Chaos on the battlefield

Have you ever wondered what combat on a samurai battlefield really looked like? Film suggests an aesthetic: silence, focus, a bow, distance, a single cut—and quiet afterward. The dōjō, too, likes clean lines, movement closed like calligraphy. Only these are children of peace, not of war. In Sengoku there is no empty space between two warriors: there is a crowd, there is dust, there is wet earth, there is a menpō beneath which steam gathers like in an oven, and there is a dō that with every breath reminds you that you are not a legend—you are a body locked inside heavy metal. So heavy that every step is a fight for balance while you trudge through sucking mud, stepping and sliding over the heads and torsos of dead ashigaru on the ground.

That is why, if we want to understand Sengoku, we must turn our eyes away from “beautiful cuts” and step into the moment cinema dislikes: the clinch. This is the world of kumiuchi and its harshest variety: yoroi kumiuchi (鎧組討ち)—two men grappling by one another’s armor while the chaotic blows of the crowd press in from every side. It takes only a foot slipping in the mud for the heroic image to become physics: suneate sink, haidate drag at the thighs, the dō pulls the torso down, and the two of them slide together into the mire. Then kuzushi (崩し) begins—a twist of the torso, a blocked step, a pull onto the knee, a shove upward under the kabuto, a weighting with the hips—done to steal posture and breath.

And then armor, seemingly monolithic, betrays its truth: it is a mosaic that must allow movement—it has armpits, a neck, a waist, joints, plate connections. In this world a hand does not seek a “pretty hit,” only a hinge: elbow, shoulder, wrist—because these are what command the weapon. One does not choke here solely by the throat; one chokes with mass, with earth, with space stolen from the chest. And when you feel beneath your fingers a different texture—not lacquer and metal, but damp cloth in a gap—you understand why the short blade exists: a tantō is not for fighting—it is for ending the fight. Of these two men only one will return today to his family. So let us step down from the smartphone screen onto Sengoku’s wet ground—and see what battlefield combat techniques looked like in Japan’s samurai Middle Ages.

Seconds that decide the whole of what comes after

First, there was a sound.

Not a scream—there were too many screams, too many throats on this not-wide-enough field. Not a prayer—prayers vanished in the dust of the struggle. It was the sound of a dry, short удар, as though someone had struck a stick against hollow wood. “Kachin.” The plates of a dō met someone’s elbow. And then again, the same thing, only closer: iron on iron, lacquer on lacquer, cord on cord. In Sengoku a battle had no single melody—it had a thousand tiny snaps that together made one great, blind friction.

In all that chaos he did not truly see him until they were two steps apart.

That was all the distance he had. He braced himself. Here every step had to be ripped out of the mud. A foot did not place itself—it had to be pulled free from heavy, wet clay that clung to straw sandals and the lower edges of greaves. Suneate (metal plates tied to the calf to protect the shins) weighed like stones. Haidate—a skirt of small plates guarding the thighs—clattered against itself with every jerk. And somewhere under it all the lungs worked: short, broken inhalations, because armor, though it gave life, could suffocate no less than an enemy.

The man he saw wore a kabuto with a high maedate—an ornament that in this moment was no ornament at all, only a handle. On his face he wore a menpō; the mask sucked in breath, and steam escaped from beneath it like from an oven. Up close you could see drops of mud on the lacquer, bitten into the red lacing. In his hand he held a spear, but the spear was already useless—they were too close. Beneath their feet bodies of dead ashigaru writhed in heaps; you had to watch not to slip on someone’s head or leg. Someone flew between them with a wild scream, a naginata raised overhead—and then vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him.

Their gazes drove into each other, and in a fraction of a second both did the same thing: they raised their weapons higher. In air soaked with smoke, damp, and the metallic smell of blood, the sword did not shine at all—it was matte, filthy, heavy. The cut went instinctively, from the hips, sideways, but the blade struck a plate of the dō. Not flesh—armor. The answer came at once: hard resistance, a tremor in the wrist, as if he had hit stone. In moments like these there is no time for surprise. There is only the flash of a thought: “don’t cut”; “break the stance.”

The man in the menpō took half a step forward. He pressed his shoulder into him, like an animal in a crowd, and suddenly the remnants of distance disappeared. The sword became an obstacle—too long, too awkward, trapped between their armors. He could smell the acrid scent of his breath and sweat beneath the mask of the yoroi. His hands met hard elements: the edge of the sode, the wide shoulder guards; a row of lamellae under the armpit; knots of cords. Quickly, with his hands, he searched for the best part of the opponent’s armor to seize firmly and comfortably.

