Category Archives: Jo

It is amazing how clearly the earliest forms of Chinese and Japanese characters depict an ancient world in which budo practice and philosophy naturally arise.  The original, four thousand year old, form of ‘bo‘ (stick, long-staff), for instance… remembering that the inspiration for O’Sensei’s misogi-no-jo is the esoteric bo kata of the Kuki family, who are priests of the Kumano shrines… and that the transmission scroll that O’Sensei gave to Michio Hikitsuchi Shihan is for ‘Masakatsu Bo-jutsu‘ – not ‘jo-jutsu‘…

…is of a tree – the substance wood – on the left-side, and of two worshipping hands holding up a plant on the right-hand-side. Later augmented with one more worshipping hand…

…Misogi no Bo…

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…and, hilariously, the four-thousand-year-old  kanji for “short staff” – or ‘jo‘ – means ‘a stick that is being measured’… the same picture of a tree on the left-hand side, but on the right-hand side, the sign for “take“: meaning length, or measurement: the sign for a hand –  a Japanese foot, a shaku, is the span of a hand – with the number ‘ten’. Meaning not that the stick has to be ten foot long, but that a standard measuring rod, of ten feet length, is involved…

…and this is hilarious because there are times when pretty much all we do is discuss the possible different lengths of a jo…partly because in our ryu, the length of the jo is personal: it should come up to just under the armpit.  But then, there’s the 50″ jo, and the 51″ jo: both of them a conversion error for a  4 shaku, 2 sun, 1 bu jo…. and there’s the 53″ jo…

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…and then, again, you could read it as ‘the piece of wood that we measure with our hands as we explore tate-yoko…”