Naginata

Origins

The naginata appears in Japanese sources by the late Heian period, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and may have developed from earlier long-bladed pole weapons of the kind used in China. Its name is usually read as "long sword" or "mowing sword," and it was, in effect, a long curved blade given the reach of a spear. The military romances of the Genpei War of 1180-1185, above all the Tale of the Heike, show naginata in the hands of foot soldiers, of samurai fighting on foot, and of the sōhei — armed monks of the great temples of Nara and Mount Hiei, who fought in the political struggles of the capital.

Design & Construction

A naginata blade is a single-edged, curved blade of the same forged steel as a sword, usually one to two feet long, fitted to a wooden shaft of about four to seven feet by a long tang held with a pin and a metal collar. The butt of the shaft carries a metal cap, the ishizuki, which could itself be used to strike. The curve of the blade and its forward balance suit wide sweeping cuts, both horizontal — against the legs of men and horses — and diagonal, and the long shaft lets the user switch hands and strike from either side. Blades were often shortened and remounted as swords in later centuries, and many surviving swords began as naginata.

Combat Use

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the naginata was a common weapon of samurai and their retainers fighting on foot, and a weapon associated above all with the warrior monks, whose attacks on Kyoto made them a political force. Its sweeping cuts were well suited to open fighting and to attacking cavalry, and it could be used from horseback. From the fifteenth century onward, as armies grew larger and fought in dense formations of foot soldiers, the straight thrusting yari, which could be used in close ranks, replaced it; by the Sengoku period of the sixteenth century the naginata was a minor battlefield weapon beside the yari, the bow and the arquebus.

Legacy

In the Edo period (1603-1868) the naginata found a new role as a weapon taught to the women of samurai families, for whom skill with it was a mark of good upbringing and a means of defending the household. The best-documented fighting women of Japan, the onna-musha, are few, but some are well attested: at the siege of Aizu in 1868 Nakano Takeko led a group of women armed with naginata against Imperial troops and was killed in the fighting. Today naginata is practiced as a modern budō in Japan and abroad, and the curved blade on a long shaft remains, with the Katana and the Tanto, one of the emblematic weapons of the Samurai.