This was kumiuchi—samurai close-quarters combat on the battlefield. There was only one, single goal. To kill the enemy faster than he could kill me.

Instead of hunting another cut, he slid his left hand under the edge of the sode, where the cord bound the small plates, and pulled. Not hard. Not straight. With a slight twist, as if he wanted to wrench the opponent’s shoulder. At the same time, with his right arm he struck the kabuto—not with the fist, because there was no space for a fist, but with the forearm, directly along the line of the helmet. The kabuto rang—dull. And with that sound the opponent lost his axis, recoiling a half step.

Half a step on a battlefield means more than five in a dōjō.

The man in the menpō tried to regain his balance, but in armor you do not do it lightly. The muscles of the torso may fail to carry the armor’s weight if he pitches too sharply. A knee also does not accept weight as a man might wish. Every movement is a negotiation with metal. In that negotiation the one who first takes kuzushi (崩し)—the breaking of structure, the theft of verticality—wins.

Locked together, they stepped sideways. Someone crashed into them and vanished at once. Someone struck his back. And they held each other’s armor like two men who, falling off a cliff, had grabbed the same rope.

Suddenly his foot slipped in the mud.

He did not fall at once. A fall here is not a theatrical tumble, but a slow, inevitable sliding of weight. First the line of the hips broke—the body tilted by a few degrees. Then the armor that was meant to protect him became his own mass. The suneate drove into the earth, the haidate pressed the thighs, and the dō dragged the torso down. The man in the menpō no longer tried to cut. In that moment he did what effective people do: he weighted him down.

They went down together.

The ground hit like a battering ram. Mud got everywhere—into the gaps of the armor, under cord, beneath the edge of the mask, into nostrils and eyes. They traded positions in fractions of seconds: knee, elbow, shoulder, pressure. This was not “grappling.” It was a fight over whose ribcage would have space for one more breath. In armor you do not choke only with the throat—you choke with mass.

He felt the opponent trying to slide a hand under his arm, searching for the armpit. This is the instinct of true yoroi kumiuchi: you do not attack plates; you attack the places that must move. The armpits, the neck, the waist area, the joints. There armor is softer; there is space; there is life, which you must end as quickly as possible.

He blocked the hand by pinning the elbow to the ground. With his right hand he reached under the kabuto—not under the helmet, because that is impossible, but under the rim, where you can seize and twist. He yanked the head sideways. The menpō limited movement, but limitation works both ways: the opponent could not “escape with his face,” because the face was locked in metal.

It was a mistake that in a duel would be small, but here was fatal: for a moment the opponent exposed his neck.

He did not see it, but in a battlefield clinch one rarely sees anything—he felt it with the hand that suddenly found a different texture—not lacquer, not metal, but cloth, soft and wet. His hand went reflexively to the target. Where a long sword would become a burden, a short blade was available.

A tantō has none of the romantic lineage of a tachi.

A tantō is like a whisper in the ear in the middle of a storm: short, direct, unmistakable. He found that one second of combat and that one inch of exposed body—either he would use it now, or he would die himself.

The opponent understood.

With a jerk he tried to tear free, but the jerk was too weak. Someone who has never lain in armor does not know how hard it is to stand when you cannot brace with your hands. How easily you become your own prison. The blade found the entry—short, brutal pressure, a thrust. It was not beautiful. It was matter-of-fact. And it was the last thing the opponent felt in his life.

Around them the battle continued. The screams did not vanish, metal still knocked against metal. Someone ran past without looking at them at all. Sengoku gave no time for contemplation.

He rose heavily, like a man standing up from beneath a stack of wet planks. The dō still held the warmth of the body, the menpō was wet with breath. He looked at the opponent’s kabuto—now it lay in the mud, the maedate ornament pressed into the earth like a broken branch.

And he thought—not in words, but in an instinct that schools would later write down in densho: “the one who cuts most beautifully does not win. The one who first steals balance wins. Who stops the hand with the weapon. Who finds the gap.”

In moments like these a samurai is not a statue from a tale. He is a man in armor, fighting for one more breath.

