I have been looking into both for some time now. I've been also trying out kendo for quite a bit in recent times and I thought about talking about some of my experiences. Kendo - It is not a martial art - It was largely formed in 20th century - It was changed radically after Japan lost the war in the way of shedding away practical elements from it - In theory it has an uninterrupted line of practitioners dating back to an era when swords were used in combat - Iaido is the actual art of swordsmanship - Kendo is often expressed to be a tool for developing spirit of the kendoka - There are a lot of places to practice kendo in HEMA - Historical European Martial Arts - Doesn't have uninterrupted line of practitioners dating back to an era when swords were used in combat - Has a large following and affiliation with actual historians able to trace back to original manuals from various ages - Has multiple schools such as German style and Bolognese style - Aims to be authentic practical martial arts based on historical era in question - ^^ can involve grappling if you close in so much that you're too close to use your weapons - HEMA only truly started around 1990's and while it's spreading rapidly is not easily available Personal notes: - Japanese love what I call "autistic" rituals. - As a consequence every practice is highly ritualized with incredible attention to detail - Every effort is made to make practicing the art as difficult and hostile as possible - Example: Hakama has multiple foldings but the material of hakama is such that it cannot be washed easily and doesn't hold on to foldings well. A lot of additional effort is required just to put it on and to pack it away and slightest mistakes will lead to complaints. - For some silly reason actual bamboo swords are used. They are expected to constantly break apart while also requiring laborous amounts of maintenance and can potentially be lethal as they constantly develop splinters that could pierce the lacking protection of the helmet visor. - Japanese weigh half that of Europeans. Most European sports feature shoes, kendo doesn't and people suffer a lot from feet skin being torn apart because shoes aren't allowed. - Almost everyone quits kendo very quickly. - There's zero sense of respect or BNBR policy in kendo. Teachers can be real assholes and somehow many of the highest ranking teachers at least in Finland end up being people who love to humiliate and punish people who are inferior to them. In conclusion, I like history and I like martial arts. Kendo is neither. I found the local club to be really great society of people but the art itself is too autistic and detached from martial arts or even history and common sense for my preference. I don't mind how some people enjoy the rituals and all the maintenance and such. I am however looking to be a part in starting HEMA club where I live. + shoes + ordinary clothes + gear that makes sense and doesn't constantly break apart + martial arts + more choice on weapons + less rituals (initial greetings/"now we start" thing, sparring starts with raising your sword and sweep to lower right, helmets stay on, stuff ends with "now we finish") + your club has a lot of freedom in deciding it's own goals and even choosing which weapons and styles you'll focus on + focus is more on positive experience and perhaps even building upon the historical sources and developing the art, less on trying to make the art as unapproachable as possible Anyway, these are my own thoughts on the matter. It is good to note that HEMA and kendo should not even be compared to each other as they're entirely different things, apples and oranges. Just I figured out to write about both since I'm able to.
