LogFAQs > #970055544

Shadiversity's video on nunchaku (not nunchucks) annoys me, because he is going about it as someone who clearly has no idea how the weapon is actually used. I don't claim to be a zealous follower of his videos, but he strikes me as a theorycrafter who relies more on his own personal interpretations than an in-depth understanding of history; I've seen about as many inaccurate claims out of him as accurate ones (and not just on this subject).

For my own background, I've trained in martial arts for just over 30 years now, about 20 of them with Okinawan weapons like the nunchaku. I run my own dojo and I'm president of a North American martial arts federation.

First of all, he compares the nunchaku to a flail, which is all kinds of bizarre. Yeah, they look similar, but they are very different weapons. Flails were improvised weapons of war, largely used by peasantry that were levied when manpower was short. Contrary to what fantasy stories may have taught you, there's basically no credible evidence that they were ever used by knights or professional soldiers. They were a grain threshing tool that could be used to bludgeon someone, so farmers brought them if they didn't have anything better, but a good polearm or sword would serve you much better if you could afford it.

Nunchaku, by contrast, were never used for warfare - that was not their intended nor actual application. The original nunchaku was a horse's bridle (as seen here: https://www.kobudo.ch/Kobudo/Waffen/Nunchaku_files/page32_3.jpg) and it was, similar to the flail, an improvised weapon, but one intended mostly for civilian self-defence or possibly law enforcement. Your attacker was assumed to be a mugger and, therefore, if he was armed at all it would probably be with a knife.

In that particular role, nunchaku work fine - they have a range advantage over the knife, and their large arcs make approaching for a stab or slash difficult. Moreover - and this is the part of the nunchaku most people don't understand, because they're used to Bruce Lee or Michelangelo from the Ninja Turtles swinging them like flails - the nunchaku actually has a lot of uses as a grappling tool. They were basically a primitive form of handcuffs.

Honestly, we don't have great information on a lot of the historical applications of nunchaku, as the Ryukyu Kingdom (present day Okinawa prefecture) didn't have great written records for much of its history and relied on oral records. Furthermore, a lot of that knowledge and history was lost when the prefecture was invaded and decimated in the Battle of Okinawa at the end of WW2 (the Americans dropped five artillery rounds on the island for every Okinawan living there at the time, and over a quarter of the population died, if you want an idea of the scale of the destruction). However, what we do know does not line up at all with what Shadiversity thinks he knows about the weapon.