Authentic samurai combat on the battlefield

If someone grew up on samurai cinema, they carry an image of combat as clean as polished steel: two warriors, distance, an ideal and lightning-fast cut, blood appearing almost “aesthetically,” and in the background, obligatorily, some austere music and wind moving the grass. Even when we move into modern martial arts—karate, kendō, aikidō—it is easy to believe that “real” fighting is, at its core, orderly: technique should be clear, movement correct, and in the end beauty of form or one decisive blow determines everything. The problem is that the battlefield is the antithesis of the dōjō, and war the antithesis of ceremony. In a real clash a samurai did not fight to look good, but to survive. And when survival is at stake, “cleanliness” ends the fastest.

One thought is enough to crack that film vision: on a battlefield almost nothing happens at ideal distance. There is crush. There is shouting. There is rain or dust. There is slippery ground, blood mixing with mud, feet that sink, and the weight of the body that suddenly is not romantic, only ruthless. In such an environment the sword—even if it remains a symbol—very often ceases to be the tool of first choice. Someone slams into you with a shoulder. Someone grabs your arm. You trip over a body or a piece of armor. You fall. And a fall in a crowd of armed people is not a “pause,” but a moment in which in a second you can lose your throat, your eye, your liver—or your honor, if we prefer the old language. And that is exactly when what our imagination likes to push aside enters: close-quarters fighting, a grip, a takedown, a pin, a finishing thrust with a short blade into a place where the armor is not a monolith.

Here begins a world of terms that can mislead. Kumiuchi (組討ち, literally “struggling in a hold”) is a broad word, sometimes used generally for clinch fighting, sometimes more technically. Yoroi kumiuchi (鎧組討ち) shifts the emphasis to armor—this is clinch “in armor,” with its specific mechanics and constraints. We will also meet the term kachū bujutsu (甲冑武術)—more broadly, “martial arts in armor,” encompassing not only grappling but an entire way of moving and using weapons while armored. Further on appear terms such as kogusoku (literally “a small set of equipment,” in practice often tied to the use of a short blade and work at minimal distance) or torite (grasping, taking, binding—a term often associated as well with the logic of “capture and control” in certain contexts).

And finally, a paradox: the word jūjutsu—so obvious today—can historically be later as a label. In sources and in scholars’ comments a thought returns: in older eras schools named their methods differently depending on emphasis—sometimes underlining armor, sometimes a short weapon, sometimes the act of gripping itself, sometimes an entire system. Names can therefore be fluid, because reality was fluid—and because different ryū (schools) described different “varieties of the same hell.”

What matters most, however, is that these words lead to one very concrete truth: armor is not a costume. A fact seemingly obvious, yet for understandable reasons easy to forget. Armor is not decoration worn for ceremony. It is a combat environment—something like an extra landscape you carry on your body. Armor changes movement before the first blow is struck. It changes breathing. It changes pace. It changes how many kilometers you can march. How quickly you can move through mud. How easily you will fall when you lose balance. It changes what even “makes sense.”

If someone imagines that fighting in armor is the same as fighting without armor, only “harder,” they imagine wrongly. Weight is not merely weight—it is a reordering of the body’s priorities. Restrictions in hips and shoulders mean certain paths are shorter, and others suddenly become impossible. “Dead angles” arise because you cannot look everywhere or twist your torso as you could without armor. Slipping over plates and bindings makes a grip not always “secure,” and at the same time certain elements—edges, cords, pieces of gear—become handles that nobody has in a dōjō. This is a fight in which matter can be more important than intentions.

And here comes the second consequence: in armor it is harder to take life with a cut. Cinema taught us that a cut solves everything. Meanwhile armor is not paper. When you strike a plate of the dō, a shoulder-protecting element, a sturdier part of the kabuto, you receive resistance, vibration, rebound. This does not mean the sword loses meaning—but it does mean that in many moments thrusts, locks, weighting, and control become more important. Instead of thinking, “hit with the blade,” you begin thinking, “break the stance.” Instead of “kill in one motion,” often: “immobilize, then finish.” Instead of the showy arc of steel: a wedge, pressure, a twist, short bodywork, taking balance.

