knowledge so they are useless without instuction, encode principles in obscure language that requires specialized knowledge to decode, or are meant as marketing tools with overblown stuff added to encourage students to hire the trainer who wrote the treatise.
I first learned karate because I needed to know how to fight. In hindsight, karate was lacking even though it wasn't completely useless. But the fact that real life threats motivated me, means that I was always thinking more critically about what I was really learning.
It's interesting that the problem you write about occurred even in the completely fictional world of Star Wars. I mean, the first fight between the Jedi and the Emperor was, well, bad for the Jedi because they hadn't fought against the Sith in a very long time. They knew their fighting methods only from treaties. But there is something else. I read about two actors practicing talking to each other on stage. Everything was going great, they were testing different variants. But this conversation was somehow artificial, and they could not effectively apply these principles to real conversation in life. The psychologist explained this: The conversation on stage went great because they both felt it wasn't real, neither felt fear of being looked down on, etc.
Ironically, the bloat from fanciful and complex printing is largely responsible for the English languages obscure spelling traditions. Printers made themselves valuable by being the only ones who knew certain words, or changed them to suit a customers needs and set the first mass spelling of words in stone as it were. never underestimate the politics in influencing an art or a structure.
@@littlekong7685I don't think that's very relevant because people used to be largely be phonetic readers, and the fact that spelling was not standardized may have been one of the reasons. Also, if the spelling is not standardized, there's no right spelling to secure from the competition. The obscure wording, when it happened (and indeed it was not prevalent at times and in cultures) has probably more to do with obscuring the art itself. You want your students to have a guide, but you don't want people who you don't know-maybe in enemy countries-to learn much of what you know and possess the instrument to surpass your own students. Indeed, you can see this sort of reasoning in the secret techniques they had in Asian martial arts.
@@littlekong7685 Recently I watched a video about whether the same problem exists with musical notation. The conclusion was that even if it wasn't INTENTIONALLY incomprehensible to outsiders, at least the professionals writing this music for themselves didn't care whether other people understood it and used complex abbreviations and symbols that only worked well for them.
After seeing Seiki Sensei's post you were the first person I thought of to recommend in their comment section, so seeing your enthusiasm in these response videos has been a blast. And your last point, about HEMA being in the beginning stages of becoming a living tradition is a good one that I hadn't considered before. Very interesting and pretty obvious in retrospect.
Having been involved in batto jutsu (real, not Rurouni Kenshin) for about 20 years now, many Asian martial arts suffer greatly from not including sparring in the curriculum. This is something where HEMA has a great advantage, because techniques that might have worked on the battlefield centuries ago can be tested face to face with a large and growing population of enthusiastic people. Some Japanese schools have forms of sparring, but many do not, and convince themselves that kumitachi (partner sword training) exercises are just as good. They're not. Even if the technique works, you won't learn how to apply it properly without real and unchoreographed resistance. It's not a problem likely to see a solution any time soon, either. When you join a traditional Asian martial arts school, you also join in the culture and tradition, which has many wonderful and fulfilling aspects, and at least two serious negatives- you by default limit your potential student base to people who appreciate that, and by striving to uphold tradition, discourage yourself from turning it into something else. To create a HEMA style sporting/competitive environment in the Japanese martial arts community would be a very useful thing, but I think most of the schools would decline to participate.
Batto jutsu is very cool! I agree it would be a very useful thing to have a HEMA style competition in Japanese martial arts. I would hope that Kendo would open a division allowing Kenjutsu or HEMA style.
I agree that sparring is extremely important and is an important distinguisher between real martial arts and bullshido. A lot of "traditional" martial arts are actually relatively modern creations and sparring is often avoided because fully resisting training partners will quickly show how ineffective these styles really are. However I feel HEMA also suffers a similar problem in the way sparring and many competions are handled. Too many schools only do very low intensity training with constant breaks and pauses taken after every contact. While avoiding injury should always be a priority, the sparring intensity should similar to that of African stick fighting sports (Nguni, Donga, etc). That sort of training would greatly overall skill level in the sport and also give a clearer picture of what real fighting was like.
Given the limitations on how they were able to train in the past, I sometimes wonder if a lot of the legendary fencers of the past wouldn't actually be as good by today's standards. They might have been good, but there's a lot of lost potential when they could only do balls to the wall stuff in a duel. Likewise the traditions must have accumulated things that worked at low pressure or worked in a fight where a fencer disarmed some drunk guy who wasn't able to fully resist, so you have to figure out how the art changes when that pressure is dialed up. @@dgmt1
@@dgmt1Even ones that are not modern creations have often been changed via years of complacency into something that no longer resembles a real martial art and is something akin to a choreographed dance for tourists.
I have studied HEMA, and Kung Fu, and one of the things that I very much appreciate the "reconstructed" system vs. the living one is transparency. A HEMA practitioner is able to access and study everything that a Master has and glean information from that, while in living lineages there seems to be a more stratified division on access to information.
Many living martial arts are run like the Arthur Murray school of dance. They could tell you all the basic movements in the first class and then have you back occasionally for group practice/evaluation. But they'll make more money by making it seem mysteriously complicated and spending hours on frivolous drills.
Another way martial arts can change over time is from sportification. Take boxing for example; in the early bare-knuckle days punching styles were quite different from today. Also early styles allowed grappling, throws, etc. Obviously gloves became the norm but early on bare knuckle was how pugilists fought. So despite having a well documented history & a fairly short lineage we can see vast change in boxing over time due to it being practiced as a sport & not just a self defense art.
Many kenjutsu schools suffered transformations (I mean more than the natural change due to person to person transmission), specially between Meiji and Showa. The living examples that didn't change so much (such as katori shinto ryu) have one advantage over reconstructions: they have been tested in real battle until relatively recent times (as in the Boshin war). Of course, exist the possibility of adition of spurius variations in the direct transmission but, considering that this traditional schools also have writing record of the techniques, the gap for interpretation is smaller.
@@scholagladiatoria thanks to you for your high quality content! As an academic colleague myself (and also fencing practitioner) I find it quite riveting. Greetings from Spain
Katori was saved at the last minute at the turn of the 19th century. When the last living practitioners were gathered. Despite senile dementia, everyone fought for their own vision of style. Finally, a consensus was reached. And then, the hard work began, to build a coherent system from the scraps.
Very interesting - could you point me toward some sources (in Japanese is fine, but not kanbun 😉) on kenjustsu / or rather actual sword use in the Boshin war? I've often heard about the firearms used during the Boshin War seen illustrations and pictures of them (muskets and more modern weaponry, rifles, artillery, etc) but much less about the use of traditional weapons, especially swords in the conflict, which I understood to have already been mostly marginal at this point, even though the shogunate forces were not fully modernised, From what I'd gathered, after the reforms initiated during Bakumatsu, the role played by foreign military advisors and the tactical changes they led to, traditional weaponry was quickly dropped and swords took on a rather similar role to that of swords in late 19th century European warfare. This something we see clearly later on in illustration of cavalry charges in the first Sino-Japanese war a few decades later for instance ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#/media/File:16126.d.1(14)-The_Battle_of_Pyongyang.jpg ) The first national (Imperial) army in Japan was established only a few years later, mostly starting in 1871... The Boshin War, is interesting, as it's probaby one of the last stands of traditional Japanese weaponry against more modern/standard European-inspired warfare and tactics. thanks!
For empty handed Chinese martial arts, the time for significant drift seems to be about 3-4 generations for arts taught to the public, and about the same for family lineages that have to contest with public lineages. Isolated lineages can remain stable for hundreds of years. Weapon based arts tend to be much more stable. For a weapon form that’s stable, you tend to get techniques that cluster into a small handful of “schools”. For example there is only 1 guan dao “school” called spring and autumn. For great spear there are two or three (Yang, Liu He, and possibly a Henan school). These schools tend to be stable until the style of warfare requiring the weapon substantially shifts. Now what was discussed above is historical shift. Most modern shift tends to occur for a different reason. Modern practitioners in CMA lack the physicality to do many of the old methods effectively.
Yang spear became yang staff after Ban Hao's (second gen) daughter was killed in a spear training exercise although I believe some branches of the Wu family still practice it as spear.
@@emptyemptiness8372Yang spear refers to the Song Dynasty Pear Blossom spear of the Yang family (no relation to Yang Taijiquan which only dates to the Qing). Most northern long spear sets are derived from the Pear Blossom spear or the Six Harmony spear. The spear sets of Yang Taijiquan were alive and well in the Yang family after Banhou. Both Cheng fu and Shao hao passed down the Yang family spear methods.
@@Endoptic There were some lineages that were lost, but primary effect was dilution. The number of performers and people with minimal martial knowledge multiplied rapidly, and the number of traditional masters was reduced. For example, you can still find well preserved lineages of Che Shi Xingyiquan in Taigu. But the number of masters is smaller, and for every master of the traditional art, you have 10’s if not 100’s of modern Wushu performers. The loss of knowledge was also highly regional. Xian’s martial culture flourished, so much so that masters from other regions relocated there over time. There are other areas where a village’s martial art’s traditions were severely suppressed. Also, China after the communist take over offered much less in terms of occupational opportunities for professional martial artists relative to the period of the Qing and the Republic. A lot of lineages all over the world died out for this reason more than any other.
Great!! I always enjoy your videos but this one addressed an issue that can be so divisive when it needn't be so. I agree with everything you said about the two types of martial arts and how the lines between them are often blurred. I think that each type of martial art, whether reconstructed or a living tradition is valid and can learn from each other. I have studied iaido for over twenty years but I always enjoy your videos about various European sword arts and their weapons and learn from those programs in a way that enhances my studies of iaido. My sensei always said that there is no "best martial art." The best one is the art that you are committed to, put the time and effort into, and enjoy. Thank you.
My sensei often said that there's no "best martial art", there's only "best martial artist". So then he would say: get to practice, you're still too slow and lacking!😅
Matt, I somewhat recently had a heated conversation with someone who was essentially stating that Eastern martial arts are categorically superior and better informed because the lineage is living. His words were something along the lines of, "THESE teachings actually come straight from the battlefield", as opposed to Western/(other) martial arts. I found that absurd for numerous reasons. Firstly, Europeans didn't just up and drop the practice of close quarters martial arts altogether. As late as World War II (technically!), there were albeit RARE instances of swords being used, and bayonet practice obviously survives to this day. Moreover, I also have experience in unarmed martial arts and I could look up very quickly the differences between what my own karate master taught, versus what his own teacher taught him. (Because, thankfully, his master was famous and there exists now many separate branches from his school of thought.) What you describe as mission creep is absolutely a thing. It'd be insane to deny it! Just like a story told by pure oral tradition will mutate, no human memory is perfect and no human lifespan is infinite, thus it is basically inevitable that a martial art taught without direct, hard evidence to the original forms and tenets, is going to shift with time. And the claim to "This was used in a real battlefield", is actually nonsense, as we are far, far beyond the era where bow and polearm and sword were contemporary battlefield deciders. So no, what's practiced is indeed just as far removed in both examples from the real thing. And one single generation of master-pupil teaching can change a LOT.
If you go into a museum you will find a lot of WW1 and WW2 handweapons used in hand to hand combat in the trenches: maces, revolver-dagger etc. usually soldiers were using their shovel as axe and for these situations they stole and looked for pistols and revolvers. Combat was more gruesome than shooting and bayonet attack.
That person has no idea what they're talking about. Disclaimer: I'm Japanese, so what I say applies only to our martial arts, as I do not know what was up in other countries. Majority of existing martial arts were developed in time of peace. They do not come straight from the battlefield. Which should make a lot of sense if you think about it. Group fighting in armor against another group in armor is very different from a duel. There are techniques which are great against a person with no armor, but will not work in the slightest against an opponent wearing full armor. Like wrist locks. Just won't work against armor. In time of peace it makes no sense to train facing bunch of guys in armor, who wield 6m long spears (Oda Nobunaga famously had forces armed with that, for real), while arrows rain down on you and a cavalry charge is incoming. That just ain't going to happen. What is going to happen, is getting in a duel against a guy with a katana who wears no armor, or getting jumped on while you're doing your thing, like eating. So in order to attract students, all the schools focused on what's going to be useful in situations described above. That ain't battlefield techniques. Iaijutsu, for example, was born in time of peace. No one would be sitting down with a katana by their side on a battlefield, but that's exactly what you do when you're eating or having a tea. Iai was developed for times when conversation turns sour, or you're getting jumped during your meal. You're presumed to be sitting. Things like that.
If you have to use a bayonet, you have fucked up. Bayonet is for extreme emergencies and you definately do not want to be in a situation where you need it
@@tacticsogreman Thank you so much for your input. I am almost certain there are modern Japanese martial arts that teach or practice things like armored grappling, and working with the long spears, (or pikes, we call them). But even then, all we can do today is practice safely and get a sense of what works and what doesn't. Nobody (hopefully!) should ever be recreating life-and-death fighting with these weapons these days, so we are all equally distanced from testing these things in practice, on battlefields. Even with some of the existing treatises in HEMA, they have images and descriptions of how you should move, and even then it is possible to get, albeit slightly, different interpretations. And we can only test it with sparring. Like you say, not on a massive battlefield with projectiles in the air and movement, and cavalry and the psychological extremes of battle on that scale.
Great video, thanks. I really hope there will be more crossovers of HEMA with Asian martial arts. I would love to see Akademia Szermierzy Fior di battaglia reaction, from both Matt and Sekisensei
Another fun video! I am a student at a traditional Japanese dojo where we study many different Ryu-ha, with each of the. Having boyh armed and unarmed components. Of course the katana, in all of the ryu, is my favorite of the weapons. 👍 To your point about how most living lineages don’t train in armored fighting techniques: we are one of those rare schools that does. Particularly in Kukishin Ryu, some (but not all) of the techniques still preserve the qualities of movement used by soldiers wearing load bearing equipment. It’s pretty cool.