Iaido is actually a particular artistry of drawing the sword and immediately attacking. Kenjutsu is actually fighting with the sword (martial arts, koryu). Kendo is the art of using the sword, emphasizing a somewhat exaggerated style of movement in order to learn to execute particular techniques precisely. So yeah, if you want a practical martial art that isn't it, because it's all focused on perfecting a narrowly interpreted element of combat. The approach of eastern martial arts is generally "learning by doing", and in theory the student is over time supposed to assimilate and internally synthesize all the training into a complete understanding of the system. The problem is there's a long ramp up of doing things (often in an exaggerated fashion) that don't make any sense, with no apparent end goal. The other problem is sometimes people get pretty good at doing everything as a ritual but never really internalize any of the "why" of what they're doing - and unless their instructor/master is insightful enough to figure that out, they can go on to become an instructor in their own right without knowing much besides a ritual of doing things. The learning-by-doing structure makes that hard to weed out. By contrast, the western/european martial tradition has a lot of recorded theory behind it, though unfortunately in many cases no extant/surviving tradition of practice. This creates a lot of "talking stick" about how people think stuff ought to be done, but without the people necessarily being able to do things the way they conceptualize them. There isn't a lot of accreditation either, so there's become a big push to become "the guy" by finding/translating/interpreting something first and therefore becoming the ersatz expert on it. There's also a number of folks floating around who basically lacked the coordination or cardiovascular conditioning for american football or ice hockey, but still want to gravitate to something that will allow them to cover themselves with BMX/cricket armor and expend great amounts of adrenaline womping one another vigorously, with "historic" technique being a complete abstraction from any action on the piste. Unfortunately the shambolic structuring of the WMA/HEMA "community" on the whole lets a lot of that stuff slide because the guys who don't use any truly safe/martial technique but are pretty damn good at playing sword tag in padding and the guys who can talk the leg off a mule on theory but can't walk their talk tend to avoid interacting out of their own safe spaces, for fear of being knocked down a peg. Also, a lot of the extant treatises pre-18th century tended to be aimed either for masters/instructors or experienced students, not as an instruction manual, and a lot of the "basics" of stance/balance/grip/distance/mechanics/time that get done to death by arts like Kendo are just not presented (or if they are are so shrouded in natural philosophy or sort of a "like you do" - e.g. "when standing in the measure you will pace forwards to throw the blow, then strike around to the left of your opponents head in the time of his parrying, traversing behind with your right foot as you do so"), and unless you're seriously good at grokking or have some prior training that provides a real stumbling block to pursuing the techniques which are illustrated (or having much idea of when or how you'd get in the position to use them). So while the one tends to be an overly rigid environment that can stifle all learning, the other can be too much of a free-for-all to do much learning, and either way, choosing who to study with can be a challenge. Good luck out there.
Yeah kendo is a sport. So many rules of where and how you can hit. With about 70 of hits being the head, I liken it to fencing almost. If you want to learn fighting with a katana go with kenjutsu. Hema is just that historical European martial arts. Fighting with all manner of historical European weapons.
LARP is slightly less formal even than HEMA, whereas HEMA may not actually have an unbroken line of training, they still try to maintain some of the traditions and styles of the original European fighting styles, I'm sure there are people who LARP using traditional styles, but I'd imagine most LARP session to be more like an MMA of what works than any specific style. Presuming of course it's not just amateur night at the coliseum XD
Larp is far from hema. But that depends on the DM. Like starting off in plain clothes and a dagger. Only being able to use equipment found in a "dungeon." People throwing imaginary lightning bolts. Can't use a spear and shield at the same time because a spear is a "two handed" weapon. Armor magically being destroyed by little taps from a weapon. I can go on This also depends on the style and era of the larp setting.
