Re: Bamboo
Fascinating. Thanks, Niall and Cady. When I was visiting Florida in the mid or late 1970's Robert Moller, a young student of Saotome Sensei showed us the storehouse where they had bamboo canes stored on racks. You could pick a couple of them out yourself and he would make three sizes of shinai out of each so you had three pairs when he covered them with leather. I think they were Yagyu style, shorter and quite different from the kendo shinai I had seen in New York and Japan. Really great to work with in paired practice... (hurt a lot less than when accidentally hit with jo or bokken!)
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