Surely one of the major differences is that HEMA emerges from a relatively recent ‘experimental’ base, while the Living Lineages we most often discuss here come from a very traditional base. Neither is better, the benefits and drawbacks of both seem fairly obvious - particularly around the ‘experimental’ part in HEMA and the - let’s call it ‘living knowledge’ (the subtle bits) in a Living Legacy. Both can be an advantage and trap, and both are available to the other if they chose to step outside of their own zone - and it is in that debate and exchange in which a significant amount of enrichment occurs. I could be wrong, but that’s always been my perspective. Militancy over which is better and which is more correct rather misses the point - except perhaps in the context of preserving very precise existing traditions, which I’ve always seen as slightly doomed to failure, as humans always reinterpret and reinvent everything they touch in the context of their current lives. Also, as an aside, one of the ‘benefits’ of HEMA is that - in the majority - many HEMA groups and members are considerably more relaxed and openly passionate about their interests. Which makes them considerably more welcoming. They don’t have the veil of massive established traditions, which to some can be quite intimidating.
I do both HEMA and lineage styles. I have no issue with both unless either starts saying one is better. What I do like about pressure testing is that there is a certain limited realism in that in any period, not everyone you fight fights the same way. So I enjoy that aspect of fighting, and it also too shows where anything taught must adapt as well
I think there is a great disparity between a martial art (whether lineage or reconstructed by this video's definition) and sports based martial arts. I also feel there is a greater disparity and more of a 'reconstruction' where language barriers are involved. We can see that in misunderstandings and evolutionary differences between Karate and Taekwondo and then how those branched further from their origins... Karate leaving their islands and becoming the boxing of Japan's mainland then going once more to the West. Taekwondo leaving its influences from Karate and other roots to then change to market to a global stage and then change further as a sport. In these cases, it isn't uncommon to do kata and have instructors unable to explain what exactly you are doing in those kata. If you go back to books, or if you take a trip to visit a living teacher in Okinawa, you will quickly see differences and have your various questions answered about this technique or that technique. It can leave students frustrated who don't have those sources, especially if they are serious about pursuing a martial art for person growth and understanding. In some cases instructors who don't know, never learned themselves. In other cases they just aren't very articulate in their ability to explain what they were taught or learned themselves. And in some cases, what is practiced in the kata doesn't make sense until you have a practice partner. Some schools of martial arts are different from other branches, because masters giving instructions got older. They're not as nimble, or they got injured - so how they do techniques or how they would approach a problem have changed. That is then taught and people learn and they only know of that method unless they seek out others. Circling back to this video... Well Hema does have living teachers, and books for sure. And in Japan you have a variety of schools that are the same. But not all instructors are quite like what we get to enjoy from Seki sensei. He's faithful to what he was trained in, understands the context of why things were done, has learned a lot from other methods, is observant, is articulate, and is open to learn. With the language barrier broken down, we can also avoid misunderstandings which is such a boon. Like any martial arts journey, it's often smoother sailing when you have a great teacher.
Being an antique dealer is such a boon! :) I'll have to see if you have a video where you talk how you got into antique weapon dealing and HEMA/ etc. Cheers.
Basically a human being with a long length of sharp metal held in both hands, has to move in certain ways in order to not fall over while defending themselves and/or attacking someone else........ Everything else is jargon.
Well said, Matt and oddly well timed for us. Our HEMA classes have been popular but we are about to launch our Kenjutsu classes this week. It was my original martial art that I began learning as a child. My time in HEMA, however, has made me rethink how I wish to teach the Kenjutsu systems I learned as we did so little pressure testing, sparring, ect. These limitations may have been due to the traditions and equipment we were taught with. Essentially, I plan to reconstruct what we teach into my own school, separated from direct linage of what I had learned (as one of those ryu seemed to be reconstructed themselves). I got a lot of push back from the purists in the JSA world but I did noticed that not one of them does extensive testing through sparring or free play, nor do they use steel sparring katana, which are now available. While the view of the system I wish to create is to study what a Japanese warrior MAY have used in combat, most of the push back to this approach has been through an almost dogmatic view of martial arts, or a distrust in modern equipment. I personally just want to practice and teach in a way a samurai could have practically fought as well as learning more from other kenjutsu systems. HEMA certainly gave me the spirit and culture to wish to see kenjutsu kata and techniques through the light of how they were actually used. I think your video shows the nuance that our school feels and that I hope more come to see when it comes to living linage vs reconstructed systems. The only time I would see this is problematic is if a reconstructed system is presented as a living linage system. Long winded way of saying thank you for putting this into words.
Great video that clears up a lot of common misconceptions of what the difference between 'reconstructed' Martial Arts versus 'living lineage' Martial Arts actually consists in - or not.
Evolved Martial Arts is perhaps a better term. Schools like Sandhurst, West Point and Hanover had a tradition of masters of the sword, horse and such, teaching their fighting system to cadet officers. They also evolved into sport as their combat need diminished, as a source of personal development. In asia, Che and Zen were always as important as skill. something we only see in European legends or Knights Templar.
I would add another comparison with something a bit 'in-between': Taiko Japanese drumming. It was constructed (not reconstructed in this case) from different drumming traditions in Japan, but as a performing act, like in a stage, was basically invented like 50+ years ago, what it makes it a very young activity (especially under Japanese standards). But know it is a living lineage, highly recognized and also complex, creating new things with big foundation in ancient traditions.
Really great video as always Matt. One thing I would add is that many martial arts with direct lineages claim a consistency to what is being taught that his highly debatable. You touched on this in your “10 Generations” comment but it’s far worse than that. Karate Ryuha are a perfect example where a teacher dies and the senior students sometimes fracture to continue the system as they see it should be taught (already implying various interpretations) and then within a single generation you can already start seeing the variance. I remember someone years ago pointing out a group preparing in the corner of a budosai event in Okinawa that apparently were doing the same Ryu as me but from a different school and it was unrecognisable. And Karate is far from ancient. Humans just aren’t great at Information Fidelity. It’s not the way we’re built.
Why do you think no face protection was used during exercise in the past? Was making a protective mask that provides good visibility and protection at the same time beyond the technical capabilities of past eras? When I see the fine old swept hilts - it seems to me that a protective mask was also possible.
They definitely could have made fencing masks, but the earliest experiments with them seem to be from about 1700. There is some evidence that they used specific pieces of standard armour for fencing practice sometimes (gauntlets are shown on clothed fencers in Paulus Hector Mair, for example). But we don't really know why fencing masks weren't invented earlier. It should be noted though that this was almost exactly the same in Japan, where the kendo helmet was not invented until a similar date (along with what would evolve into gekiken/kendo).
@@scholagladiatoria In fact, in the Middle Ages, they used special helmets only for tournament fighting. They resembled a fencing mask, only the grate was thicker. But since the weapon used in this competition was a cross between a sword and a baseball bat, the competitor did not have to worry about being stabbed into the cracks of the mask. So - people in the past had a way of thinking that such a mask could be useful. It's even more unclear why it wasn't widely used.
So because of the age I live in and area I grew up in, I had to train on my own and I took in everything I saw in a sort of 'jeet-ken-do" but it's influences are Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish fencing. Now I'm an adult and what I do with my life is up to me, so I want to join Tenshin-ryuu Hyoho because I believe in my story. It would also be a great joy to sweat in your studio, BECAUSE YOU GET IT 😊
@scholagladitoria: First to say: A great video! As someone who practice Okinawans Karate which has as well techniques of weapons known as Kobudo I can 100% agree. We have the part "reconstructed martial art" of the Bubishi book which shows ancient techniques which we interpreted from as well as from the Katas we try to interpreted techniques, but we have as well a living lineage from the Masters of one style family like in my case Shorin-Ryu. In Shorin-Ryu are several 'sub-styles' because as you said, different masters have different focuses on things and change the style slightly towards this like I example stances and how to step, kick etc. Still we are all from the same lineage but you can see the differences too. that is why for exams you have to tell who sensei you have/had lesson from so that the people can pay attention to the little changes. So yes in my case I have both within my martial arts. Thank you!
Fencing. Fenshingu. Treaties. Torichiisu. Having fun imagining Shogo translating this for Seki-sensei and wondering which words he would transmit phonetically.
Completely agree with the main point of this video - and several minor ones. Especially like the thought that HEMA itself is becoming a living MA. :-) On the Japanese side, there's a lot more stuff that could be said, considering Matt's relative lack of background there. I'll just add one that I think is quite major. It's that the kenjutsu of koryu schools generally has a very strict distinction between omote (outside) and ura (back or inside) content, the latter of which is *never* taught to anyone outside of the school or, in fact, any casual learner either. All the commonly known textbooks comparable to the European ones (like the (in)famous Go rin no sho) are omote, and as such deliberately written in such a way that they cannot be understood correctly without the oral instructions to go with them. In fact, many are said to be deliberately misleading on key points. The reason for this is that the different schools were highly competitive, fighting for students, teaching positions with local rulers, and other benefits. HTH!
I think that some knowledge of the european sword fighting traditions was preserved in FMA then became a starting point to HEMA. I used to train in FMA and perhaps I heard this from some HEMA practicioner that trained with us.
Well, I see a broader problem here: What is the goal of these "living MA"? Scoring hits using accurate replicas of historical weapons? OK, but they won't be 100% accurate because metallurgy has advanced, and Matt rightly pointed out that a blunt blade behaves differently than a sharp weapon. Or maybe we are going in a different direction and simply using modern knowledge and experiments we want to learn how to eliminate the enemy with sharp weapons? Then the old masters and their treatises will only be a guide, but we will be focused more on constant experiments and improvements.
This is a very important point. Many here in the West believe kenjutsu is entirely kata and nothing more when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is only what they are comfortable with showing to outsiders
It's super interesting how many parallels there are across different martial arts from places all over the world. There's crossover with this type of teaching an record keeping in HEMA as well. For the Liechtenauer tradition there is the Zettel which contains teachings about the art in a long poem form, and it is written cryptically on purpose so that people with knowledge of the art can understand what it's saying, but it wouldn't give away secrets to outsiders. Luckily later masters in the Liechtenaurer lineage wrote down interpretations of the Zettel in more plain terms and use it to structure a lot of their teaching so it's able to be understood looking at it through their lens.
@@boon9329 Fascinating. A history professor of mine liked to say that a common misconception of people today is to think that people in the past were in any way less smart than we were. Clearly that's not the case. :-)
Im a second generation hema/buhurt practitioners and Im now starting to teach my first group of students so I definitely think its a living martial art now, especially with the level of information from multiple sources so readily available. No other time in history do we see the level of differing practitioners and shared information
One thing I will say that about use of safety gear is that while it allows us to train full force, it also dulls some of the sense of caution that one would develop without gear. HEMA sparring can be quite aggressive in ways that may be detrimental to survival in a real fight with deadly weapons, and the sense of safety afforded by gear decouples the technique from the feeling of “threat” that might otherwise prevent a swordsman from acting recklessly. I’ve studied both living lineage and HEMA , and my personal experience has been that HEMA practitioners are by far more aggressive, reckless, and injury prone, and I’ve sustained more injuries practicing HEMA in a year than I did practicing other arts in five (due mostly to inconsistent standards for floor safety, etiquette, progression and weapon control) . I still love HEMA and have a great respect for those who have put the time and effort into mastering many weapons, but I would like to see it adopt some of the more conservative teaching standards and practices of living lineage schools.
this reminds me of a conversation, in my hema club that happened recently, about vestigial smallsword techniques in epee. We play around with smallswords as supplement to our rapier and saber practice and our smallsword instructor is an epeeist by training and he doesnt know very much period smallsword terms, but we get along fine, but at one point he brought how modern epee technically has the agrippa rapier guard and parry terza (also called 3rd or tierce!), with the back of the hand up and the knuckles and edge facing the outside of your body, but you basically never need that strong of a parry against another epee so you just use the modern olympic 6th parry. And this got me curious why modern epee still names that guard and parry it basically never uses and my guess was that it could be a hold over from 19th century foil and saber fencing practices where they also were thinking about how one should parry a heavier sword or even a bayonet. we tried it out and you can use agrippas terza really easy to parry a bayonet with a smallsword and rad as hell!! im pretty sold on my hypothesis that that outside parry 3 in modern epee that that never use is just a vesitigial hold over of the living tradition because of our little experiment :3
It would be grate to see a martial arts "conference" where HEMA meets Japan etc. It would be great to see Matt talk to Seki Sensei and try out different weapons.
Ok ... I have not finished the video yet.... however I have studied Japanese jujutsu and some use if the sword. Further my first introduction to hema was Georgian sword and buckler and that has been taught in a living and continuous manner.
