What type of martial arts do ninjas use

They might appear as farmers, servants, priests, entertainers, etc. The point was to spy and infiltrate, sabotage and assassinate. They couldn't do that very well by being the center of attention wearing a conspicuous outfit.

Ninja could be likened to modern-day CIA agents or special forces. They were trained in arts of intelligence gathering and sabotage, and in arts of fighting and weaponry. Men and women in special forces and intelligence agencies today have training in firearms, hand-to-hand combat and explosives, and ninjas had training in the equivalent for their era. This included training in and use of firearms flintlock rifles that existed during their time , poisons and explosives.

Though the ninja, actually called shinobi, were originally a caste group who inherited their position as professional spies, eventually the daimyo Japanese feudal lords began training their own shinobi.

And, as the story goes, shinobi eventually made their way into folklore. By the time you start seeing ninjas in the West, the image is tainted by James Bond movies and other films, and even comic books, that further perpetuate legends of the ninja. At any rate, shinobi what we now often call ninja were a real group that underwent real training for their profession. So, what were they trained in and how was their training used? Today, the martial art of the ninja is referred to as ninjutsu.

There is some debate as to whether the martial art known as ninjutsu is authentic and actual documentation and historical accounts of the training of shinobi is scarce. What is generally accepted is that they were well-trained in espionage, both striking and grappling martial arts, weapon arts, poisons, explosives, horse-back riding, the bow and arrow, and had extensive training for improving endurance and conditioning.

They could use sword, spear and flexible weapons. They did carry and use the shuriken, often called throwing stars or ninja stars, but it has been up for debate how these weapons were used; it's been suggested that they weren't used as projectiles but held in the hand and used for striking.

The shinobi also used caltrops, which are 4-pointed spikes that could be dropped in their path so that anyone trying to track them could step and fall on the spikes and get a horror of a painful injury. Caltrops were certainly meant to aid an escape. The striking art of the ninja would have been an old form of fighting in Japan known as taijutsu and their grappling art was the forerunner of jujutsu, known as kumi-uchi.

Their sword art would have been the old art of kenjutsu and they also had training in the use of the spear, known as sojutsu and also naginata-do. They had bo staff skills from their practice of the art of bojutsu and practiced a form of archery called kyudo. The ninja carried small weapons that could be concealed, called tonki. All in all, their combat costume was a formidable outfit. This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible.

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Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. The ninja were also great second-story men. They were extremely adept at breaking into enemy castles and spent long hours practicing wall climbing.

They also stressed leaping to be able to jump across rooftops and to avoid their enemies by hopping across chasms, over walls and fences, etc. Seiko Fujita claimed that ninja became such experts at leaping that many of them could jump more than 7 feet into the air — which would make them champion high jumpers even today.

Ninja put just as much stress on the spiritual and mental aspects of ninjutsu training as they did on purely physical action. They had to have their wits about them at all times and work out complicated problems on the spot. They learned to sharpen their perception and insight, developing their instincts to a point that seemed almost superhuman. Heishichiro Okuse — perhaps the foremost authority on ninjutsu and the author of four books — wrote his last work on the subject, Hidden Ninjutsu: The Secret Thoughts and Strategies of the Ninja.

According to him, they regarded nothing as impossible and scientifically applied brain power to every problem they encountered. He regards the nonphysical aspects of ninjutsu as the key to a successful career. One of the most interesting aspects of ninjutsu is kuji-kiri, or magical signs made with the fingers to assist them in self-control during moments of danger.

Kuji, or the number nine, is said to be the most important number in Kikkyo esoteric Buddhism and Shugendo mountain asceticism. In practicing kuji-kiri, there were 81 different ways the ninja could knit his fingers together.

At the same time, he chanted Buddhist sutras, or maxims from the scriptures. The practice not only restored confidence and gave the ninja inner strength in moments of danger and desperation, but it was also supposed to hypnotize the enemy into inaction or temporary paralysis.

It was something like the evil eye or the casting of a hex. Twenty years later, the Flying Dragon Villa has become more feared. Meanwhile, the swordsman's daughter, Yen Cheng Pei Pei sets out to find the brothers, end Lung's reign and make Flying Dragon Villa an honorable place again.

