The Kusarigama: Gimmicky or Effective?

all right folks today I'm finally going to talk about the kusarigama a number of people over the years have asked me about it and one of my patrons Ace the super villain has been fascinated with it recently and he put together a playlist of videos that he said he found surprisingly plausible now I won't be able to show you one on hand because it is prohibited in Canada presumably by ignorant lawmakers who watch too many 80s ninja movies it's also prohibited apparently in the UK and Ireland and in Australia it looks like it would fall under the flail prohibition the way it's formulated so all I've got is a sickle and uh yeah I'm just going to show you some pictures of originals and museums I'm not going to go into great detail about the historical background because I haven't dug that deeply into it I'm more interested in the practical application but I did find a book by Ellis mdur if I pronounce that correctly uh who talks about the kusari gamma and apparently it was neither a ninja weapon nor a peasant weapon uh Sachin if you think about it the reasoning here makes perfect sense as an agricultural tool you want something that's as light as possible so you can swing it all day without fatigue and you want a very thin blade that can cut grass and weed effectively all of that a war pick or battle sickle or whatever is a very different kind of Beast that needs to be designed differently he refers to the Japanese martial artist and researcher yawa yumio who hypothesized that this weapon derived from the jingama which is a tool that was generally kept in Barns because it was used to Cut the Ropes tethering the horses in case of a fire in the barn so we can lead the horses out and he thought that it was combined with a con Pi which is a chain with a weight at the end which you would hold in one hand and then the jingle drama in the other hand to defend horses against thieves or arsonists Etc so then the next logical step would be to connect the two and there's different types of kusarigama the chain can be connected either to the bottom of the handle or to the sickle blade he points out that it was not a battlefield weapon which makes perfect sense because you wouldn't be able to use it in a formation with multiple people and also it's not really an anti-armor weapon depending on the size of the weight at the end I suppose you could potentially use it as a flail but a lot of them seem like the weight is of moderate size are not extremely heavy so it seems to have been designed as a weapon against a single opponent with a sword specifically so you can entrap the sword and use the sickle to both parry and attack he argues that the weight at the end of the chain is of limited Effectiveness which I would agree with I'm having messed around with a Castlevania style chain whip all I put at the end was was just a lock that's all I had at the time so it's not amazingly effective in that regard but a lot of the ones that I see don't seem necessarily to weigh that much more than heavy duty lock again there's different shapes and sizes now I found a video on the channel pims projects about the Castlevania Whip and he made a much better one and figured out a quite effective way to use it where the the weight actually goes forward pretty much like you see in in the game I'm assuming that's due to the heavier weight what I use probably just wasn't heavy enough at the end so you can't do that and that'll look quite effective really so if you if you have the right kind of weight and you use it well enough with proper technique this can certainly be quite useful again not necessarily lethal unless you happen to hit the head if you hit somebody in the chest with one of those they're not going to go down but you know you have all kinds of reach and any hit of course any kind of injury to the opponent is good in short since Japanese arms and armor are not my specialty I figured I should get the input of someone who won't butcher the pronunciation of Japanese words the way I do and who can provide some more background info so I asked a certain Mega we I mean Megatron Metatron just kidding bro thanks for chiming in konnichiwa hey skeleton thank you so much for having me here and hello to everyone all right let's talk a little bit about the sarigama definitely an unusual weapon you've got the sari the Kama and the fundo so the chain sickle and weight respectively but there were quite a lot of different typologies now Scala has already shown quite a few on this video but for example in the more Okinawan version of this weapon you've got sometimes two sickles or two Karma connected by a rope or a chain which is already quite interesting other times the two commas or the two cycles are asymmetrical one being smaller than the other as we begin talking about the little different pieces the karma part which is actually the sickle well that's the easiest one it's just a farming tool that's what it is you use it to reap crops and most likely you know you can imagine a Japanese farmer who's walking around and then he's being attacked by either a bandit slash you know Samurai maniac and they want to kill him and he's got the camera of course he's going to use it as an improvised self-defense Implement and that's what the comma is first so we've got two different hypotheses about the origin on the one hand a tool used to cut free horses and defend them on the other hand the agricultural sickle which of them is more accurate or if it could be a bit of both I have no idea the kusarigama I want to detach it from The Peasants now because this is an actual weapon that is trying to be improved as such and if you look at Edo period examples you will find some that will have full lead blades and forged blades which already gives you an idea they are trying to improve it and sometimes you've got versions