In my experience lineages constantly change too, because the teachers develop further (at least the good ones), some adapt their teachings to compensate for injuries or age and because of differences in body structures students of the same master do things differently.
having tried both, the one caveat i have with some heritage living martial arts, mostly armed ones, is that they tend to suffer from the preconception that exists in japanese culture of "your superior is always right". if your ranking superior says the sky is red, even though you can see it is blue, the sky is red. i tried kenjutsu for a while, and maybe this was that particular school, but they discouraged exploration and experimentation, which irritated me. you do "x action" because the master says it's x. even if x doesn't make sense and would probably get you killed in a real situation and "y action" would make so much more sense and effective, x is the correct one because masters says so. there tends to be a shunning of techniques that are not of that school. and living martial arts also tend to change over time, each master will have their own interpretations. and going back to the master is always right, even if that interpretation might be wrong, that interpretation is correct. even shogo in earlier videos points this out about his own living martial art of iaido in japan, where there seems to be little to no respect between masters and openly mock each other. the experience i have with hema is the complete opposite. even when encountering different schools, we try to learn and explore techniques from each other. for example my hema instructors mostly teach fiore, but they also encourage incorporating some german techniques such as the thumb grip, which does not exist in fiore manuals having said that im glad that seki sensei does not appear to be like this and tries to explore how to approach different situations
I have done both HEMA and Eastern styles of martial arts starting with wrestling in grade school, then SCA late 70's to early 80's, and Karate and Fencing in college, lastly some Aikido. I prefer western styles of teaching with it's heavy emphasis on pressure testing. Not many of us get into martial arts so that we can drill; we get into it for the fighting. The closer to real fighting, the better. In SCA the armor is functional because it has to be. In full contact sparring you are actively thinking how to get past the defense without exposing yourself in turn. In Fencing I had to learn an attitude - I WILL touch you, you will NOT touch me; you can't learn that in drills or even play sparring where you are holding back to avoid causing injury.
A good example of "making it up," i.e., reconstructing a combat system from scratch WITHOUT treatises, is viking combat, which Roland Warzecha and some others have been working on reconstructing for a while.
That's not entirely true, as one of the things we do as humans is look for a common frame of reference, so unless those people have done no martial arts ever, they will be drawing on those when they create their combat system. You give me a sword and shield type item, with no instructions on how to use, it's gonna look a lot like Bolognese Sword and Buckler. For my friend, same kit, it'll look like I.33. So not really making it up, more trying to draw from disparate data sources (how the weapons work, how things are taught later) a way to use it that seems sensible, but it will still show biases to what the guys have trained in previously (and that's not criticism, it's simply how we as humans work).
Exactly right, my sword and buckler work, and sword and shield work is distinctly Indian (though both are different lineages), it's hard to not see that bleed through even when I do I.33 and other HEMA styles@@Scuzzlebutt142
@@scholagladiatoria The cultural value of a living lineage can be sometimes be extremely great. Katori Shinto Ryu and Tai chi comes to mind, both national institutions in Japan and China (others as well). Also Sanatan Shastarvidiya for India. These are basically living cultural treasures. The thing with reconstructed arts I guess is that there's a need for more experimentation to figure out exactly what the text is saying. But yes, there's quite a bit of cultural value there as well, though some of the heritage value is not there by the mere fact that it's reconstructed. There's something about the direct transmission from teacher to student for centuries that's fascinating, for any art, whether music, dance, sculpting, swordmaking, martial arts, etc. Japanese swords are valued all over the world, even though the metal used to make it, is inferior. Purely due to the craftsmanship involved. The craftsmanship is a living tradition.
@@anantasheshanaga3666the problem is that we are never doing the actual historical thing. The historical thing was based on immediate lived experience of lethal combat on the battlefield or in duels. As soon as we as practitioners no longer have our lives as the ultimate test of the art's functionality, the art begins to devolve away from reality and nothing can be done to prevent that. See also Bruce Lee's critique of the "classical mess" in Asian martial arts. Edit:The same thing also with the devolution of Bushido from the experienced tradition of warriors fighting for their lives before the Tokugawa Shogunate until it was such a debased martial philosophy that it directly resulted in battles lost at enormous cost in WW2 with subordinates using that philosophy to bully their superiors ( !!! ) into costly blunders.
@@anantasheshanaga3666 There is also a danger in revisionism and deliberate corruption in living traditions, hence why snapshot scroll/books are so vital to prevent this. An example would be Tai Chi. The original teachers were killed, books burned, and the arts founding deliberately lost to history because of Chinese government politics. It was then revived as a state sponsored mythical art. Over time it "corrected" for many of the governmental political influences through trial and error to become a functional martial art. But because it calls on a legacy (despite no direct lineage), it is still considered a 3000 year old art form (that was recreated from a handful of poems and philosophy books in the 1970's as a direct political measure to compete with Japanese cultural martial arts). Now there are 4 schools of tai chi, each with 6-12 distinct school styles with a lot of political and regional rivalries, but none can point to a hard piece of evidence to indicate lineage, only vague stories of nameless masters passing on traditions, which may very well be true, but the history is so muddled with politics it is hard to see it as a "pure" martial art, it is a legitimate art, but not a "historically pure" one like some Japanese traditions where they can both name 30 generations of masters, but also have historical books from the period that can be referred to, which reinforces its lineage.
@@j.f.fisher5318Yeah it's hard, for example, to simulate still being able to fight after getting hit in the thigh, because you don't know what it's like to fight with a giant gash in your leg, and how that affects your movement. You just have to call the bout there and assume it's a fight ender.
Great video, I enjoy all of your content. I would think the goals of HEMA differ from the goals of Living Lineage. I would imagine that HEMA is about reconstructing history, and Living Lineage is about carrying on some tradition over time. So arguing about which one is better seems a bit non-sensical.
One thing with any martial art is the instructor. Often times when teaching I'll adjust techniques to the student to fit their body dynamics. A lot of the time it's "this is the traditional way to do it, this is the way i find works for me, this is another way that you may find easier" as such the style evolves while keeping the core the same
These crossover conversations seem really valuable and are certainly interesting. Would love to see you in Arizona with InRangeTV and Sinistral Rifleman at a 2gun Action Challenge Match.
Let me explain something: i study kendo almost 20 year , i cant count minor changes of well established kendo kata thru this years. Imagine how much koryu kata changes thru hundreds of years. So what do u think are those kata traditional or not?
What people also tend to forget, or not even consider, is that some of the solutions of the past may not hold up in the face of changing times. You see this in how later treatises have differing techniques to earlier periods. We can also see this in the tactics used in WWI and WWII urban environments vs how we basically had to reinvent how to move through, and engage targets, in urban environments in Iraq. Both used squads of men with firearms, but in vastly different ways. If one were simply interested in the reenactment phase of HEMA, and other historical martial arts, then strictly keeping to the traditions is actually the goal. However, if one were interested in learning how to become the best fighter with those tools, for say a New World Order that wants to take away our right to defend ourselves with modern weaponry or a long term grid down scenario where ammo becomes less available, then mixing the skills of the past with modern combat tactics makes much more sense, as swords never run out of bullets.
Reconstruction isn't a foreign concept to traditional Japanese martial arts at all btw. I'm personally training a style of Naginatajutsu and one of our instructors is currently trying to revive parts of the school that were lost over time, based on scrolls. A lot of schools have been doing things like this, even in pre-modern Japan. Maniwa Nen Ryu, which is technically the oldest Kenjutsu style even before Katori Shinto Ryu, actually died out in the early 16th century but was reconstructed in 1591.
On the subject of antique Japanese swords... I'm wondering if you could help me. I've inherited a Wakizashi from my late grandfather. I know nothing of the history of the sword except that it somehow found it's way to my great grandfather in the trenches of the Somme. I know a lot of information can be found on the tang, but the leather has perished in places and I'm reluctant to disassemble the blade for fear of the leather just disintegrating. The blade has also lost it's traditional polish and shows signs of damage from use / inexpert sharpening, presumably by my great grandfather. Basically I'm wondering if there's somewhere or someone I could take it to to learn more about the sword and it's history and possibly stabilise / partially restore it's condition?
if i were you, i'd take it to a local university and see what resources they have to give you/how they can help you out, i know my grandmother brought some stuff that her mother had kept from when she was a nurse stationed in manchuria after ww2 and learned some neat stuff about it
Hey Matt, are you reading my mind? I was having similar thoughts about living lineages and how they relate to what we do and how the approach the arts xD this happens with surprisingly regularity xD I'm just sat over here writing about things and/or digitising my paper notes and you'll slap out a video on the exact topic I was thinking about xD
One aspect, I miss in the discussion of which is "better" is a definition of - better at what, for what. What are the parameters of quality??? Better for self defense in the subway? Better for getting agile and fit? Better for bouncing people in a pub...? If I compare two knives - lets say a machete and an Italian stiletto, and I claim, this is a better knife! ...that will for sure be ruled by my perspective, and by my needs. If I need a consealable stabbing implement for self defense, the stiletto probably wins the title. But if I need to hack my way through a jungle, the machete wins. So what is it, one type of martial art is supposed to be better at, than the others, to be "better"???
The machete is not only a knife, it can also be a sword or falchion and as the name implies it is a messer! Interestingly enough, when of the proper length (30"+) it was the primary weapon use in rebellions, revolutions and insurrections.
So, there has been conversation about Kenjutsu/Katana vs Hema/longsword and obviously there's an element of learning the past. . but I would like to see something different. I wanna see an evolution of swordsmanship. I wanna see experts look at Hema and Kenjutsu and combine the best of both worlds or at the very least see if there are newer and better ways to do stuff. I wanna see if we can look at the best qualities of the katana and the long sword and refine it into something new or better. Something like that. Are people out there experimenting and testing and trying new ways or are we in a state of stagnation? Or have we reached the peak?
Interesting questions would be: are theatre sword fighting and late 19th/early 20th fencing actually "genealogical" martial arts or derived from once living ones. Also throughout europe that are surviving stick combat like in, I think, Sardina and Ireland.
I am Korean and I have trained both traditional martial arts (Taekwondo, Judo, Muay Thai, Boxing) and modern MMA and also kenjutsu and tameshigiri and freestyle sword sparring. Every art has advantages and disadvantages. This is why I train them all. I take what I like and disregard what I don’t like. But you got to know the rules to break the rules. Bruce Lee was right. No form is the best form. Do not limit yourself.
An interesting aspect of the kenjutsu continuum is that it hasn't been clear what to do with it, post-Tokugawa as it were. Is is a sport? Is it a "martial art" and what does that mean? Can it be revised for modern battlefield use as it was in WWII? Can it be used to improve the "character" of young people? Meanwhile, HEMA is still exiting the phase of mere reconstruction. Best!
Best line of the video is still "I have friends who do Asian martial arts". 😄 To the point of pressure testing, it is important verify the effectiveness of techniques. I would like to propose the thought that lineage arts have done the pressure testing over generations as opposed to only decades for some rediscovered/relearned (but no less valid) styles.
19:40 This video is great and is one step closer to seeing the two of them possibly have a conversation…but this is where I have to strongly disagree. Matt says that there isn’t much difference between a late Edo period katana vs a Kamakura era katana but this is completely wrong. I get where he’s going at as seems to refer more to the form of the blades (and uses a longsword and a rapier as an example) but to say they didn’t massively change as weapons is incorrect. The *crucial* difference that cannot be understated is the difference in smithing methods between the periods Matt mentions. He is right that swords between these period did not change by a huge margin in terms of shape but, functionally, it is almost night and day. Kamakura swords were made far stronger and, as common with koto blades, had heavy niku and a small hamon close to the edge. When we get to the Edo period, smiths were making swords that were thinner and had extremely wide, flamboyant hamon. Some would be so wide they’d start to get close to the shinogi. This, as some smiths realized, is detrimental to the katana’s overall performance as it allows cracks to travel deeper into the blade and allows far larger chips to be taken out of the edge. Generally swords of the Edo period were made more so as art pieces and had lost a lot of functionality. I know the sound of hamon being farther back may not sound like much of anything and has no change at a first glance, but it really is a world of a difference. There is this perception that katana edges could chip easily and it is likely because of these later art swords that this misconception came to be. Matt already made a video about a British anecdote from the late Edo period of a katana receiving a massive chip against a saber. Dlatrex Swords has an amazing video going over accounts of Edo period katana failing that show just how detrimental the change in hamon was.
Interesting questions would be: are theatre sword fighting and late 19th/early 20th fencing actually "genealogical" martial arts or derivedb from once living ones. Also throughout europe that are surviving stick combat like in, I think, Sardina and Ireland.
The canary Islands has one of the longest surviving stick fighting martial arts, Palo Canario. But you also find stick fighting in Portugal and the South of France. Wooden sword stick fighting was a martial art method, during the Ottoman occupation of Greek Cyprus. The greek population was not allowed to carry steel swords, so they resorted to using ones made out of wood.
There are actually loads of living traditions in HEMA from all over Europe. People often forget that fencing, boxing and wrestling all have unbroken living traditions in Europe - it's just that they have evolved from what they were 50, 100, or 300 years ago. But they never disappeared really.
No one martial art is better then another, With a few exceptions. My feeling is that this whole question depends on if the "living" art has changed and evolved over the years to reflect current needs. If not, it's a fossil. (as an example, in 20 years of trad jujutsu, the style I practice has changed and modified more than one move from Kata, to make it more effective. Or practical at all, tbh. But then any martial art is just a starting point, onto which you add your own strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, and your own mindset. For myself I favour fluid defence followed by aggressive and brutal counter attacks. BUT, as one of my instructors always says; "there's a big difference between Dojo "art", and pub-car park "technique". Basically, if it works, it's right.
This is a long shot but I wonder if windlass would be interested in doing a period-accurate katana reconstruction at some point. I feel like such a product would be a big boon to collectors, but I’m no market researcher.
22:12 yes that's a topic that's been on my mind throughout the video, but it went in a different direction from here. I've had training in a German tradition for 2 years, never past the level of novice so bear that in mind. I wonder how you honestly pressuretest your skills in exercise of murder in an age where butchering eachother for the sake of sport is mostly frowned upon and very much illegal. Where I trained we practised form using wooden longswords, and sparred using kendoswords. The only protection we used were leathergloves and, more importantly, control. You don't don't stab, you don't attack the very tender bits and while an attack should connect in a form that shows intent we were never to follow through with that attack (though we could of course transition into a follow-up emphasising both intent, control and planning). Control in this regard was rule nr1 where I trained. I loved that, and when I had some practice lessons in kendo I was a bit surprised they were trained in intent just like I was familiar with, but not on the measure of control on a followthrough. Noth in those beginner classes anyway. In a way this made sense because they were wearing protection and there was no immediate need for it, but it felt very wrong to me. But it also made me wonder about something else. Is the level of protection you use an indication of what you can or can't properly test when you are sparring and not in a situation where you are trying to chop someone's arm off and all rules regarding your opponents health are out the window? Is that actually a case or is that simply to with level of expertise, and my own lack thereof? In other words does your skill at sparring tell you verything about your skills as a fighter?
