Question:
This is just a question...not at all intended as a criticism or anything other than a sincere question.
These iaito...why do people buy them?
Why would someone want to study an art that deals with the use of a sword if that person does not own a sword?
I would like to understand this. I know people who own shinken buy iaito to practice with, whether for fear of injury or desire to avoid damaging the sword. This I can understand, if not agree with.
What I cannot understand is why someone would want to learn how to use a sword and not own one (or have plans to buy one any time soon). It's like learning how to shoot and then buying a toy plastic gun. What is the point? This is not a rhetorical question, I really do want to understand the motivation.
Answer:
It is not like learning to shoot and buying a plastic gun. You can't shoot with a plastic gun and the point of target shooting is to shoot targets.
The exception would be with one of the Japanese arts of the gun, that you could likely do with a fake gun if you had all the working parts to use... although it wouldn't be as much fun without the boom at the end.
It isn't about the sword. It isn't about the "soul of the samurai". It isn't about chopping things in half or owning a juyo blade that you can worry over losing, sweating on or dropping. It's about the process. The kata. Having or not having a shinken is almost entirely meaningless until you reach a certain level of skill where you then need the shinken to provide the feedback that says "you're outside the envelope". Japanese koryu gunnery is about the process of getting to the bang, it's not about the bang.
Starting practice of iaido with a shinken is possible, but I don't recommend it to my beginners since they spend much too much time worrying about cutting themselves and not enough learning the kata. In other words it gets in the way.
In the immortal words of F. Lovret in his "kenjutsu shoden" "Toy swords make for toy swordsmen". If you believe that, don't do iaido, it's real simple. If you don't think iaido is a real martial art, don't do it. Why waste time from a short life worrying about why people do iaido or whether it's a real art or not? Just go do one that IS real.
Me, I believe that people who shoot at static targets with guns are wasting their time, you should shoot at live human targets who are shooting back if you really want to know what shooting is all about.
Now that we've done our reductio, let's go back to guns and see where that really goes... and well, here we have cadets learning to handle and march with fake wooden guns. And over here we have people learning to handle their guns without ammunition. "People who learn range safety without live ammunition are toy gunners"??
How about Japanese archery? we see people learning the motions of the draw with pieces of stick and rubber tubing... and drawing without arrows, and firing at targets three feet away.
Adult learning principles say that you start from simplified tasks and work up to the complex ones. Start with a bokuto, you don't worry about cutting yourself, dropping the sword, or a saya. Then go to an iaito with which, I assure you, you can accumulate scars on the hand if you're pushing the envelope. Then when you go for a couple of years without ripping a gash in your left hand, go to a shinken.