We do have a local LARP (rpg style) show fighting group focusing on Viking stuff. They definitely don't practice martial arts but they make stuff up as they go about it. Also their show fights are the kind of.. where one guy starts a wide arcing swing and starts slowing it down .. slowing slowing slowing almost stopppiinnngg and then the other guy gets it and blocks. Great post Solis Obscuri, I wholeheartedly agree. It's all about personal preferences really. Some people even like the intentionally ritualized to look good Kung-Fu styles as opposed to the more practically oriented ones. Some people even like Fencing where a slight tap on opponents toe counts as a kill. To me, I found kendo isn't really my thing due to my physiology and mindset. For one, I'm one of the tallest people with some of the tallest hands that I'll ever come across in kendo circles. That means that my actual hitting distance is before the swords even cross whereas most people have to at least cross the tips before they're in hitting distance. This means what I should be doing is hitting people from afar. The problem is that you can't hit a person from that distance according to the scoring rules. I mean, I don't score points even when I hit them. My range also allows me to do stuff like walk in and hit a do - a hit to enemy's right side torso while also blocking their attack with the same move. The only problem is that "you shouldn't hit do because it's almost never scored". Yea, right. I bang the other guy in the side torso with a cut that would cut the other guy in half while blocking his attack and I don't score a point because I'm supposed to be hitting him in the head and hitting at do at my rank is just a sign of being a newbie? Riiight. And because of my range if the enemy gets too close, I can still hit them but now I'm hitting them with the wrong part of the sword! Literally, I should hit them in the head with the tip of my sword but they close up so close that I'm hitting with the midsection of the sword while trying to avoid bashing their head out of the way with the grip itself. And no score. And then we get locked up within one feet distance unable to do anything and nothing is allowed either. Yawns. I'm also one of the heaviest guys I'll ever come across in the kendo circles but that won't help me up close because I'm not allowed to just throw them away so I can hit them on the way out and I am not basically allowed to do anything. So, it's definitely not something I would enjoy doing. It's like the whole game is rigged against tall and bulky people. ----------------- Now, as for HEMA, I recognize those exact problems with it. That said, it's a living art. There is a sense of creativity about it. Everything's not so intense and strict. If you're part of setting up your own club you can be a part of defining what sort of atmosphere there will be. You can decide there's a BNBR policy at the club, that people ought to at the very least roleplay some genuine respect towards each other while at the club while leaving all the politics and such outside. You can make a place where people try to figure out the art of historical European martial arts with gear that makes sense and you can even control how Sir TalksALot can take his verbal output to club website or HEMA website and focus more on the doing of stuff while at the club training sessions. You can even keep it a rankless organization based on meritocracy. You have a teacher who sucks at fencing, you can ask for pedagogical tips. The person who is best at seeing the stance of someone and correcting it makes the best assisting instructor while the person who has the best cuts makes the best cut demonstrator, etc. It can even be built around the USMC training style where you might have an instructor who is best with feet techniques, another who is great at parrying and so on. I really think that a club with welcoming rather than exclusive atmosphere combined with a touch of historic "chivalric" good manners and respect (BNBR) would make for a nice club where folks can have a blast hacking at each other with toy swords in a safe way. Depending on club size it can be many things and even come to feature many styles to choose from. A bigger HEMA club for instance can have a range of style options and training options from which to pick while also catering to casuals, competition crowd and the history crowd. That said with any social group you can't be everything for everyone and some lines have to be drawn somewhere and some people are always going to be frustrated. At least with this kind of thing you can sort of go with what the people at the club prefer and you have some room of maneuver as opposed by having a very, very dogmatic set of rituals and so. In short, HEMA's freedom is both a great strength and a great weakness, depending on where you're looking from and how it's implemented. Luckily with such clubs there's always the option of having a mechanism for the group through which frustrations can be expressed and managed.
LARP is also a very wide category referring to basically any version of roleplay involving acting out the fight, so there's a great many styles and flavors, and rules both for and against silliness. But being unfamiliar with what is available for the country, it's a general enough field to encompass most of what we mean. Personally I like and would look into Amtgard, I've enjoyed the few encounters I've been able to have with them, but they're usually willing to consider things within reason. SCA is probably better for the roleplaying and historical accuracy aspect of things, but their fights tend to be a bit more watered down than I would like (for safety reasons, but still) and of course there's the other end of the spectrum as one of our members has mentioned from time to time, however I don't think I'd ever want someone even for realism purposes swinging an object that bears similar mass and shape to a sword or other medieval weapon, whether I'm wearing full armor or not, sure, plate might turn 999 out of 1000 blows, but there's no insurance that you'll survive that 1000th blow, or that those 999 other blows you took didn't leave some very nasty looking bruises!