Schools, styles with a long tradition, accumulate knowledge. Let's take karate kyokushin as an example. Oyama opened his first official dōjō in 1953. He was 30 years old then, and had about 20 years of experience in various martial arts. To sum up, this gives us, about 90 years of experience of him and thousands of his successors. Enough knowledge for today, to keep you busy for a lifetime. Do historic fencing schools have this to offer? Within one coherent, logical system. For example, one system of longsword fencing. Maybe in the next 20 years. If the coaches follow the example of Oyama, Kano, Gracie and create their own original styles. Without styles, knowledge will be lost with teachers.
Reconstruction: Better with modern translation and application. Will appear to be more effective. Interpretation from a modern mindset may contribute to misunderstanding, misapplication, and possibility of jettisoning information. Appears progressive. Linage based: Will have traditions and historical context in mind, secrets included. Has the possibility of appearing like bullshido- unless enough effort is put into understanding historical context/usage. May fall into complacency or resort to compromising the art/system when posed with financial & existential trouble. Appears conservative. Both: Useful for those who practice them for the right reasons. May develop character, discipline and physical conditioning. May create superiority complex, tribalism, elitism and other forms of self-aggrandizement.
its interesting how MMA showed that studying particular lineages was not as important as being competent enough with a diverse skill set to be able to deal with any one particular lineage
i should add Robert Childs talks about this sort of stuff, he rather be able to adapt to his opponent to be able to defeat them, and discourages "getting really got at one thing" because then we will just adapt to that and defeat you
It didn't show that at all. Everyone was a product of living heritages who competes and competed in MMA. The discussion is about the difference with reconstructed martial arts and such has no relevance at all wiith MMA.
@@MarcRitzMD yes it did. look at early UFC. boxers couldnt beat grapplers. then submission guys took out the grapplers. it also DOES have to do with this discussion. if you only want to do longsword against longsword thats fine, but that is a different RECONSTRUCTION than if you wanted to longsword against katana, or saber fencing versus rapier fencing. same as if you just want to train boxing, versus focusing on boxing while being able to deal with a wrestler.
@@MarcRitzMD also consider Robert Childs. he doesnt care if you have a reconstruction or a living tradition: you cant fix yourself into just one line of attack or line of thinking. the superior reconstructions or living traditions (like his living tradition) teach you to be adaptable. just like chess. OH NO A CHESS REFERENCE. cant wait for you to tell me that isnt what chess shows at all and that this discussion has nothing to do with chess 😘
@@MarcRitzMD your comment (no hate) actually makes me wonder if you could have a "private martial art". so if i were involved with say, 2 living traditions (where or not they started as reconstructions or not) and i decided to import various techniques into my skill set, would that be my own "private recreation"? if i never taught anyone, i guess it wouldnt be a living tradition, maybe if i had one student or made youtube videos about technique, then it would be?
@@jonathanyaeger2289 Incorrect, the term "classical fencing" was actually coined in France in the mid-19th century to describe the difference between the older style of masters like Louis Justin Lafaugére and the "romantic" school of younger men like Bertrand Lozés. While some people do you use the term "classical fencing" in the way you describe (Nick Evangelista), I would argue that that is not its proper meaning. Louis Rondelle stated in 1892 that "A classical fencer is supposed to be one who observes a fine position, whose attacks are fully developed, whose hits are marvelously accurate, his parries firm, and his ripostes executed with precision. One must not forget that this regularity is not possible unless the adversary is a party to it. It is a conventional bout, which consists of parries, attacks, and returns, all rhyming together." In other words, classical fencing is fencing being conducted with the proper traditional form and technique; another, more succinct, definition that is often added being "to touch without being touched", its not just sport fencing from a particular time period. Moreover, I would also point out that at least some contemporary classical fencing lineages do meet the literal Japanese definition of a koryu (a school that has been around since before the Meiji Restoration in 1871) as their are several Maestri today who can trace their lineage at least as far back as Giuseppe Radaelli who was teaching in the 1860's. Frankly, there is also very little difference between the way the way foil would be taught by a maestro today, as opposed to the way Rondelle would have described it in 1892, or Lafaugére in 1820 (or Parise in 1883 and Scorza and Grisetti in 1805 if you prefer the Italian tradition). In the 20th century sport fencing, like Kendo, went through a period where the various traditional schools were pulled apart and then lumped together, but classical fencing diverged before this point and still retains the difference between various regional traditions, making it more equivalent to kenjutsu.
Another advantage of reconstructed martial arts is that you have a far better assurance that your fellow practitioners, including instructors, are a bunch of nerds doing it because they think it's cool, and not a bunch of snobs or tradition addicts.
Hello! this maybe a small question, but im about 5"9, I practice iaijutsu, and was curious id like to find a good "hand and a half" sword if it exists, for Italian treatices that would work for my height. Thank you much love from Detroit
This is a complicated subject but I definitely don't believe that living tradition necessarily means most efficient, realistic or most effective in every single way and I think that Olympic fencing sort of illustrates that point.
You can check out Harjeet Singh Sagoo's Shastra Vidya - the martial arts of the ancient Hindu warriors, the Kshatriyas. There are also living traditions, some of whom may have manuals.
Is there any truth in India classical dancing is related to martial arts like the hand movements and legs movements could be blocks @@scholagladiatoria
@@braddbradd5671 Check out Sanatan Shastarvidiya if you are looking for Indian martial arts that are related to Indian classical dance. Sanatan Shastarvidiya is one of these classical arts, just like Indian classical music and dance, and so is related to both of them. As far as the postures of the arms and legs being blocks, etc - no. It's not that direct a relationship. The leg raised postures are more about manouvering the body mass and quickly changing directions, etc. The arm movements are more about merging with the opponent, etc.
Better? No. Both are trying to keep different arts and aspects of those arts alive. Both ways have value. Everybody's doing the best they can within the constraints we have to deal with.
Living versus reconstructed: Which one is better? Well that's a loaded question! In which way one will be better than the other? For one thing, traditional martial arts existing today are no longer holding true to their original methods. Specially in the case of Chinese and Japanese martial arts, they have gone through modifications over time. Either because of change of cultural attitudes or because of government impose policies and rules. The japanese swordsmanship styles of the Edo period are not as battlefield practical as older styles. Yet even earlier styles from the sengoku period have gone through modifications and have somehow lost their true appreciations. With the appearance of HEMA today, many old traditional martial arts are going through a process of revisionism and looking back at their true original applications of techniques.
I think living, lineage martial arts will always be better than reconstructed martial arts as long as one condition is true: that the lineage martial art has continued to progress as a martial art that evolves as combat evolves and that it doesn't change to transform into a sport. Sportifying a lineage martial art waters down its combat effectiveness.
Nothing against buhurt, but burhurt armour is actually rather modern in many of its design choices. Even period tournament armour is substantially different to modern buhurt armour.
Not having seen the video yet - living lineage martial arts' biggest advantage over others is that instructors in living lineage martial arts usually can actually show proof of their training - be it a certificate or a diploma, or something else that can prove they've actually received proper instruction. On the other hand, here, in Bulgaria there are schools who claim to have reconstructed rediscovered some ancient Bulgarian martial art, but their instructors have very little real experience in anything. I'm not going to name names, but I think this is a problem. If you know what you're doing, reconstruction martial arts can be great, of course.
What is that certificate or diploma actually worth though? Unless you know that the school that issued that thing actually teaches competently, it doesn't mean a thing. There could be a hypothetical school that teaches sword fighting from a supposedly unbroken tradition of a thousand years, but they never do any sparring. Good luck using that stuff in practice if you've never faced anyone uncooperative, but they sure issue diplomas. On the other hand you can have a merry informal group of enthusiasts who spar all the time and so have a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn't. No certificates though, sadly. Although I'm sure someone could whip one up in Photoshop. Determining the quality of what's being taught is hard, especially if you're a beginner and have no frame of reference.
@@BruderLoras >>What is that certificate or diploma actually worth though? --- It's worth a lot, actually, especially in our time. Sadly, the Internet is filled with self-defense "experts" whose education comes from videos by other "experts" whose education comes from videos... The Internet is also filled with sword-fighting "experts" without actual training for some reason. Shadiversity managed to fool everyone for freaking years that he was an actual martial artist, myself included. He never actually trained properly, though. His political opinions aside, this was the main reason I eventually stopped following him - that I realized he wasn't nearly as knowledgeable as he'd like to pretend to be.
I believe that there are some people in Japan that are currently practicing HEMA, but I don't know of any organized group in the sense like in the West. The way that they are going about it is by using synthetics.
There is also another argument to be made - that of, "martial effectiveness" let's call it. If you take a reconstructed art from let's say the 15th century, you can be fairly certain that the techniques you see there were meant to hurt and kill people the way they are written. While in a lineage art you can never be certain if the technique you are being taught has actually retained it's martial usefulness - after all the last time someone used it to really hurt an opponent was centuries ago. During those centuries it could have been (and probably was to an extent) watered down by omitting certain mechanical details that were no longer needed or by intentionally making it safer to practice etc.
If you look at a martial art from let's say the 15th century, you don't know if it's really that useful on a modern battlefield. Actually, you can be quite sure that there are more effective ways to kill people around now. 'Martial effectiveness' of a martial art isn't a static thing, it changes by context.
@@Ehuatl I don't mean useful in a modern battlefield at all. Swords have no place on a modern battlefield. What I meant was useful in its original context - either a lowtech battlefield or a 1v1 sword fight. After all this is what we are all trying to emulate when training historical martial arts.
The only difference is style and maybe potentially some things were not written down, typically minor details, that HEMA practitioners may have to extrapolate or infer some.
![ละลาย (LALALYE) - DAOU PITTAYA ต้าห์อู๋ พิทยา [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wo6r9TgausI/mqdefault.jpg)
Install Raid for Free ✅ IOS/ANDROID/PC: pl.go-ga.me/0wrlh7v2 and get a special starter pack with an Epic champion ⚡ Drake⚡ Available only for new players
Thank you Raid: Shadow Legends for sponsoring this video, and thanks to Universal Studios Licensing
what would be the MMA of weaponized mixed martial arts?
@@beepboop204I think it's not really comparable, on account of the fact that there are a bunch of HEMA competitions where the regulations are relatively system-neutral. MMA arose from an environment of many highly insular and regulated living martial arts traditions: boxing, wrestling, wing-chun, judo, karate, kickboxing, Muay-Thai, etc. all represent systems descended from the continuously evolving unarmed combat traditions of their respective cultures as they became increasingly systematized and sportified over centuries, and the desire to mix those traditions and pick and choose what works best was only really compelling because of how rigidly the forms had been divided previously.
Because HEMA is largely reconstructed, we don't have the same sense of completeness (both true and false) that allows for such extremely idiomatic divisions of principle. There is an exception, of course, for clubs that rigidly stick to only what is attested in treatises by specific masters (i.e. Meyers or Lichtenaur) in what they practice. Even in those cases, however, there is still a need to interpret the material. This means that you are likely to find as many versions of a Meyers' system as there are people practicing it. The final consequence is that you can't as easily test Lichtenaur's longsword versus Meyer's longsword in a meaningful way, like you can test a master of a tradition of Karate against a master of another school of Karate or of Kung Fu.
pokemon go@@beepboop204
@@beepboop204
Does not exist. While MMA still has safety rules and restrictions, it is still pretty close to unrestricted hand-to-hand combat. HEMA has a variety of rules restricting thrusting and grappling, which are fundamental combat techniques. Same with Asian martial arts. Ultimately, they are all just sports, but MMA seems most analogous to actual combat.
@@mouseutopiadystopia24601 thanks for sharing thoughts and not being a dick about it 🙂 i guess that would be the difference between sports and combat sports
What a timely video - my HEMA guild just held a fundraiser in conjunction with a Mugai Ryu Iaido school. We had students from both schools have demonstration bouts against each other, both for the entertainment of the attendees and so we could learn from each other. Learning the similarities and differences between our styles was fascinating (and a lot of fun!)
That is awesome!
Are there videos of this?
That's very cool and hope that goes mainstream. The problem I see is that most Kenjutsu schools in Japan forbid competition. I hope that changes.
I have to ask did they think that you were doing a legitimate martial art or did they think it was… I’m not sure what word to use but let’s say fake or pointless.
@BS-cc4ks I'm not sure, there might be some out there if you look for "Wandering Warriors Benefit".
I come from mostly Asian, generally unarmed traditions. Even without the challenges of realistically training with lethal weapons, living traditions suffer creep very quickly when not under the constant pressure of immediate lethal combat. Bruce Lee termed it the "classical mess." Deconstructing and rebuilding from first principles is vital. If there's no chance to find out that "oh wow, my buddy tried that thing we do and died, we should fix that" then the art collects dead wood and becomes stagnant. No set of written instructions can define everything about how an art works, so interpretation slips generation by generation. And manuals or treatises often skip basic knowledge so they are useless without instuction, encode principles in obscure language that requires specialized knowledge to decode, or are meant as marketing tools with overblown stuff added to encourage students to hire the trainer who wrote the treatise.
I first learned karate because I needed to know how to fight. In hindsight, karate was lacking even though it wasn't completely useless. But the fact that real life threats motivated me, means that I was always thinking more critically about what I was really learning.
