Types Of Swords In Kenjutsu Practice

In this practice of ours, the first sword you use eventually becomes the last sword you use.

When entering the dojo, after taking the oath, kenjutsu practice begins not with cuts, forms, and sword-fighting, but with etiquette.

How to take the sword off its stand on the dojo wall, how to return it.

How to pass it to a training partner, how to have it passed back to you.

How to sit with it and bow with it.

There is a reason to this training and those that skip the first year of etiquette training miss out on the gokui when they jump past it and rush to the cuts, forms, and fighting.

This is etiquette practice is done respectfully and carefully with a shinken- a real sword, only it is never removed from the sheath. The weight and gravity of what it is, the presence of its feeling in the hand.

Awareness.

It builds an internal architecture.

After some time one is instructed to acquire a wooden training sword- a bokken, along with a cloth bag to keep it in when out of practice.

This wooden sword is the primary sword of practice and the one that the student will be spending the most time with, going over the fencing postures, cuts, drills, forms, and movement of the sword.

Essentially what everybody pictures as sword practice happens with this sword.

The challenge at this level of the training is to persevere and be diligent in practice and with one’s duties to the lessons, as it is easy to start thinking about and coveting the next type of sword in practice.

At some point, at the appropriate time the student will be instructed to obtain a mogito- a metal training sword that does not have an edge or a point. Sometimes there are out of steel, but in most cases they are aluminum or another rust resistant and durable metal composition.

This sword has the look, feel, and weight of a shinken, but it is not a shinken.

The mogito is used in solo training and forms.

What we are building here is a layered focus of training, one sword building on the other, at which point the student is now at about 10-15 years of practice.

The final sword is the shinken, and any discussion on this would be between the teacher and the student, but for the most part the shinken sits on the shelf and is an object to be admired.

Site note: Some school use a shinai or fukuro shinai which are bamboo and leather wrapped sword, or padded swords for practice, as a specific type of training is down with them, they fall out of the awareness building of the other swords.