In this sense yoroi kumiuchi is not an “alternative” to weapon fighting—it is its brutal closure. When distance collapses, and formation stops being formation, a logic close to instinct appears: seize, throw down, press. Armor gives protection, but it also gives points of purchase—and it gives certainty that if it goes to the ground, the fight will be more about position than finesse. Here begins the preference for short weapons: tantō, tanken, a short dagger, a small blade. Not because the warrior liked daggers, but because armor gaps are narrow, and the space between bodies in a clinch is narrower still. The short blade is the language of this closeness: it speaks plainly and directly.

Yes—gaps. If we want to understand the reality of kumiuchi, we must stop thinking about armor as a wall and start thinking of it as a mosaic. Armor is a set of parts—plates, connections, bindings, places where one thing overlaps another, and places where movement must remain. These “places of movement” are places of death. Neck, armpits, the waist area, plate connections, the area of the face and throat under the menpō, joints. This is a practical map, not a symbolic one. And that is why close combat so often looked like work in a dark corridor: you do not seek an “ideal target” (heart, head), you look for an entry—any entry. And to find that entry, you must first stop your opponent. Not “wound”—stop.

The myth of the samurai’s “clean” combat is largely a projection of later aesthetics and later order. It comes from times without war (Edo) or from situations outside the battlefield (the duel). When we look at later traditions, it is easy to be captivated by form, line, etiquette—and that captivation is not without reason. But when we go back to realities in which war was not tradition, story, or legend, but daily “work,” the image suddenly becomes more true—dirty, dense, constrained.

A bit of history

The history of clinch fighting in Japan does not run as a straight line from “primitive wrestling” to “refined techniques.” It rather undulates with war itself: armies change, battle landscapes change, armor changes, and with it the body’s logic. And that is why kumiuchi in the Heian era is not the same as yoroi kumiuchi in Sengoku, and that in turn is not the same as Edo-era jujutsu, even if these phenomena share one core: the moment in which distance breaks and victory stops being a matter of a “pretty cut” and becomes a matter of controlling the opponent’s posture.

In Heian (794–1185) and early Kamakura (1185–1333), war long still carried an aristocratic face. The ideal of bushi—especially in narratives and self-portraits of the warrior class—was strongly tied to archery (yumi), to duels on horseback, to demonstrations of courage and skill that can be “seen” and told.

This was an era in which the bow was not an accessory but the king of the field: an arrow often decided earlier than steel, and the sword—more often the long tachi than the much later katana—could be a tool of closure, the last step when enemies drew too near or when one of them fell from a horse. That fall is crucial, because in Heian and Kamakura warfare much still happens “from above”—from the saddle—and that is exactly why contact with the ground could be the most dangerous moment. Whoever once lost height lost advantage: in armor, with breath impaired, with a foot sinking into uneven earth, he became a target. And then the reality of clinch appears: grabbing armor elements, pressing, dragging to the ground, a swift “finishing” with a short weapon into places where armor must yield to movement. Even if the ethos of storytelling loved a clean gesture and a clear scene, the physics of battle added a dirty footnote.

Later centuries intensify the process. In the medieval turn—somewhere between Muromachi (1338–1573) and what we call Sengoku (1467–1603)—war loses its salon profile. Order breaks, the number of armed men rises, the tempo of campaigns rises, the role of mass rises. At the same time armament evolves: alongside the sword, polearms rule ever more. Yari (spear) and naginata become the natural language of the crowd: reach, thrust, work in formation. And when, in 1543, firearms appear on Tanegashima—hinawajū (火縄銃—literally “fire-cord / matchlock gun”), colloquially “tanegashima”—battle begins to sound differently, smell differently, and happen faster: smoke, thunder, sudden gaps in the line, violent accelerations and equally violent collapses. In such a world there is no luxury of a “beautiful duel.” Too easily someone runs in from the side, too easily you trip over a body, too easily your maai stops being distance and becomes a tight, suffocating contact with someone else’s armor (about the concept of maai in martial arts and psychology I write more here:When Martial Arts Teach the Psychology of Relationships — Japanese Distance Control Ma’ai and the Art of Living Together).

And here Sengoku makes yoroi kumiuchi into more than a “technique”: it makes it into a procedure. Brutal, short, practical. Polearms and thrusts dominate, but when distance vanishes—and it vanishes constantly, because formations jam, because one fights in rain and mud, on slopes, in rice fields, in narrow passages, on bridges, in ditches—then you switch to mass.