It's interesting that the problem you write about occurred even in the completely fictional world of Star Wars. I mean, the first fight between the Jedi and the Emperor was, well, bad for the Jedi because they hadn't fought against the Sith in a very long time. They knew their fighting methods only from treaties. But there is something else. I read about two actors practicing talking to each other on stage. Everything was going great, they were testing different variants. But this conversation was somehow artificial, and they could not effectively apply these principles to real conversation in life. The psychologist explained this: The conversation on stage went great because they both felt it wasn't real, neither felt fear of being looked down on, etc.
Ironically, the bloat from fanciful and complex printing is largely responsible for the English languages obscure spelling traditions. Printers made themselves valuable by being the only ones who knew certain words, or changed them to suit a customers needs and set the first mass spelling of words in stone as it were. never underestimate the politics in influencing an art or a structure.
@@littlekong7685I don't think that's very relevant because people used to be largely be phonetic readers, and the fact that spelling was not standardized may have been one of the reasons. Also, if the spelling is not standardized, there's no right spelling to secure from the competition.
The obscure wording, when it happened (and indeed it was not prevalent at times and in cultures) has probably more to do with obscuring the art itself. You want your students to have a guide, but you don't want people who you don't know-maybe in enemy countries-to learn much of what you know and possess the instrument to surpass your own students. Indeed, you can see this sort of reasoning in the secret techniques they had in Asian martial arts.
@@littlekong7685 Recently I watched a video about whether the same problem exists with musical notation. The conclusion was that even if it wasn't INTENTIONALLY incomprehensible to outsiders, at least the professionals writing this music for themselves didn't care whether other people understood it and used complex abbreviations and symbols that only worked well for them.
After seeing Seiki Sensei's post you were the first person I thought of to recommend in their comment section, so seeing your enthusiasm in these response videos has been a blast.
And your last point, about HEMA being in the beginning stages of becoming a living tradition is a good one that I hadn't considered before. Very interesting and pretty obvious in retrospect.
Having been involved in batto jutsu (real, not Rurouni Kenshin) for about 20 years now, many Asian martial arts suffer greatly from not including sparring in the curriculum. This is something where HEMA has a great advantage, because techniques that might have worked on the battlefield centuries ago can be tested face to face with a large and growing population of enthusiastic people. Some Japanese schools have forms of sparring, but many do not, and convince themselves that kumitachi (partner sword training) exercises are just as good. They're not. Even if the technique works, you won't learn how to apply it properly without real and unchoreographed resistance.
It's not a problem likely to see a solution any time soon, either. When you join a traditional Asian martial arts school, you also join in the culture and tradition, which has many wonderful and fulfilling aspects, and at least two serious negatives- you by default limit your potential student base to people who appreciate that, and by striving to uphold tradition, discourage yourself from turning it into something else. To create a HEMA style sporting/competitive environment in the Japanese martial arts community would be a very useful thing, but I think most of the schools would decline to participate.
Batto jutsu is very cool! I agree it would be a very useful thing to have a HEMA style competition in Japanese martial arts. I would hope that Kendo would open a division allowing Kenjutsu or HEMA style.
I agree that sparring is extremely important and is an important distinguisher between real martial arts and bullshido. A lot of "traditional" martial arts are actually relatively modern creations and sparring is often avoided because fully resisting training partners will quickly show how ineffective these styles really are. However I feel HEMA also suffers a similar problem in the way sparring and many competions are handled. Too many schools only do very low intensity training with constant breaks and pauses taken after every contact. While avoiding injury should always be a priority, the sparring intensity should similar to that of African stick fighting sports (Nguni, Donga, etc). That sort of training would greatly overall skill level in the sport and also give a clearer picture of what real fighting was like.
Given the limitations on how they were able to train in the past, I sometimes wonder if a lot of the legendary fencers of the past wouldn't actually be as good by today's standards. They might have been good, but there's a lot of lost potential when they could only do balls to the wall stuff in a duel. Likewise the traditions must have accumulated things that worked at low pressure or worked in a fight where a fencer disarmed some drunk guy who wasn't able to fully resist, so you have to figure out how the art changes when that pressure is dialed up. @@dgmt1
@@dgmt1Even ones that are not modern creations have often been changed via years of complacency into something that no longer resembles a real martial art and is something akin to a choreographed dance for tourists.
I have studied HEMA, and Kung Fu, and one of the things that I very much appreciate the "reconstructed" system vs. the living one is transparency. A HEMA practitioner is able to access and study everything that a Master has and glean information from that, while in living lineages there seems to be a more stratified division on access to information.
Not to mention that, inevitably, some of the knowledge passed down orally and/or by demonstration will be lost or altered.
Many living martial arts are run like the Arthur Murray school of dance. They could tell you all the basic movements in the first class and then have you back occasionally for group practice/evaluation. But they'll make more money by making it seem mysteriously complicated and spending hours on frivolous drills.
Another way martial arts can change over time is from sportification. Take boxing for example; in the early bare-knuckle days punching styles were quite different from today. Also early styles allowed grappling, throws, etc. Obviously gloves became the norm but early on bare knuckle was how pugilists fought.
So despite having a well documented history & a fairly short lineage we can see vast change in boxing over time due to it being practiced as a sport & not just a self defense art.
Many kenjutsu schools suffered transformations (I mean more than the natural change due to person to person transmission), specially between Meiji and Showa. The living examples that didn't change so much (such as katori shinto ryu) have one advantage over reconstructions: they have been tested in real battle until relatively recent times (as in the Boshin war). Of course, exist the possibility of adition of spurius variations in the direct transmission but, considering that this traditional schools also have writing record of the techniques, the gap for interpretation is smaller.
It's a fascinating topic to me, thanks for posting.
@@scholagladiatoria thanks to you for your high quality content! As an academic colleague myself (and also fencing practitioner) I find it quite riveting. Greetings from Spain
Katori was saved at the last minute at the turn of the 19th century. When the last living practitioners were gathered. Despite senile dementia, everyone fought for their own vision of style.
Finally, a consensus was reached. And then, the hard work began, to build a coherent system from the scraps.
Very interesting - could you point me toward some sources (in Japanese is fine, but not kanbun 😉) on kenjustsu / or rather actual sword use in the Boshin war? I've often heard about the firearms used during the Boshin War seen illustrations and pictures of them (muskets and more modern weaponry, rifles, artillery, etc) but much less about the use of traditional weapons, especially swords in the conflict, which I understood to have already been mostly marginal at this point, even though the shogunate forces were not fully modernised,
From what I'd gathered, after the reforms initiated during Bakumatsu, the role played by foreign military advisors and the tactical changes they led to, traditional weaponry was quickly dropped and swords took on a rather similar role to that of swords in late 19th century European warfare.
This something we see clearly later on in illustration of cavalry charges in the first Sino-Japanese war a few decades later for instance ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#/media/File:16126.d.1(14)-The_Battle_of_Pyongyang.jpg )
The first national (Imperial) army in Japan was established only a few years later, mostly starting in 1871...
The Boshin War, is interesting, as it's probaby one of the last stands of traditional Japanese weaponry against more modern/standard European-inspired warfare and tactics.
thanks!
For empty handed Chinese martial arts, the time for significant drift seems to be about 3-4 generations for arts taught to the public, and about the same for family lineages that have to contest with public lineages. Isolated lineages can remain stable for hundreds of years. Weapon based arts tend to be much more stable. For a weapon form that’s stable, you tend to get techniques that cluster into a small handful of “schools”. For example there is only 1 guan dao “school” called spring and autumn. For great spear there are two or three (Yang, Liu He, and possibly a Henan school). These schools tend to be stable until the style of warfare requiring the weapon substantially shifts. Now what was discussed above is historical shift. Most modern shift tends to occur for a different reason. Modern practitioners in CMA lack the physicality to do many of the old methods effectively.
Yang spear became yang staff after Ban Hao's (second gen) daughter was killed in a spear training exercise although I believe some branches of the Wu family still practice it as spear.
@@emptyemptiness8372Yang spear refers to the Song Dynasty Pear Blossom spear of the Yang family (no relation to Yang Taijiquan which only dates to the Qing). Most northern long spear sets are derived from the Pear Blossom spear or the Six Harmony spear.
The spear sets of Yang Taijiquan were alive and well in the Yang family after Banhou. Both Cheng fu and Shao hao passed down the Yang family spear methods.
Didn't China purge most stuff then standardize something less functional for display? I know some lineages fled to Taiwan.
@@Endoptic There were some lineages that were lost, but primary effect was dilution. The number of performers and people with minimal martial knowledge multiplied rapidly, and the number of traditional masters was reduced. For example, you can still find well preserved lineages of Che Shi Xingyiquan in Taigu. But the number of masters is smaller, and for every master of the traditional art, you have 10’s if not 100’s of modern Wushu performers.
The loss of knowledge was also highly regional. Xian’s martial culture flourished, so much so that masters from other regions relocated there over time. There are other areas where a village’s martial art’s traditions were severely suppressed.
Also, China after the communist take over offered much less in terms of occupational opportunities for professional martial artists relative to the period of the Qing and the Republic. A lot of lineages all over the world died out for this reason more than any other.
Great!! I always enjoy your videos but this one addressed an issue that can be so divisive when it needn't be so. I agree with everything you said about the two types of martial arts and how the lines between them are often blurred. I think that each type of martial art, whether reconstructed or a living tradition is valid and can learn from each other. I have studied iaido for over twenty years but I always enjoy your videos about various European sword arts and their weapons and learn from those programs in a way that enhances my studies of iaido. My sensei always said that there is no "best martial art." The best one is the art that you are committed to, put the time and effort into, and enjoy. Thank you.
My sensei often said that there's no "best martial art", there's only "best martial artist". So then he would say: get to practice, you're still too slow and lacking!😅
Matt, I somewhat recently had a heated conversation with someone who was essentially stating that Eastern martial arts are categorically superior and better informed because the lineage is living. His words were something along the lines of, "THESE teachings actually come straight from the battlefield", as opposed to Western/(other) martial arts.
I found that absurd for numerous reasons. Firstly, Europeans didn't just up and drop the practice of close quarters martial arts altogether. As late as World War II (technically!), there were albeit RARE instances of swords being used, and bayonet practice obviously survives to this day. Moreover, I also have experience in unarmed martial arts and I could look up very quickly the differences between what my own karate master taught, versus what his own teacher taught him. (Because, thankfully, his master was famous and there exists now many separate branches from his school of thought.)
What you describe as mission creep is absolutely a thing. It'd be insane to deny it! Just like a story told by pure oral tradition will mutate, no human memory is perfect and no human lifespan is infinite, thus it is basically inevitable that a martial art taught without direct, hard evidence to the original forms and tenets, is going to shift with time. And the claim to "This was used in a real battlefield", is actually nonsense, as we are far, far beyond the era where bow and polearm and sword were contemporary battlefield deciders. So no, what's practiced is indeed just as far removed in both examples from the real thing. And one single generation of master-pupil teaching can change a LOT.
If you go into a museum you will find a lot of WW1 and WW2 handweapons used in hand to hand combat in the trenches: maces, revolver-dagger etc. usually soldiers were using their shovel as axe and for these situations they stole and looked for pistols and revolvers. Combat was more gruesome than shooting and bayonet attack.
That person has no idea what they're talking about.
Disclaimer: I'm Japanese, so what I say applies only to our martial arts, as I do not know what was up in other countries.
Majority of existing martial arts were developed in time of peace. They do not come straight from the battlefield. Which should make a lot of sense if you think about it. Group fighting in armor against another group in armor is very different from a duel. There are techniques which are great against a person with no armor, but will not work in the slightest against an opponent wearing full armor. Like wrist locks. Just won't work against armor.
In time of peace it makes no sense to train facing bunch of guys in armor, who wield 6m long spears (Oda Nobunaga famously had forces armed with that, for real), while arrows rain down on you and a cavalry charge is incoming. That just ain't going to happen. What is going to happen, is getting in a duel against a guy with a katana who wears no armor, or getting jumped on while you're doing your thing, like eating.
So in order to attract students, all the schools focused on what's going to be useful in situations described above. That ain't battlefield techniques.
Iaijutsu, for example, was born in time of peace. No one would be sitting down with a katana by their side on a battlefield, but that's exactly what you do when you're eating or having a tea. Iai was developed for times when conversation turns sour, or you're getting jumped during your meal. You're presumed to be sitting.
Things like that.
If you have to use a bayonet, you have fucked up. Bayonet is for extreme emergencies and you definately do not want to be in a situation where you need it
Even something as a pistol is not a weapon for battlefield
@@tacticsogreman Thank you so much for your input. I am almost certain there are modern Japanese martial arts that teach or practice things like armored grappling, and working with the long spears, (or pikes, we call them).
But even then, all we can do today is practice safely and get a sense of what works and what doesn't. Nobody (hopefully!) should ever be recreating life-and-death fighting with these weapons these days, so we are all equally distanced from testing these things in practice, on battlefields.
Even with some of the existing treatises in HEMA, they have images and descriptions of how you should move, and even then it is possible to get, albeit slightly, different interpretations. And we can only test it with sparring. Like you say, not on a massive battlefield with projectiles in the air and movement, and cavalry and the psychological extremes of battle on that scale.
Great video, thanks. I really hope there will be more crossovers of HEMA with Asian martial arts. I would love to see Akademia Szermierzy Fior di battaglia reaction, from both Matt and Sekisensei
That's one of my favorite channels also. I would second that!
Good points, I appreciate both HEMA and Kenjutsu.