that have got metal protection for the hand and interestingly enough they're actually further up in the weapon suggesting that there are many possible different ways to grip it and that's supported by the way it's used in Okinawan kobudo now the fact that they start attaching the chain at the bottom or at the top depending on the style really tells me that they are trying to develop this weapon even further okay so it's a real weapon but when was it created well the repertoire of moves and techniques that have to do with the sarigama go all the way back to called you I'll call you are the traditional school so the traditional martial arts so anything that predates the major restoration of 1868 and possibly also the ban of carrying weapons of 1876 anything created before that in terms of martial arts is that called you and lots of schools such as the arakiriu the shingandyu ishindyu they all have kasarigama techniques and the foundation of these Styles goes all the way back to the sengoku period and for some of these schools even to the late muromachi period so if I had to take my uneducated guess no one really knows when to specifically pinpoint it in time but I want to say 1500 so definitely muramachi period some of these kusarigama had a chain slash rope that was all the way up to three meters long which means that theoretically you could functionally keep a Pole weapon wielder at Bay with this weapon now given I'd rather be the Pole weapon will that I'd like to mention I mean I would definitely prefer a year but it's still interesting that you can keep them at Bay make it harder for them to step in with such a weapon and now let's close it with the most controversial question was it a specifically designed Ninja Weapon or Shinobi weapon no I'm not saying that historically no Shinobi whatsoever ever touched at sarigama no it probably did happen but was it specifically made for the Shinobi No Mono there is no historical evidence to back that one up in the association between the sariyama and the ninja is relatively modern but thank you so much for listening to me blabbering back to scalar Grim off I go all right thanks Metatron it's good to have the extra information about the historical background so let's get back to function and practical use okay so let's take a look at some of those videos so here's a demonstration Swinging the Chain around so this is the the type with the chain connected to the blade as you can see here so the nice thing about that is you can use the entire thing with one hand you can actually twirl The Chain by just swinging the um the sickle around hey so here you've got a Perry against a sword the nice thing is with the sickle you can use it the same way as an ax you can hook and you can control the opponent's blade that way also note there's a guard on here a hand guard it being a demonstration is going to be compliant but I like that they do it properly you know they both move at the same rate of speed in fact they moved pretty close to full speed so here the kusarigama user basically scares The Swordsman Away by swinging that chain it would be quite difficult to to Parry and catch with the sword without it wrapping around speaking of wrapping around so he wraps around the foot now here's a drawback that I see of the type that has the chain connected to the blade or to the sickle in general it could also be to the to handle so you see right here it's wrapped around so far that he only has a little bit of of lengths to work with so that limits what you can do with the sickle if you've wrapped it around the opponent and now it's you know Tethered to the opponent with with this much room how are you going to use the sickle effectively so if it's attached to the handle you can probably still use the sickle more effectively big and he blocks the sword with the sickle then he wrenches it around and then he wraps the chain around the neck now this this I think is a bit of an odd follow-up like here just just cut him in the head like you know just bring the sickle down on his head or his neck or whatever just tackle the signal you're already right in position there's really no reason here to use the chain but for the demonstration just to show how you can use the chain fair enough okay here we've got naginata versus kusarigama and they're both wearing protective gear so this should be a more functional demonstration with more resistance I'm assuming yeah exactly that's what I'd like to see so the the fighter with the naganata is actually attacking for you know in Earnest and you know with one of the two sickles the defender catches it and then moves in that's exactly what you want to do and then he keeps entangling them so that's that's exactly what you want to do you need to defend against the naganada because you need to get past the point and then rush in immediately because as soon as you're there the naganatas had a huge disadvantage and yeah especially if you wrap them up and also what I really like here the naganada fighter is drawing a dagger sidearm using it it's exactly what you want to do if you have a pole arm you pretty much need some kind of sidearm be it a dagger or a short sword or something because your opponent is going to do want to do exactly this get past your pole alarm and get to grappling and then you need something something short to deploy the interesting thing here is there is a kusarigama in the main hand and then there's the sickle or comma I guess in the offhand which makes a lot of sense in this case now this honestly I don't think would have worked in in a real fight with an actual steel naginata because considering how hard a pole arm hits you really can't stop that with one hand it's just not happening this I'm pretty sure this naganata cut would have blown through and hit anyway but uh yeah again moving in attacking with it I do have to