HEMA fights at least use special purpose designed training swords that look like real ones but the blade section is often white or so and they have a lot less mass and impact strength. The HEMA sparring kit also sets you back around 1000€ so there's that but at the same time having spent that amount on your protective gear means that you're pretty decently protected against appropriate training swords. On the other hand hitting someone with a full weight medieval sword is not a good idea. Even historically practice swords were often used and people would get plenty enough injuries with those. Luckily today we have better materials and better training gear. Then there's the whole thing about LARP and combat. Fencing? Do you need to create your character as a representation of your actual fencing skills? If not, it could be silly that a banker character with no combat skills suddenly disarms a paladin with a claymore because the IRL person has such good fencing skills. Even so the good fencer always wins. Fencing is really difficult to master and there's enormous difference even between a novice and slightly less novice fencer. (I'm not talking of the Olympic fencing sport but ability with sword) Then, do you need to communicate your relative skills to each other before proceeding? Just curious. And yes, this is why I don't LARP. I'm too much of a smartass.
most LARPs have some form of experience system, at which point someone with preexisting experience would likely progress much faster than someone without, so sure someone who's a professional martial artist may show up and fight way outside of their weight class per se, they'd quickly rank up to a more appropriate skill level, even assuming they're not given a honorary ranking to match their familiarity.
Would in my opinion be better to start off with a quality gambeson, gloves, and a feder. Everything else really isn't needed for training in medieval martial arts.
Helmets generally did not get used for training purposes back in the day. Hands, arms, and torso only mattered as a good hit to those areas would put someone out of a possible fight with broken bones. While a hit to the head normally just resulted from a scar. The reason for training was to practice and master techniques. Which learning is all that mattered and helmets hindered this. You have to learn and see where things are through muscle memory before just trusting where those things are with a helmet. edit for grammar
In many of the manuals the trainees are in fact training wearing stockings and no armor. Then again 1000€ is not much for really good protection if and when you want to take your sparring more seriously. Ideally you don't want to be overly limiting your attacks out of fear of hurting your opponent, you need to be able to at least take a swing at him without having to slow down a lot at the end. I really, really like the ability to hit the opponent to the head. Back in the day they simply didn't have our materials and their training faced certain limitations. On the other hand sometimes they just went nuts and jousted "natural" with real weapons instead of practice lances. Because why the hell not? There were a lot of situations that a professional warrior would train for. For instance you're not always going to be riding your horse in full plate at the courtyard of your castle. They did train to fight without armor for self defense and so on and not just knights but nobility and even commoners. Imaginary scenario - you're casually walking around the market carrying your greatsword and three thieves attack you or some guy makes a serious insult, a guy passes you at the sausage kiosk line. Whatever the case, you're unarmored and you have your weapon. The enemy might actually have weapons that are ideal to fight against your weapon and so. Luckily you've practiced a shit ton of this stuff so you know what your play is going to be, what to try to do and what to avoid. If we were assuming a war situation then swords would be largely sidearms, like a pistol while you're gripping to a spear, bow, rifle or a polearm. When people study fighting with swords it is most likely something you're going to benefit from outside of a battle since you might not even be a soldier to begin with. You might own a sausage shop and be carrying your cash to the bank and stuff. The guy with the sausage shop opposite to you might want to get rid of you and so on. In fact it was a thing back then in some places - someone insulted you and you could duel him to death. Then the authorities would investigate if you had earlier beef with him - as in, you're not just trying to take offense or insult your rival in order to cheat the system so you get to kill him and go free.
No, more like potential witnesses can't know that you've got a beef with the guy in advance. You know, because it's OK to put down a horrible trollish jerk but it's not OK to use that as an excuse to kill an annoying neighbor or rival suitor or so. -------------- HEMA club is moving forward. We're starting out with longsword and our starting kit will be limited to sporting clothes of preference, indoor shoes and a synthetic Black Fencer longsword. Funny, there was an enormous excitement about this within the kendo core group here. What I've been talking I have heard that in some cities you don't even need to advertise. They just set up the club and people started showing up. Pretty similar level of excitement at least initially here. Already got a place to train at with help from the local kendo club and a ton of support from the nearby cities' HEMA instructors who are helping pave the way pointing us to good materials, what are good swords and practices etc. Now it looks it sets you back 70€ to get started - the cost of the synthetic sword. Unlike in kendo you don't need a ton of swords and you don't need to spend all of your free time maintaining them either. Just get the sword, put your pants and indoor shoes on and get started. When you like it you can be acquiring more gear and eventually piece together a full sparring kit which is pretty fucking epic, essentially it protects your full body and can be rated up to 1000 Newtons of protection. For instance your elbow will be really well protected: And none of that stuff with limited areas you're allowed to hit either and if the other guy comes in too close - you can just grab hold of him so you can hit him with your sword. If need be (and the floor isn't concrete or so) you can even perform some simple throws on enemies that come too close for comfort. Pretty damn excited about getting this going. Turns out everyone's been thinking of doing this and now we're getting started once we get the gear and an idea of what we're going to be doing - in addition to swinging a bunch of swords together.