Another fun video! I am a student at a traditional Japanese dojo where we study many different Ryu-ha, with each of the. Having boyh armed and unarmed components. Of course the katana, in all of the ryu, is my favorite of the weapons. 👍
To your point about how most living lineages don’t train in armored fighting techniques: we are one of those rare schools that does. Particularly in Kukishin Ryu, some (but not all) of the techniques still preserve the qualities of movement used by soldiers wearing load bearing equipment. It’s pretty cool.
Surely one of the major differences is that HEMA emerges from a relatively recent ‘experimental’ base, while the Living Lineages we most often discuss here come from a very traditional base.
Neither is better, the benefits and drawbacks of both seem fairly obvious - particularly around the ‘experimental’ part in HEMA and the - let’s call it ‘living knowledge’ (the subtle bits) in a Living Legacy.
Both can be an advantage and trap, and both are available to the other if they chose to step outside of their own zone - and it is in that debate and exchange in which a significant amount of enrichment occurs.
I could be wrong, but that’s always been my perspective. Militancy over which is better and which is more correct rather misses the point - except perhaps in the context of preserving very precise existing traditions, which I’ve always seen as slightly doomed to failure, as humans always reinterpret and reinvent everything they touch in the context of their current lives.
Also, as an aside, one of the ‘benefits’ of HEMA is that - in the majority - many HEMA groups and members are considerably more relaxed and openly passionate about their interests. Which makes them considerably more welcoming. They don’t have the veil of massive established traditions, which to some can be quite intimidating.
I do both HEMA and lineage styles. I have no issue with both unless either starts saying one is better. What I do like about pressure testing is that there is a certain limited realism in that in any period, not everyone you fight fights the same way. So I enjoy that aspect of fighting, and it also too shows where anything taught must adapt as well
In German we have two different words for the two different things: "Kampfkunst" (Kampf=Fight/Martial Kunst=Art) and "Kampfsport"
I think there is a great disparity between a martial art (whether lineage or reconstructed by this video's definition) and sports based martial arts. I also feel there is a greater disparity and more of a 'reconstruction' where language barriers are involved. We can see that in misunderstandings and evolutionary differences between Karate and Taekwondo and then how those branched further from their origins... Karate leaving their islands and becoming the boxing of Japan's mainland then going once more to the West. Taekwondo leaving its influences from Karate and other roots to then change to market to a global stage and then change further as a sport.
In these cases, it isn't uncommon to do kata and have instructors unable to explain what exactly you are doing in those kata. If you go back to books, or if you take a trip to visit a living teacher in Okinawa, you will quickly see differences and have your various questions answered about this technique or that technique.
It can leave students frustrated who don't have those sources, especially if they are serious about pursuing a martial art for person growth and understanding. In some cases instructors who don't know, never learned themselves. In other cases they just aren't very articulate in their ability to explain what they were taught or learned themselves. And in some cases, what is practiced in the kata doesn't make sense until you have a practice partner.
Some schools of martial arts are different from other branches, because masters giving instructions got older. They're not as nimble, or they got injured - so how they do techniques or how they would approach a problem have changed. That is then taught and people learn and they only know of that method unless they seek out others.
Circling back to this video... Well Hema does have living teachers, and books for sure. And in Japan you have a variety of schools that are the same. But not all instructors are quite like what we get to enjoy from Seki sensei. He's faithful to what he was trained in, understands the context of why things were done, has learned a lot from other methods, is observant, is articulate, and is open to learn. With the language barrier broken down, we can also avoid misunderstandings which is such a boon. Like any martial arts journey, it's often smoother sailing when you have a great teacher.
Being an antique dealer is such a boon! :) I'll have to see if you have a video where you talk how you got into antique weapon dealing and HEMA/ etc. Cheers.
This would be cool, with commentary with Lucy!
This is one of the videos why I love this channel. ❤
Basically a human being with a long length of sharp metal held in both hands, has to move in certain ways in order to not fall over while defending themselves and/or attacking someone else........ Everything else is jargon.
Well said, Matt and oddly well timed for us. Our HEMA classes have been popular but we are about to launch our Kenjutsu classes this week. It was my original martial art that I began learning as a child. My time in HEMA, however, has made me rethink how I wish to teach the Kenjutsu systems I learned as we did so little pressure testing, sparring, ect. These limitations may have been due to the traditions and equipment we were taught with. Essentially, I plan to reconstruct what we teach into my own school, separated from direct linage of what I had learned (as one of those ryu seemed to be reconstructed themselves). I got a lot of push back from the purists in the JSA world but I did noticed that not one of them does extensive testing through sparring or free play, nor do they use steel sparring katana, which are now available. While the view of the system I wish to create is to study what a Japanese warrior MAY have used in combat, most of the push back to this approach has been through an almost dogmatic view of martial arts, or a distrust in modern equipment. I personally just want to practice and teach in a way a samurai could have practically fought as well as learning more from other kenjutsu systems. HEMA certainly gave me the spirit and culture to wish to see kenjutsu kata and techniques through the light of how they were actually used.
I think your video shows the nuance that our school feels and that I hope more come to see when it comes to living linage vs reconstructed systems. The only time I would see this is problematic is if a reconstructed system is presented as a living linage system. Long winded way of saying thank you for putting this into words.
Long time since Matt did a video of this quality, congratulations. Cheers
Great video that clears up a lot of common misconceptions of what the difference between 'reconstructed' Martial Arts versus 'living lineage' Martial Arts actually consists in - or not.
Thanks for covering the topic Matt.
Evolved Martial Arts is perhaps a better term. Schools like Sandhurst, West Point and Hanover had a tradition of masters of the sword, horse and such, teaching their fighting system to cadet officers. They also evolved into sport as their combat need diminished, as a source of personal development. In asia, Che and Zen were always as important as skill. something we only see in European legends or Knights Templar.
I would add another comparison with something a bit 'in-between': Taiko Japanese drumming. It was constructed (not reconstructed in this case) from different drumming traditions in Japan, but as a performing act, like in a stage, was basically invented like 50+ years ago, what it makes it a very young activity (especially under Japanese standards). But know it is a living lineage, highly recognized and also complex, creating new things with big foundation in ancient traditions.
Really great video as always Matt. One thing I would add is that many martial arts with direct lineages claim a consistency to what is being taught that his highly debatable. You touched on this in your “10 Generations” comment but it’s far worse than that. Karate Ryuha are a perfect example where a teacher dies and the senior students sometimes fracture to continue the system as they see it should be taught (already implying various interpretations) and then within a single generation you can already start seeing the variance. I remember someone years ago pointing out a group preparing in the corner of a budosai event in Okinawa that apparently were doing the same Ryu as me but from a different school and it was unrecognisable. And Karate is far from ancient. Humans just aren’t great at Information Fidelity. It’s not the way we’re built.
Once again a great Video of you Matt
Why do you think no face protection was used during exercise in the past? Was making a protective mask that provides good visibility and protection at the same time beyond the technical capabilities of past eras? When I see the fine old swept hilts - it seems to me that a protective mask was also possible.
They definitely could have made fencing masks, but the earliest experiments with them seem to be from about 1700. There is some evidence that they used specific pieces of standard armour for fencing practice sometimes (gauntlets are shown on clothed fencers in Paulus Hector Mair, for example). But we don't really know why fencing masks weren't invented earlier. It should be noted though that this was almost exactly the same in Japan, where the kendo helmet was not invented until a similar date (along with what would evolve into gekiken/kendo).
@@scholagladiatoria In fact, in the Middle Ages, they used special helmets only for tournament fighting. They resembled a fencing mask, only the grate was thicker. But since the weapon used in this competition was a cross between a sword and a baseball bat, the competitor did not have to worry about being stabbed into the cracks of the mask. So - people in the past had a way of thinking that such a mask could be useful. It's even more unclear why it wasn't widely used.
So because of the age I live in and area I grew up in, I had to train on my own and I took in everything I saw in a sort of 'jeet-ken-do" but it's influences are Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish fencing.
Now I'm an adult and what I do with my life is up to me, so I want to join Tenshin-ryuu Hyoho because I believe in my story.
It would also be a great joy to sweat in your studio, BECAUSE YOU GET IT 😊
This might be my favorite video of yours now.
@scholagladitoria: First to say: A great video! As someone who practice Okinawans Karate which has as well techniques of weapons known as Kobudo I can 100% agree. We have the part "reconstructed martial art" of the Bubishi book which shows ancient techniques which we interpreted from as well as from the Katas we try to interpreted techniques, but we have as well a living lineage from the Masters of one style family like in my case Shorin-Ryu. In Shorin-Ryu are several 'sub-styles' because as you said, different masters have different focuses on things and change the style slightly towards this like I example stances and how to step, kick etc. Still we are all from the same lineage but you can see the differences too. that is why for exams you have to tell who sensei you have/had lesson from so that the people can pay attention to the little changes. So yes in my case I have both within my martial arts. Thank you!
Fencing. Fenshingu. Treaties. Torichiisu.
Having fun imagining Shogo translating this for Seki-sensei and wondering which words he would transmit phonetically.
This was a great video, thank you
Completely agree with the main point of this video - and several minor ones. Especially like the thought that HEMA itself is becoming a living MA. :-)
On the Japanese side, there's a lot more stuff that could be said, considering Matt's relative lack of background there. I'll just add one that I think is quite major. It's that the kenjutsu of koryu schools generally has a very strict distinction between omote (outside) and ura (back or inside) content, the latter of which is *never* taught to anyone outside of the school or, in fact, any casual learner either.
All the commonly known textbooks comparable to the European ones (like the (in)famous Go rin no sho) are omote, and as such deliberately written in such a way that they cannot be understood correctly without the oral instructions to go with them. In fact, many are said to be deliberately misleading on key points.
The reason for this is that the different schools were highly competitive, fighting for students, teaching positions with local rulers, and other benefits.
HTH!
I think that some knowledge of the european sword fighting traditions was preserved in FMA then became a starting point to HEMA. I used to train in FMA and perhaps I heard this from some HEMA practicioner that trained with us.
Well, I see a broader problem here: What is the goal of these "living MA"? Scoring hits using accurate replicas of historical weapons? OK, but they won't be 100% accurate because metallurgy has advanced, and Matt rightly pointed out that a blunt blade behaves differently than a sharp weapon. Or maybe we are going in a different direction and simply using modern knowledge and experiments we want to learn how to eliminate the enemy with sharp weapons? Then the old masters and their treatises will only be a guide, but we will be focused more on constant experiments and improvements.
This is a very important point. Many here in the West believe kenjutsu is entirely kata and nothing more when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is only what they are comfortable with showing to outsiders
It's super interesting how many parallels there are across different martial arts from places all over the world. There's crossover with this type of teaching an record keeping in HEMA as well. For the Liechtenauer tradition there is the Zettel which contains teachings about the art in a long poem form, and it is written cryptically on purpose so that people with knowledge of the art can understand what it's saying, but it wouldn't give away secrets to outsiders. Luckily later masters in the Liechtenaurer lineage wrote down interpretations of the Zettel in more plain terms and use it to structure a lot of their teaching so it's able to be understood looking at it through their lens.
@@boon9329 Fascinating.
A history professor of mine liked to say that a common misconception of people today is to think that people in the past were in any way less smart than we were. Clearly that's not the case. :-)
Im a second generation hema/buhurt practitioners and Im now starting to teach my first group of students so I definitely think its a living martial art now, especially with the level of information from multiple sources so readily available. No other time in history do we see the level of differing practitioners and shared information
One thing I will say that about use of safety gear is that while it allows us to train full force, it also dulls some of the sense of caution that one would develop without gear. HEMA sparring can be quite aggressive in ways that may be detrimental to survival in a real fight with deadly weapons, and the sense of safety afforded by gear decouples the technique from the feeling of “threat” that might otherwise prevent a swordsman from acting recklessly. I’ve studied both living lineage and HEMA , and my personal experience has been that HEMA practitioners are by far more aggressive, reckless, and injury prone, and I’ve sustained more injuries practicing HEMA in a year than I did practicing other arts in five (due mostly to inconsistent standards for floor safety, etiquette, progression and weapon control) . I still love HEMA and have a great respect for those who have put the time and effort into mastering many weapons, but I would like to see it adopt some of the more conservative teaching standards and practices of living lineage schools.
this reminds me of a conversation, in my hema club that happened recently, about vestigial smallsword techniques in epee. We play around with smallswords as supplement to our rapier and saber practice and our smallsword instructor is an epeeist by training and he doesnt know very much period smallsword terms, but we get along fine, but at one point he brought how modern epee technically has the agrippa rapier guard and parry terza (also called 3rd or tierce!), with the back of the hand up and the knuckles and edge facing the outside of your body, but you basically never need that strong of a parry against another epee so you just use the modern olympic 6th parry. And this got me curious why modern epee still names that guard and parry it basically never uses and my guess was that it could be a hold over from 19th century foil and saber fencing practices where they also were thinking about how one should parry a heavier sword or even a bayonet. we tried it out and you can use agrippas terza really easy to parry a bayonet with a smallsword and rad as hell!! im pretty sold on my hypothesis that that outside parry 3 in modern epee that that never use is just a vesitigial hold over of the living tradition because of our little experiment :3
Thanks for the video ⚔️
It would be grate to see a martial arts "conference" where HEMA meets Japan etc. It would be great to see Matt talk to Seki Sensei and try out different weapons.
Ok ... I have not finished the video yet.... however I have studied Japanese jujutsu and some use if the sword. Further my first introduction to hema was Georgian sword and buckler and that has been taught in a living and continuous manner.
