The history of Kendo -- Part 3 of 5

Kenjutsu -- Japanese fencing with sharp, single-edged swords -- is thought to have come to Japan from China in the Sixth or Seventh Century A.D. At that time, swords upwards of four feet in length were used primarily for fighting from horseback.

Little by little, foot soldiers began to develop their own techniques for wielding swords, probably due to the higher cost of cavalry.

The Kamakura Period (1192-1333) was the golden age of the sword arts, and saw great refinements made in the areas of making and wielding the deadly katana. As certain swordsmen demonstrated greater skill and success than their peers, they began to be looked to as teachers of the art of swordsmanship.

Naturally, these teachers had their own ideas about how things should be done, and so they developed different and often highly competitive schools, or ryu, teaching their own particular brand of the discipline. Often this competition between schools resulted in bloodshed as the followers of different masters fought to prove their ryu's superiority. In truth, the schools were probably all equal; the masters were probably born with certain unteachable skills, much the way modern pro athletes have a certain innate physical ability that separates them from the pack.

Nonetheless, thousands of eager young warriors from the Kamakura Period to the end of the Momoyama Period (1568-1600) were ushered to early graves thanks to ill-advised duels entered out of a fanatical devotion to their ryu.

Around this time, master swordsmen began to notice that there was something more than sheer skill that separated the victorious from the dead. It was an indefinable calmness of spirit and resolution of purpose. This theory seemed to be borne out on the battlefield, where an instant's hesitation or confusion had often cost superior swordsmen their lives to lesser opponents.

And so swordmasters began melding Zen with technique. By the Edo Period (1600-1867), kendo was being studied for its philosophy as much as its physical techniques.

It was also during the Edo Era that the fukuro shinai, fore-runner of the modern shinai, was developed. Made of 32 strips of bamboo covered in heavy cloth, the fukuro-shinai allowed fencers to deliver their blow with proper focus and power without harming their opponent the way a sharp sword or even a solid wood bokken (practice sword) would. The modern shinai is made of four strips of bamboo and is no longer covered in cloth.

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