I do have to wonder if the chain could sometimes entangle the user as well here it's it's really mainly the opponent so that works out quite well and so if you can wrap it around their legs that's going to be very useful you can basically use it as a Bola you know entangle the legs better pull them off their feet things like that and Tangle the arms we've got a practice kusarigama against the katana so he hits him on their head with it this should probably be full score this should this should score as a head hit because if you smack someone in the head with with a weight like that at the end of the chain yeah they're probably going down or at least they're going to struggle to continue the fight so that's the danger here and he's actually doing a really good job evading it there that's almost a matrix Dodge right there and it moves in immediately then we get the Rope wrapped around it's still wrapped around his hand so that certainly works it's pretty interesting to see here and it's not the only thing you have you still have the sickle to use to defend because if you think about it just the chain with a with a weight or a an extremely long flare or something cannot defend basically in short the idea of blocking a sword cut with the chain worries me a little bit I imagine if you were to receive a committed full powered blow of the sword on the Chain there's going to be so much force going to the chain that you may have trouble holding on to it so the chain might start to slip through your hands and then you know basically extend and collapse inward so you might not be able to actually stop that compared to a rigid object with which to block you could say with excellent grip strength if you hold on to it really tightly and keep the chain as taut as possible you might be able to get away with that but if you assume high strength then what if the The Swordsman also is very strong and delivers a particularly powerful strike with the sword I really doubt you would be able to stop that fully while being safe but of course without testing it it's just speculation so take that with a grain of salt but with this absolutely especially if it's reinforced you know if it's um if you've got iron reinforcement line gets uh iron bands things like that on a solid oak shaft for example yeah you can absolutely stop a shortcut with this particularly again if you have that guard at the end which I quite like not all of them have it but that is extremely useful yeah that's that's a good way to keep the swordsman at Bay he has to move in because he has less range than the chain but he doesn't want to of course because it's extremely hard to evade or Parry this okay let's check out one more there we go so we got the Rope okay is this a bit too much of a pause here in between after wrenching the sword you know here the uh that's what's swordsman is just standing there here it's used as more of a distraction I think so you make the opponent sidestep to evade that strike with the Rope then hooking onto the sword attacking the offhand and then the leg there it's Raptor oh yeah I like that one so it's wrapped around the sword and then she steps on the Rope pull it down yeah I can see that so yeah I can definitely see this being an effective weapon there are some things to consider of course like for example if a an opposing swordsman cuts down with both hands are are you going to be able to stop that with one hand you know if it's the opponent is strong and delivers a cut with good structure that really follows through you may not be able to stop that with just one hand it may just you know blow through basically but if there's other ways to do it for example if you sweep it aside if you basically cut into the opponent's sword cut and deflect it off to the side rather than meeting the force head on that can absolutely work sure this is a very short weapon uh they come at different lengths I've seen some kusarigama that are relatively long although the jingama seems to be longer in general but either way it's a relatively short weapon against a sword of course you're at a disadvantage there but you have the chain the weighted chain to keep them at Bay with so that can make up for that and especially if you're using two sickles then you have more opportunities for parrying in fact if you have to block do a static block with two both of them so you can use both arms that's an option and once you're able to move in now of course you have the huge Advantage because a short weapon like this Close Quarters is going to be devastating speaking of devastating I mean I've tested this one here which just goes straight through padded armor as if it wasn't there and that's despite this really being the less effective type because this is curved if you use a straight War pick basically it concentrates all that Force more effectively and penetrates extremely deeply so it's a devastating weapon and can also be used against armor of varying kinds either against soft or sort of medium armor where it punches right through or you could possibly Target the gaps of the armor in case of plate so yeah this is my opinion based on what I'm seeing without having handled it myself but to be honest I wouldn't make that much of a difference because I'm not trained in the use so you know I wouldn't really get that much more of an impression necessarily than commenting on videos so hope you found it interesting thanks for watching and have a good one folks [Music] no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

Channel: Skallagrim

Views: 428,371

Keywords: Skall, Skallagrim, Japanese weapon, ninja weapon, shinobi, kusarigama, kama, how practical, samurai, ronin, ancient Japan, koryu, sengoku, flail, weighted chain, swordsman, naginata, martial arts, demonstration, Metatron

Id: ce4MQA5fWbY

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021