In my experience lineages constantly change too, because the teachers develop further (at least the good ones), some adapt their teachings to compensate for injuries or age and because of differences in body structures students of the same master do things differently.
having tried both, the one caveat i have with some heritage living martial arts, mostly armed ones, is that they tend to suffer from the preconception that exists in japanese culture of "your superior is always right". if your ranking superior says the sky is red, even though you can see it is blue, the sky is red. i tried kenjutsu for a while, and maybe this was that particular school, but they discouraged exploration and experimentation, which irritated me. you do "x action" because the master says it's x. even if x doesn't make sense and would probably get you killed in a real situation and "y action" would make so much more sense and effective, x is the correct one because masters says so. there tends to be a shunning of techniques that are not of that school. and living martial arts also tend to change over time, each master will have their own interpretations. and going back to the master is always right, even if that interpretation might be wrong, that interpretation is correct. even shogo in earlier videos points this out about his own living martial art of iaido in japan, where there seems to be little to no respect between masters and openly mock each other. the experience i have with hema is the complete opposite. even when encountering different schools, we try to learn and explore techniques from each other. for example my hema instructors mostly teach fiore, but they also encourage incorporating some german techniques such as the thumb grip, which does not exist in fiore manuals
having said that im glad that seki sensei does not appear to be like this and tries to explore how to approach different situations
I have done both HEMA and Eastern styles of martial arts starting with wrestling in grade school, then SCA late 70's to early 80's, and Karate and Fencing in college, lastly some Aikido. I prefer western styles of teaching with it's heavy emphasis on pressure testing. Not many of us get into martial arts so that we can drill; we get into it for the fighting. The closer to real fighting, the better. In SCA the armor is functional because it has to be. In full contact sparring you are actively thinking how to get past the defense without exposing yourself in turn. In Fencing I had to learn an attitude - I WILL touch you, you will NOT touch me; you can't learn that in drills or even play sparring where you are holding back to avoid causing injury.
A good example of "making it up," i.e., reconstructing a combat system from scratch WITHOUT treatises, is viking combat, which Roland Warzecha and some others have been working on reconstructing for a while.
That's not entirely true, as one of the things we do as humans is look for a common frame of reference, so unless those people have done no martial arts ever, they will be drawing on those when they create their combat system.
You give me a sword and shield type item, with no instructions on how to use, it's gonna look a lot like Bolognese Sword and Buckler. For my friend, same kit, it'll look like I.33.
So not really making it up, more trying to draw from disparate data sources (how the weapons work, how things are taught later) a way to use it that seems sensible, but it will still show biases to what the guys have trained in previously (and that's not criticism, it's simply how we as humans work).
Exactly right, my sword and buckler work, and sword and shield work is distinctly Indian (though both are different lineages), it's hard to not see that bleed through even when I do I.33 and other HEMA styles@@Scuzzlebutt142
An excellent lecture.
Living lineages have traditions behind them. Reconstructed martial arts however, can be a lot of fun and have more freedom of interpretation.
Yes, though maybe 'reconstructions' also have traditions behind them? Hopefully I've explained this in the video.
@@scholagladiatoria The cultural value of a living lineage can be sometimes be extremely great. Katori Shinto Ryu and Tai chi comes to mind, both national institutions in Japan and China (others as well). Also Sanatan Shastarvidiya for India. These are basically living cultural treasures.
The thing with reconstructed arts I guess is that there's a need for more experimentation to figure out exactly what the text is saying. But yes, there's quite a bit of cultural value there as well, though some of the heritage value is not there by the mere fact that it's reconstructed.
There's something about the direct transmission from teacher to student for centuries that's fascinating, for any art, whether music, dance, sculpting, swordmaking, martial arts, etc.
Japanese swords are valued all over the world, even though the metal used to make it, is inferior. Purely due to the craftsmanship involved. The craftsmanship is a living tradition.
@@anantasheshanaga3666the problem is that we are never doing the actual historical thing. The historical thing was based on immediate lived experience of lethal combat on the battlefield or in duels. As soon as we as practitioners no longer have our lives as the ultimate test of the art's functionality, the art begins to devolve away from reality and nothing can be done to prevent that. See also Bruce Lee's critique of the "classical mess" in Asian martial arts.
Edit:The same thing also with the devolution of Bushido from the experienced tradition of warriors fighting for their lives before the Tokugawa Shogunate until it was such a debased martial philosophy that it directly resulted in battles lost at enormous cost in WW2 with subordinates using that philosophy to bully their superiors ( !!! ) into costly blunders.
@@anantasheshanaga3666 There is also a danger in revisionism and deliberate corruption in living traditions, hence why snapshot scroll/books are so vital to prevent this. An example would be Tai Chi. The original teachers were killed, books burned, and the arts founding deliberately lost to history because of Chinese government politics. It was then revived as a state sponsored mythical art. Over time it "corrected" for many of the governmental political influences through trial and error to become a functional martial art.
But because it calls on a legacy (despite no direct lineage), it is still considered a 3000 year old art form (that was recreated from a handful of poems and philosophy books in the 1970's as a direct political measure to compete with Japanese cultural martial arts). Now there are 4 schools of tai chi, each with 6-12 distinct school styles with a lot of political and regional rivalries, but none can point to a hard piece of evidence to indicate lineage, only vague stories of nameless masters passing on traditions, which may very well be true, but the history is so muddled with politics it is hard to see it as a "pure" martial art, it is a legitimate art, but not a "historically pure" one like some Japanese traditions where they can both name 30 generations of masters, but also have historical books from the period that can be referred to, which reinforces its lineage.
@@j.f.fisher5318Yeah it's hard, for example, to simulate still being able to fight after getting hit in the thigh, because you don't know what it's like to fight with a giant gash in your leg, and how that affects your movement. You just have to call the bout there and assume it's a fight ender.
Great video, I enjoy all of your content. I would think the goals of HEMA differ from the goals of Living Lineage. I would imagine that HEMA is about reconstructing history, and Living Lineage is about carrying on some tradition over time. So arguing about which one is better seems a bit non-sensical.
One thing with any martial art is the instructor.
Often times when teaching I'll adjust techniques to the student to fit their body dynamics.
A lot of the time it's "this is the traditional way to do it, this is the way i find works for me, this is another way that you may find easier" as such the style evolves while keeping the core the same
I love where I think all of this is going!!
It's great to see the beautiful Albion Ringeck!
These crossover conversations seem really valuable and are certainly interesting. Would love to see you in Arizona with InRangeTV and Sinistral Rifleman at a 2gun Action Challenge Match.
Ah, glad to see Matt finally covers this topic
Let me explain something: i study kendo almost 20 year , i cant count minor changes of well established kendo kata thru this years.
Imagine how much koryu kata changes thru hundreds of years.
So what do u think are those kata traditional or not?
another great video, thanks.
My pleasure!
What people also tend to forget, or not even consider, is that some of the solutions of the past may not hold up in the face of changing times. You see this in how later treatises have differing techniques to earlier periods. We can also see this in the tactics used in WWI and WWII urban environments vs how we basically had to reinvent how to move through, and engage targets, in urban environments in Iraq. Both used squads of men with firearms, but in vastly different ways. If one were simply interested in the reenactment phase of HEMA, and other historical martial arts, then strictly keeping to the traditions is actually the goal. However, if one were interested in learning how to become the best fighter with those tools, for say a New World Order that wants to take away our right to defend ourselves with modern weaponry or a long term grid down scenario where ammo becomes less available, then mixing the skills of the past with modern combat tactics makes much more sense, as swords never run out of bullets.
Reconstruction isn't a foreign concept to traditional Japanese martial arts at all btw. I'm personally training a style of Naginatajutsu and one of our instructors is currently trying to revive parts of the school that were lost over time, based on scrolls. A lot of schools have been doing things like this, even in pre-modern Japan. Maniwa Nen Ryu, which is technically the oldest Kenjutsu style even before Katori Shinto Ryu, actually died out in the early 16th century but was reconstructed in 1591.
On the subject of antique Japanese swords...
I'm wondering if you could help me. I've inherited a Wakizashi from my late grandfather. I know nothing of the history of the sword except that it somehow found it's way to my great grandfather in the trenches of the Somme.
I know a lot of information can be found on the tang, but the leather has perished in places and I'm reluctant to disassemble the blade for fear of the leather just disintegrating. The blade has also lost it's traditional polish and shows signs of damage from use / inexpert sharpening, presumably by my great grandfather.
Basically I'm wondering if there's somewhere or someone I could take it to to learn more about the sword and it's history and possibly stabilise / partially restore it's condition?
if i were you, i'd take it to a local university and see what resources they have to give you/how they can help you out, i know my grandmother brought some stuff that her mother had kept from when she was a nurse stationed in manchuria after ww2 and learned some neat stuff about it
Hey Matt, are you reading my mind? I was having similar thoughts about living lineages and how they relate to what we do and how the approach the arts xD
this happens with surprisingly regularity xD I'm just sat over here writing about things and/or digitising my paper notes and you'll slap out a video on the exact topic I was thinking about xD
A chat with Matt and Iain Abernathy would be awesome to watch
Not all HEMA are reconstructed. For example, Jogo do Pau is an unbroken lineage martial art.
One aspect, I miss in the discussion of which is "better" is a definition of - better at what, for what. What are the parameters of quality??? Better for self defense in the subway? Better for getting agile and fit? Better for bouncing people in a pub...?
If I compare two knives - lets say a machete and an Italian stiletto, and I claim, this is a better knife! ...that will for sure be ruled by my perspective, and by my needs. If I need a consealable stabbing implement for self defense, the stiletto probably wins the title. But if I need to hack my way through a jungle, the machete wins.
So what is it, one type of martial art is supposed to be better at, than the others, to be "better"???
The machete is not only a knife, it can also be a sword or falchion and as the name implies it is a messer!
Interestingly enough, when of the proper length (30"+) it was the primary weapon use in rebellions, revolutions and insurrections.
P. S. It has also functioned as a self-defense weapon in many cases and instances, even against attackers with firearms....
So, there has been conversation about Kenjutsu/Katana vs Hema/longsword and obviously there's an element of learning the past. . but I would like to see something different. I wanna see an evolution of swordsmanship. I wanna see experts look at Hema and Kenjutsu and combine the best of both worlds or at the very least see if there are newer and better ways to do stuff. I wanna see if we can look at the best qualities of the katana and the long sword and refine it into something new or better. Something like that.
Are people out there experimenting and testing and trying new ways or are we in a state of stagnation? Or have we reached the peak?
HEMA also offsets this through the way it uses sparring, you gain experience through active sparring.
Interesting questions would be: are theatre sword fighting and late 19th/early 20th fencing actually "genealogical" martial arts or derived from once living ones. Also throughout europe that are surviving stick combat like in, I think, Sardina and Ireland.
You made a video describing the difference between expert and amateur. Professional and Hobbyist.
I am Korean and I have trained both traditional martial arts (Taekwondo, Judo, Muay Thai, Boxing) and modern MMA and also kenjutsu and tameshigiri and freestyle sword sparring. Every art has advantages and disadvantages. This is why I train them all. I take what I like and disregard what I don’t like. But you got to know the rules to break the rules. Bruce Lee was right. No form is the best form. Do not limit yourself.
An interesting aspect of the kenjutsu continuum is that it hasn't been clear what to do with it, post-Tokugawa as it were. Is is a sport? Is it a "martial art" and what does that mean? Can it be revised for modern battlefield use as it was in WWII? Can it be used to improve the "character" of young people? Meanwhile, HEMA is still exiting the phase of mere reconstruction. Best!
Best line of the video is still "I have friends who do Asian martial arts". 😄 To the point of pressure testing, it is important verify the effectiveness of techniques. I would like to propose the thought that lineage arts have done the pressure testing over generations as opposed to only decades for some rediscovered/relearned (but no less valid) styles.
19:40
This video is great and is one step closer to seeing the two of them possibly have a conversation…but this is where I have to strongly disagree. Matt says that there isn’t much difference between a late Edo period katana vs a Kamakura era katana but this is completely wrong. I get where he’s going at as seems to refer more to the form of the blades (and uses a longsword and a rapier as an example) but to say they didn’t massively change as weapons is incorrect.
The *crucial* difference that cannot be understated is the difference in smithing methods between the periods Matt mentions. He is right that swords between these period did not change by a huge margin in terms of shape but, functionally, it is almost night and day.
Kamakura swords were made far stronger and, as common with koto blades, had heavy niku and a small hamon close to the edge. When we get to the Edo period, smiths were making swords that were thinner and had extremely wide, flamboyant hamon. Some would be so wide they’d start to get close to the shinogi. This, as some smiths realized, is detrimental to the katana’s overall performance as it allows cracks to travel deeper into the blade and allows far larger chips to be taken out of the edge. Generally swords of the Edo period were made more so as art pieces and had lost a lot of functionality.
I know the sound of hamon being farther back may not sound like much of anything and has no change at a first glance, but it really is a world of a difference. There is this perception that katana edges could chip easily and it is likely because of these later art swords that this misconception came to be. Matt already made a video about a British anecdote from the late Edo period of a katana receiving a massive chip against a saber. Dlatrex Swords has an amazing video going over accounts of Edo period katana failing that show just how detrimental the change in hamon was.
Interesting questions would be: are theatre sword fighting and late 19th/early 20th fencing actually "genealogical" martial arts or derivedb from once living ones. Also throughout europe that are surviving stick combat like in, I think, Sardina and Ireland.
The canary Islands has one of the longest surviving stick fighting martial arts, Palo Canario. But you also find stick fighting in Portugal and the South of France.
Wooden sword stick fighting was a martial art method, during the Ottoman occupation of Greek Cyprus. The greek population was not allowed to carry steel swords, so they resorted to using ones made out of wood.
What about Northern Shin Kicking that is an English martial art with some linage very brutal ?
There are actually loads of living traditions in HEMA from all over Europe. People often forget that fencing, boxing and wrestling all have unbroken living traditions in Europe - it's just that they have evolved from what they were 50, 100, or 300 years ago. But they never disappeared really.
