I recently had a couple of students in my Wing Chun class ask for training in swordsmanship. Now, Kung Fu has a lot of weapons forms, but they tend to be stylized, rather than sparring formats. I originally thought of teaching them Kendo, on the Japanese forms, but having just taken some Tae Kwon Do classes of my own, I decided to look a little further afield. I found the Korean cognate of Kendo, called kumdo.
While there are a lot of practitioners of kumdo who claim that their techniques are passed down over the centuries in secret rituals, a little bit of digging showed that it’s incredibly unlikely that this is the case. When the Imperial Army of Japan occupied Chosun (now Korea) in the early 20th century, they brought kendo with them. Prior to that, because of the Confucian influences from China, and a Korean superstition about sharp objects, the art of the sword in Korea had been withering on the vine for going on three hundred years. The Koreans, like any culture that adopts guns, had relegated the sword to a secondary, and eventually tertiary weapon for military training, and Confucianism put a stronger emphasis on scholarship than martial...
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