You seize not “the body,” but the armor: by shoulder guards, bindings, edges, the helmet. You try to take the axis, because in armor every degree of tilt costs more than without it. When the opponent loses verticality, you weight him down: with shoulder, hips, knee, the mass of the dō. You throw him to the ground not like an athlete but like a soldier: so that a man stops having space for breath and for the hand with the weapon. Only then comes what the modern imagination often omits, and what in practice is the logical finale: a short weapon and a gap. Kogusoku—“a small set,” a small blade, a small motion—is here more a philosophy of action than a name.

In a clinch the sword is often too long, too easily stuck between plates, too hard to swing. A dagger, a tantō, a short thrust, a wrist twist, entry under the armpit, by the neck, by the waist, into plate connections: you attack where armor must be weaker, because otherwise the warrior could not move.

And then Edo arrives (from 1603) and changes the world’s temperature. Armor does not vanish—but it ceases to be the daily condition of life for most warriors. There is more social order, more ceremony, more administration, more city. With that grows the need for systematization: clinch methods begin to be described, arranged into curricula, organized in densho and transmitted as schools. And something very important happens: much of what we now call jujutsu flourishes in conditions in which one fights more often without full armor.

Freedom of movement is greater, work becomes “softer,” other emphases appear—control, restraint, gripping techniques tied to social order and the realities of policing, guarding, disputes in the city. But the core does not vanish. In koryū the memory of armor remains even if armor now hangs more often on a stand than on shoulders. The logic remains: steal balance (kuzushi), take the weapon hand, glue yourself to the body, shorten the space, do not fight the “plate” but the human being in the gaps of his movement.

The language of terms remains too, sometimes ambiguous: some traditions say “kumiuchi,” others “torite,” others “kogusoku,” still others use the later label “jujutsu.” This is not chaos, but a trace of history: different eras did not need the same names, because they did not need the same war.

So if we want to understand “how samurai really fought,” we must stop asking for one mythical method. We should rather see how the battlefield rewrote the body. In Heian and Kamakura the clinch is the shadow of bow and horse, but a real shadow—because the horse falls, and the man lands in chaos. In Sengoku the clinch becomes a daily mechanism of survival in mass battle, the closure of a clash in which polearms and thrusts lead, and grappling and dagger finish. In Edo all of this is captured in school forms—smoothed in transmission, yet still carrying within a hard truth: armor was an environment, not a costume, and in the clinch it was not style that mattered, but who would return to his home and family.

Principles of samurai close-quarters combat on the battlefield

In yoroi kumiuchi one does not begin with a catalogue of grips. One begins with a certain way of thinking about combat: not “I win with technique,” but “I shift conditions so that the opponent stops being dangerous.” In densho and comments on the traditions this is clear: schools teach not one “secret move,” but the ability to switch between opposites—soft and hard, weak and strong—according to circumstance. This principle is stated directly in the initiatory text of Takenouchi-ryū (more about this ancient school is written here: Japanese martial art of the samurai from the medieval battlefields: Jujutsu of the Takenouchi-ryū school): one must be able to use “jū and gō, jaku and kyō” depending on conditions, because only then can a person keep up with changes in the opponent’s movements.

柔と剛、弱と強

(jū to gō, jaku kyō)

“softness and hardness, weakness and strength”

From this follows the first practical rule: in armor you do not fight against armor. You fight against what in armor can move: the body’s axis, steps, the hand holding the weapon, breathing, vision, balance. Densho like to speak of “small things” that are more important than “big”—thinking carried over from classical Chinese military treatises cited in “Bugei no jo” (武芸之序, 1844): attend to details, strike what is subtle, avoid what is strong—then superiority works “like a stone thrown at an egg.”

It sounds like metaphor, but in practice it is a map of behavior in the clinch: seek a small crack in structure, not a big effect.

The second rule is equally hard: in yoroi kumiuchi the priority is to remove the ability to act, not to “deliver a clean hit.” In the era of wars (what sengoku looked like more here: The Real Sengoku – What Was Life Like for the Swordless in the Shadow of Samurai Wars?) the game was simple—it was about killing the opponent as fast as possible, therefore strategies were more offensive, and “under-the-armor” techniques were treated as a natural element of kachū bujutsu—the war arts of a man in armor.

In Edo, when war stops being daily life, the same mechanisms are ordered, written down, placed in ethics, in discipline, in a ban on rivalry and an emphasis on shaping the student’s character—something that comes through very clearly from Takenouchi-ryū’s initiatory “rules.” This matters because it helps the reader understand a paradox: technique is brutally pragmatic, but the language of transmission can be moral and “formative.”