After uniting the five brothers, she teaches them the Five Tigers with One Heart kung fu skill to give them a fighting chance against Lung. Seeing this technique will help you understand why the Chinese are known for those amazing balancing and people-pyramid acts. During the s until retirement, Pei Pei was touted as the first queen of kung fu films and prior to a serious accident in Golden Swallow was known for doing her own stunts and fights. Yet after the injury, a male double was used if the director wouldn't allow her to do it herself.

When Pei Pei fights Tien's stunt double, who's armed with a guan dao massive blade on top of a long pole , they rock the screen with lengthy weapon exchanges captured within the same shot. To me, this is Pei Pei's best fight ever. She's relentless, smooth, and graceful, which is a difficult to do when fighting someone with a larger and heavier weapon. Chia enters the genre like a bat out of hell on a freakazoid chopper high on Meatloaf. In what must be the most men killed by any female star in a kung fu film, the final fight is as mesmerizing as it is relentless.

For nine-and-a-half minutes, Chia is surrounded by knife-wielding warriors and hatchet men trying to feed-frenzy her into oblivion. Ultimately, it is the lady who axes the questions and when they try to lie and cheat her, she becomes the cheetah and makes them lie on the ground. Avenger uses s fight choreography while shooting the action with tight angles that create a strained sense of pugilistic claustrophobia that makes us feel Su-zhen and Chia are both fighting for their lives.

With a wee background in Chinese opera combat choreography and this being Chia's debut kung fu film, it was fitting to not disrupt Chia's expectations of what the fight might look and feel like.

During the use of s choreography where hooligans would form tight circles around the hero and the non-attackers would excessively move to add motion and commotion to the fight, Chia was instructed to throw non-stop kicks and punches in all directions while spinning around like a female Olympic skater except to do it with knives and hatchets in hand.

Everybody gets nailed by a sharp hatchet hammer or a pointed screwdriver knife…Su-zhen's tools of the trade. The Mandarin title Ching Wu Men means entering the gate of knowledge of the Ching Wu martial arts school, which was created by Shanghai martial arts legend Huo Yuen-jia.

Set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in , after the Japanese deliver a plaque with the words Sick Men of Asia written in searing black ink and Huo's top student Chen Chen Lee endures ridicule from the Japanese delegation, we're minutes away from a very important moment in fight choreography history; Lee kicking eight different bullies in one unedited shot in a Japanese karate dojo then introducing the world to a nunchaku. Adding to the scene's steam, a reflection of Lee's disdain toward how the Japanese treated the Chinese during that era, he adds insult to injury by having some Japanese fighters wearing their hakama backwards and at the end of the nunchaku sequence, Lee defiantly poses in front of Gichin Funakoshi's father of Japanese karate portrait.

Yet Lee's ultimate powerful pervasive message of Chinese not being sick people is brilliantly depicted when Lee defeats Japanese thugs in front of Shanghai Park by splintering a wooden sign that read, "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" with a flying kick it's a sign that never existed. Black Tavern is the best whip movie in the history of whip-moviedom. My mouth was so agape watching this film that I swallowed a thousand flies. Whip master Zhang Ku Feng is like a flamethrower full of rocket fuel. It's on the list not for the story, but for the fight scenes that are cooler than liquid nitrogen freezing the Terminator, which includes the whacked out, Viking-helmeted, villain Hu terrorizing the Inn like an enraged bull in a ring filled of blind matadors who forgot their capes and swords.

The story opens when after a drunk monk performs shu xiao ban 11 th century Chinese rap music to an inn full of vagabond, thieves, and a cryptic swordswoman that a treasure chest is heading to Black Tavern, all the rascals leave the inn with brains wrapped in greed.

At the tavern, all hell breaks loose as the menagerie of Chekhovian pseudo-heroes, back-stabbing villains, zombie men, ghosts, leopard-skin lackeys, switched women and Hu partake in increasingly lethal and inventive death scenes. The Bo Staff is a famous weapon used by Ninjas and other Japanese martial artists; and the style of fighting with the staff was called Bojutsu.

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