JAPAN
rapier practice or in broadsword play, as these things are understood in the Occident, it is difficult to conceive a fencer resorting to devices learned by studying the flight of a swallow, or the somersaults of a cat, or the leaping of a monkey. Upon such models, however, the Japanese expert often fashioned his style, and it was an essential element of his art not only that he should be competent to defend himself with any object that happened to be within reach, but also that without an orthodox weapon he should be capable of inflicting fatal injury on an assailant, or, at any rate, of disabling him. In the many records of great swordsmen that Japanese annals contain, instances are related of men seizing a piece of firewood, a brazier-iron, or a druggist's pestle as a weapon of offence, while, on the other side, an umbrella, an iron fan, or even a pot-lid served for protection. The iron fan, especially, was a favourite weapon with renowned experts. It owed its origin to a cruel trick by which two or three brave soldiers had been victimised. A bushi visiting a man whose enmity he did not suspect, and kneeling beyond the threshold of the apartment to make his bow, found his head caught in a vice, the sliding doors having been thrust suddenly against his neck from either side. By way of protection against treachery of that kind, an iron fan was clasped in the two hands upon which the visitor bowed his head, so that the ends of the fan pro-
138