And finally the third rule—the simplest and crucial: in armor, economy of movement counts. Every extra centimeter, every attempt to “complete a gesture,” every excess rotation is energy and time given to the opponent. That is why many traditions, especially those rooted in battlefield eras, developed what Takenouchi-ryū called koshi-no-mawari kogusoku: fighting at minimal distance in which grip, control, and short blade are coupled into one continuous chain of actions; beside this appears torite—the logic of binding and taking, also with an eye to capturing the opponent.

Rules of the Fight

Entering the clinch is not a duel-like “technical entry.” It is breaking through chaos. Hands go where armor offers a handle and where you can steer a man’s axis: the rim of the kabuto, the collar/neck guard, the shoulder guard (sode), the arm around the elbow, the belt and bindings. Many entries are very down-to-earth: you wedge with the shoulder, because the shoulder is a battering ram that does not need “precise impact” to steal verticality; you weight with the hips, because in armor the hips are the anchor that carries mass. If you do not have the luxury of “gripping perfectly,” you grip however you can, as long as you make it harder for the opponent to keep balance.

The logic of a “double task” is also important: the same entry must simultaneously protect you from the weapon and open a path to control. That is why elbow control is so common: the elbow steers the forearm, and the forearm steers the weapon. Instead of chasing the blade, you chase the hinge.

Kuzushi: “breaking posture”

Kuzushi (崩し) in armor looks different than on a mat. It is not finesse, but shifting the center of gravity enough that a man in metal cannot correct it. Most often this is done with four “motions”:

A torso twist: you do not “push,” you twist the man relative to his hips, because armor does not like twisting. A step block: not to “throw,” but to steal the ability to place the foot where the body needs it. A pull onto the knee: simple, brutal—the knee becomes a threshold over which the axis breaks. An upward shove on the helmet: if contact with the kabuto appears at all, its purpose is not “striking” but structural—the helmet is a lever on the cervical spine and on orientation in space.

All of this is a practical development of the densho rule: strike the weak, avoid the strong; small things matter.

Takedowns: the fall as a stage, not a finale

In cinema, a takedown ends the scene. In real yoroi kumiuchi, a takedown is usually only the beginning of true advantage. That is why takedowns are “heavy” and short: a leg block and a pull, dropping to the back by stealing balance, a diagonal overturning when a man has nowhere to plant a foot. The aim is not a spectacular flight, but to make the opponent land so that for a moment he cannot work hands and hips at once.

In traditions that preserved a strong kachū component, this warlike temperament is clear: technique must be offensive, aimed at rapid breaking, because in battle time is literally life.

Ground control

In the “ground” armor makes many classic throat chokes harder, but something else appears: strangling by space. That is: pressure with the chest, hip control, stealing room for breath and for scapular movement. In armor one breathes more shallowly—and that is precisely why mass acts faster.

The most important goal of ground control is often the weapon hand. Instead of “hitting,” you pin: you press the wrist to the ground, lock the elbow, wedge the shoulder. This directly continues what you did standing: you steer hinges, because the hinge steers the blade.

In many school descriptions one also sees the coupling of clinch fighting with binding and taking techniques (torite, later also practices such as hōjōjutsu), reminding us that it was not always about immediate killing—sometimes about seizure, escort, control. Takenouchi-ryū directly links kogusoku to grabbing and binding.

Locks and breaks: what “passes through” metal

In armor the best locks are those that do not require gripping a “bare torso.” The most universal are therefore: shoulder, elbow, wrist. Many grips on the body itself are less reliable, because plates and bindings slip, and the armor disperses pressure. That is why technique often looks “economical”: a short twist, a short bend, repositioning the elbow, closing the wrist. The point is not for the opponent to “feel pain”—the point is for him to stop having the tool to inflict it on you.

“Auxiliary” strikes

In yoroi kumiuchi strikes are by nature subordinate to the task. They are not meant to win the fight on their own. They are meant to open: to distract attention, force the arms up, loosen a grip, trigger the reflex of pulling the head back, interrupt breathing. Depending on circumstance there are strikes to the face (where the mask does not protect perfectly), to the nape, to the solar plexus, to the thighs—rather short, “driving” rather than elaborate. Their meaning is simple: give yourself that half-second you will turn into control of the axis or a pin on the hand.