No one martial art is better then another, With a few exceptions. My feeling is that this whole question depends on if the "living" art has changed and evolved over the years to reflect current needs. If not, it's a fossil. (as an example, in 20 years of trad jujutsu, the style I practice has changed and modified more than one move from Kata, to make it more effective. Or practical at all, tbh. But then any martial art is just a starting point, onto which you add your own strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, and your own mindset. For myself I favour fluid defence followed by aggressive and brutal counter attacks.
BUT, as one of my instructors always says; "there's a big difference between Dojo "art", and pub-car park "technique".
Basically, if it works, it's right.
This is a long shot but I wonder if windlass would be interested in doing a period-accurate katana reconstruction at some point. I feel like such a product would be a big boon to collectors, but I’m no market researcher.
22:12 yes that's a topic that's been on my mind throughout the video, but it went in a different direction from here. I've had training in a German tradition for 2 years, never past the level of novice so bear that in mind.
I wonder how you honestly pressuretest your skills in exercise of murder in an age where butchering eachother for the sake of sport is mostly frowned upon and very much illegal. Where I trained we practised form using wooden longswords, and sparred using kendoswords. The only protection we used were leathergloves and, more importantly, control. You don't don't stab, you don't attack the very tender bits and while an attack should connect in a form that shows intent we were never to follow through with that attack (though we could of course transition into a follow-up emphasising both intent, control and planning). Control in this regard was rule nr1 where I trained.
I loved that, and when I had some practice lessons in kendo I was a bit surprised they were trained in intent just like I was familiar with, but not on the measure of control on a followthrough. Noth in those beginner classes anyway. In a way this made sense because they were wearing protection and there was no immediate need for it, but it felt very wrong to me.
But it also made me wonder about something else. Is the level of protection you use an indication of what you can or can't properly test when you are sparring and not in a situation where you are trying to chop someone's arm off and all rules regarding your opponents health are out the window? Is that actually a case or is that simply to with level of expertise, and my own lack thereof?
In other words does your skill at sparring tell you verything about your skills as a fighter?
Schools, styles with a long tradition, accumulate knowledge. Let's take karate kyokushin as an example. Oyama opened his first official dōjō in 1953. He was 30 years old then, and had about 20 years of experience in various martial arts. To sum up, this gives us, about 90 years of experience of him and thousands of his successors. Enough knowledge for today, to keep you busy for a lifetime.
Do historic fencing schools have this to offer? Within one coherent, logical system. For example, one system of longsword fencing. Maybe in the next 20 years. If the coaches follow the example of Oyama, Kano, Gracie and create their own original styles. Without styles, knowledge will be lost with teachers.
Reconstruction: Better with modern translation and application. Will appear to be more effective. Interpretation from a modern mindset may contribute to misunderstanding, misapplication, and possibility of jettisoning information. Appears progressive.
Linage based: Will have traditions and historical context in mind, secrets included. Has the possibility of appearing like bullshido- unless enough effort is put into understanding historical context/usage. May fall into complacency or resort to compromising the art/system when posed with financial & existential trouble. Appears conservative.
Both: Useful for those who practice them for the right reasons. May develop character, discipline and physical conditioning. May create superiority complex, tribalism, elitism and other forms of self-aggrandizement.
its interesting how MMA showed that studying particular lineages was not as important as being competent enough with a diverse skill set to be able to deal with any one particular lineage
i should add Robert Childs talks about this sort of stuff, he rather be able to adapt to his opponent to be able to defeat them, and discourages "getting really got at one thing" because then we will just adapt to that and defeat you
It didn't show that at all. Everyone was a product of living heritages who competes and competed in MMA. The discussion is about the difference with reconstructed martial arts and such has no relevance at all wiith MMA.
@@MarcRitzMD yes it did. look at early UFC. boxers couldnt beat grapplers. then submission guys took out the grapplers. it also DOES have to do with this discussion. if you only want to do longsword against longsword thats fine, but that is a different RECONSTRUCTION than if you wanted to longsword against katana, or saber fencing versus rapier fencing. same as if you just want to train boxing, versus focusing on boxing while being able to deal with a wrestler.
@@MarcRitzMD also consider Robert Childs. he doesnt care if you have a reconstruction or a living tradition: you cant fix yourself into just one line of attack or line of thinking. the superior reconstructions or living traditions (like his living tradition) teach you to be adaptable. just like chess. OH NO A CHESS REFERENCE. cant wait for you to tell me that isnt what chess shows at all and that this discussion has nothing to do with chess 😘
@@MarcRitzMD your comment (no hate) actually makes me wonder if you could have a "private martial art". so if i were involved with say, 2 living traditions (where or not they started as reconstructions or not) and i decided to import various techniques into my skill set, would that be my own "private recreation"? if i never taught anyone, i guess it wouldnt be a living tradition, maybe if i had one student or made youtube videos about technique, then it would be?
Isn't classical fencing the equivalent to kenjutsu whereas sport fencing is equivalent to kendo out of the living lineages?
Yes, both modern fencing and kendo are bogged down by rules and neither represent real sword fighting
Classical fencing is sport fencing from the turn of the 20th century. It's equivalent to pre-WWII Kendo.
@@jonathanyaeger2289 Incorrect, the term "classical fencing" was actually coined in France in the mid-19th century to describe the difference between the older style of masters like Louis Justin Lafaugére and the "romantic" school of younger men like Bertrand Lozés. While some people do you use the term "classical fencing" in the way you describe (Nick Evangelista), I would argue that that is not its proper meaning.
Louis Rondelle stated in 1892 that "A classical fencer is supposed to be one who observes a fine position, whose attacks are fully developed, whose hits are marvelously accurate, his parries firm, and his ripostes executed with precision. One must not forget that this regularity is not possible unless the adversary is a party to it. It is a conventional bout, which consists of parries, attacks, and returns, all rhyming together." In other words, classical fencing is fencing being conducted with the proper traditional form and technique; another, more succinct, definition that is often added being "to touch without being touched", its not just sport fencing from a particular time period.
Moreover, I would also point out that at least some contemporary classical fencing lineages do meet the literal Japanese definition of a koryu (a school that has been around since before the Meiji Restoration in 1871) as their are several Maestri today who can trace their lineage at least as far back as Giuseppe Radaelli who was teaching in the 1860's. Frankly, there is also very little difference between the way the way foil would be taught by a maestro today, as opposed to the way Rondelle would have described it in 1892, or Lafaugére in 1820 (or Parise in 1883 and Scorza and Grisetti in 1805 if you prefer the Italian tradition). In the 20th century sport fencing, like Kendo, went through a period where the various traditional schools were pulled apart and then lumped together, but classical fencing diverged before this point and still retains the difference between various regional traditions, making it more equivalent to kenjutsu.
When are you going to do a video with Tod testing the effects of a Void Shard on fully armored 16th century plate harness? :P
It sounds like 'reconstructed' just means 'we had a LOT of Mission Creep... lets consult the book'.
Another advantage of reconstructed martial arts is that you have a far better assurance that your fellow practitioners, including instructors, are a bunch of nerds doing it because they think it's cool, and not a bunch of snobs or tradition addicts.
Hello! this maybe a small question, but im about 5"9, I practice iaijutsu, and was curious id like to find a good "hand and a half" sword if it exists, for Italian treatices that would work for my height. Thank you much love from Detroit
i think hema has evolved to a living lineage in some ways, despite not having the broader integration into society as mentioned in the video.
Thanks for the Police/Warden sword. Charles
Matt, don't both forms suffer from the fact that there are no more death battles with swords? Isn't that really where forms originate from?
This is a complicated subject but I definitely don't believe that living tradition necessarily means most efficient, realistic or most effective in every single way and I think that Olympic fencing sort of illustrates that point.
Would it also be helpful to view some examples of HEMA in the broader context of experimental archeology?
Is there any illustrations or books with Indian martial arts still around mainly Hindu ones ?
Yes. However they are so far locked away and nobody I know has been able to get access to them. Lucknow library has one dating to the 1600s.
You can check out Harjeet Singh Sagoo's Shastra Vidya - the martial arts of the ancient Hindu warriors, the Kshatriyas. There are also living traditions, some of whom may have manuals.
Is there any truth in India classical dancing is related to martial arts like the hand movements and legs movements could be blocks @@scholagladiatoria
Yeah i like that sort of thing because its really old There must be some hinden some where that is 2000 years old @@anantasheshanaga3666
@@braddbradd5671 Check out Sanatan Shastarvidiya if you are looking for Indian martial arts that are related to Indian classical dance. Sanatan Shastarvidiya is one of these classical arts, just like Indian classical music and dance, and so is related to both of them.
As far as the postures of the arms and legs being blocks, etc - no. It's not that direct a relationship. The leg raised postures are more about manouvering the body mass and quickly changing directions, etc. The arm movements are more about merging with the opponent, etc.
Better? No. Both are trying to keep different arts and aspects of those arts alive. Both ways have value. Everybody's doing the best they can within the constraints we have to deal with.
I should add also that in hema, give it a few hundred years to build up. Then it'll be more comparable as a tradition.
Living versus reconstructed: Which one is better? Well that's a loaded question!
In which way one will be better than the other?
For one thing, traditional martial arts existing today are no longer holding true to their original methods. Specially in the case of Chinese and Japanese martial arts, they have gone through modifications over time. Either because of change of cultural attitudes or because of government impose policies and rules.
The japanese swordsmanship styles of the Edo period are not as battlefield practical as older styles. Yet even earlier styles from the sengoku period have gone through modifications and have somehow lost their true appreciations.
With the appearance of HEMA today, many old traditional martial arts are going through a process of revisionism and looking back at their true original applications of techniques.
Has anyoje looked into the living lineage of the swiss gaurd at the vatican? Dont they still use medieval arms and fighting techniques?
I think living, lineage martial arts will always be better than reconstructed martial arts as long as one condition is true: that the lineage martial art has continued to progress as a martial art that evolves as combat evolves and that it doesn't change to transform into a sport. Sportifying a lineage martial art waters down its combat effectiveness.
Very true, but the problem is that you can’t evolve when something like swords are no longer needed in combat.
What do you mean by 'better'? Better for what exactly?
Then it is not, because "living lineages" have not evolved
I have always bin curieus about armoured fighting for samurai. It's sow hard to find stuff about it though.
Matt: "Nobody wants to wear historical armor, so we wear modern protection."
Buhurt: "Look at me, Brother."
Nothing against buhurt, but burhurt armour is actually rather modern in many of its design choices. Even period tournament armour is substantially different to modern buhurt armour.
Not having seen the video yet - living lineage martial arts' biggest advantage over others is that instructors in living lineage martial arts usually can actually show proof of their training - be it a certificate or a diploma, or something else that can prove they've actually received proper instruction.
On the other hand, here, in Bulgaria there are schools who claim to have reconstructed rediscovered some ancient Bulgarian martial art, but their instructors have very little real experience in anything. I'm not going to name names, but I think this is a problem.
If you know what you're doing, reconstruction martial arts can be great, of course.
...it's Combat Hopak, isn't it?
@@Vlad_Tepes_IIINo, that's Ukrainian. I'm a Bulgarian, and what I'm talking about is much worse.
What is that certificate or diploma actually worth though? Unless you know that the school that issued that thing actually teaches competently, it doesn't mean a thing. There could be a hypothetical school that teaches sword fighting from a supposedly unbroken tradition of a thousand years, but they never do any sparring. Good luck using that stuff in practice if you've never faced anyone uncooperative, but they sure issue diplomas. On the other hand you can have a merry informal group of enthusiasts who spar all the time and so have a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn't. No certificates though, sadly. Although I'm sure someone could whip one up in Photoshop.
Determining the quality of what's being taught is hard, especially if you're a beginner and have no frame of reference.
@@BruderLoras >>What is that certificate or diploma actually worth though?
---
It's worth a lot, actually, especially in our time. Sadly, the Internet is filled with self-defense "experts" whose education comes from videos by other "experts" whose education comes from videos...
The Internet is also filled with sword-fighting "experts" without actual training for some reason. Shadiversity managed to fool everyone for freaking years that he was an actual martial artist, myself included. He never actually trained properly, though. His political opinions aside, this was the main reason I eventually stopped following him - that I realized he wasn't nearly as knowledgeable as he'd like to pretend to be.
I am curious, are there any HEMA schools in Japan?
Steel swords, even blunted practice swords are heavily regulated in Japan.
I believe that there are some people in Japan that are currently practicing HEMA, but I don't know of any organized group in the sense like in the West. The way that they are going about it is by using synthetics.
There is also another argument to be made - that of, "martial effectiveness" let's call it. If you take a reconstructed art from let's say the 15th century, you can be fairly certain that the techniques you see there were meant to hurt and kill people the way they are written. While in a lineage art you can never be certain if the technique you are being taught has actually retained it's martial usefulness - after all the last time someone used it to really hurt an opponent was centuries ago. During those centuries it could have been (and probably was to an extent) watered down by omitting certain mechanical details that were no longer needed or by intentionally making it safer to practice etc.
If you look at a martial art from let's say the 15th century, you don't know if it's really that useful on a modern battlefield. Actually, you can be quite sure that there are more effective ways to kill people around now. 'Martial effectiveness' of a martial art isn't a static thing, it changes by context.
@@Ehuatl I don't mean useful in a modern battlefield at all. Swords have no place on a modern battlefield. What I meant was useful in its original context - either a lowtech battlefield or a 1v1 sword fight. After all this is what we are all trying to emulate when training historical martial arts.
"...for obvious safety reasons and so that we can bash each other on the head." Hahahahahah!
The only difference is style and maybe potentially some things were not written down, typically minor details, that HEMA practitioners may have to extrapolate or infer some.