We got 7 people showing up for the first session. I got this Black Fencer's Federschwert v4 for myself as a starter sword. It's got a reputation for being nigh unbreakable. Also, I'm going to be leading the first sessions. We're starting a week from now, I need to figure out the 2-hour training regimen in advance. I need to figure out which end of the sort is the business end and all that stuff. I'm also going to be trying to create a pell. Essentially a thick wooden log and I'll attach a carpet around it so once I get that done we'll have something to swing at with full force. It will be a nice addition to the available training methods which will initially be mostly about form and technique, hitting air to build up familiarity with the sword and a basic idea of the movement. I'll be looking for any opportunities to visit older clubs to get some good tips as well as inviting their instructors in. Luckily we all have varying degrees of background from swinging swords. I can tap to the experience of the more seasoned folks to help with form and so on. People experienced with sparring and even physiotherapy, etc. - great assets for the club as they'll know a ton of stuff about improving speed and endurance and can point to which faults in the form can lead to injury. First argument was about whether to invite even more people for the first practice. Majority were sort of going with keeping the size relatively small for the first few sessions - we don't have many swords to go around, we don't yet have a good idea of what works and what doesn't etc. I'm with the camp who thought that it's better to just experiment for the first month or so before inviting other people so we'll have some minimal level of familiarity of running these sessions ourselves.
I'd recommend masks. Even if you aren't using steel weapons, a shot to the head in the wrong place can do some nasty damage, even with not much force behind it. Jammed fingers and contusions are fairly trivial, and usually breaks are altogether avoidable if are considerate of one another and control your blows. What are you looking at as source material?
I've looked up Wiktenauer sources for German longsword. They have a collection of videos that together with other sources help us figure out a set of strikes and parries we'll be first adding to our curriculum. Our primary reference material consists of these two books: https://www.amazon.com/German-Longsword-Study-Guide-Farrell/dp/099267350X https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Longsword-Mastering-Arms-Book-ebook/dp/B00LLC6OLK Yes, face is extremely sensitive area. A light strike to top of head or so rarely results in concussion but even a slight brush in face area can result in a broken nose or permanent eye damage. Padded HEMA specific fencing style helmets set you back around 110$, this was recommended for a budget starter mask: http://www.afinternationalsporting.com/product_info.php/products_id/145/cPath/8 This mask has protection extending even to the back of head which is really nice. Folks without masks will be limited to the pell (once it's finished, I'd like to have more than one), swinging into air and some simple training where they go through the motions of hitting at an opponent at very slow speed so they can get some feel for the distance and so. Any training involving stopping the sword before it hits the training partner will be carefully thought of and limited to such techniques where there is no risk of any real injury. Even so everyone will be instructed of safety principles every time. There's no playing around with safety issues. I'll need someone to hit me with the federschwert to my arms, sides and so to see what it feels like. Luckily there's no shortage of volunteers for this! I need to know what it feels like so I can take that into account when planning practice.
you will want the protection to the back of the head, I don't care how good people are at pulling their blows, blah blah whatever BS they want to give you, I've taken a shinai to the ear and to claim it was an enjoyable experience is similar to stating about how nice it is to have a good shot to the groin. It doesn't take a very solid thwack to have you second guessing your life choices XD