Dirty battlefield details: the kabuto as a handle, the earth as a tool, mass as an argument

This is the part cinema usually does not show, because it is not “noble.” And yet it is precisely this that creates the authenticity of yoroi kumiuchi. The kabuto can be a handle, because the helmet is high and steers the head. The earth can be a tool, because every pressure in mud works stronger than in air. Mass can be an argument, because in armor mass is everywhere: in the dō, in the sode, in the suneate, in the haidate. In such a world fighting becomes less a “fight of techniques” and more a fight of arrangement: who is higher, who has hips under himself, who has a free hand, who has breath.

Who will return home?

In the end, when all the pretty images disappear—wide arcs of steel, clean lines, duel-like pauses—something remains that in yoroi kumiuchi is almost too logical: the short weapon. The tantō is not a “second katana” here, but a tool for solving a specific problem. Armor, however strong, must breathe: it has gaps at the armpits, by the neck, around the waist, at plate connections, around joints. And that is precisely why a dagger in armor is not for dueling, but for entering places you cannot “win” with cutting alone. In the most honest sense it is a surgical weapon—not for aesthetics, but for function.

In traditional logic, when a blade appears it does not mean a “second phase of combat,” but its closure: grip and control do not exist for pride, only to make room for a thrust and deny the opponent the chance for one last desperate move. The dagger works briefly: without a windup, without wide dynamics; what matters is a precise direction, a short pressure, and constant control of the opponent’s hand—because in a clinch even a dying man can strike if you leave him space. That is why kumiuchi is a bridge: between weapons and bare hands, between steel and the body. Sometimes the hold is the aim—when one must seize, lead away, restrain. And sometimes the hold is only the key to a lock that opens with steel.

When one looks at this through the prism of schools, more illusions fall away. Koryū are not museums of gestures—they are testimonies of realities. Takenouchi-ryū, often mentioned as one of the oldest jūjutsu traditions, remembers a world in which “small distance” was daily life, and kogusoku and torite were not theory but answers to weight, bindings, constraints, and the brutal tempo of clashes. Sekiguchi-ryū carries within itself the war roots of bodywork and control before later times give it more “civil” functions. Kitō-ryū, famous for work on balance and structure, shows how deeply in Japanese tradition the idea of taking the opponent’s axis was rooted—something that in armor becomes literally a matter of life. Araki-ryū and related kogusoku/torite currents remind us that clinch fighting was often “dirty mathematics”: grips on gear elements, actions on joints, control, and if needed—fast work with a short weapon. Different names, different emphases, different genealogies—but the same hard thought: minimalism, control, the priority of survival.

What is truly fascinating reveals itself when we look into the mentality that ordered these things. Densho—initiatory and structuring school texts—are often written in kanbun, in a language naturally “serious,” hierarchical, set in the tradition of scholars. Their structure is often simple, but their aim enormous: to explain not only “what to do,” but who to be so that it works. It is striking how tightly technique is woven there with ethics: discipline, a ban on empty rivalry, hierarchy of transmission, the student’s responsibility toward teacher and tradition. This is not a sports rulebook but a project of shaping a person. In this sense close combat—even the most brutal—was not treated as the opposite of culture, but as its austere core: something requiring composure, self-control, and awareness of consequences.

In the schools’ language a philosophical-religious background also runs through: the conviction that the mind must be unattached, that action must be adequate to the moment, that details decide, and that pride kills faster than steel. That is why alongside grips, locks, and thrusts so much talk of character appears in traditions—because on the battlefield character is part of technique.

So if after all this we were to return to the samurai myth, it would not be to destroy it completely, but to straighten it. “Clean” combat exists—but rather in imagination, in later aesthetics, in the story we like to repeat, or at most in duels under very particular circumstances. True combat of a man in armor is dense, brief, stifling, and relentlessly logical. It consists not of gestures but of effectiveness: of maintaining structure in chaos, finding a rule in the crowd, discovering a gap in armor, and in one’s own fear—a little cold clarity. And perhaps that is the most important conclusion: a samurai is not primarily a poet of the sword. He is a man placed in the chaos of battle opposite another man. And only one of them will later return to his home and family. Technique and the honor of combat are precisely everything a man will do so that he will be the one who still sees his children.

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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