Nindurance, LLC provides high quality indoor cotton budo Tabi shoes, and Tabi socks for budo, as well as bujutsu equipment for practitioners of classical Japanese Martial Arts. We specialize in equipment in those training in Samurai Bujutsu Martial Arts, and Shinobi No Ninjutsu.
Many modern budo martial arts practiced today such as Aikido, Kendo, Judo, Iaido, Jodo, Kyudo, and etc. are based on the teachings of ancient schools of Japanese Bujutsu Ryuha that have been preserved for hundreds of years.
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Visiting Japan today you can still find these ancient schools passed down the generations practicing the arts of the Samurai, and the Shinobi better known as Ninja. Koryū (古流) is a Japanese term which means ancient Japanese martial arts. This word literally translates as “old school” (ko/old, ryū/school) or “traditional school”. Koryū is a general term for Japanese schools of martial arts that predate the Meiji Restoration (1866 – 1869 where major socio-political changes led to the modernization of Japan). There is no official cutoff date, the dates commonly used are either 1868 (first year of the Meiji period) or 1876, when the Haitōrei edict banning the wearing of swords was pronounced.
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Samurai (侍) the military nobility of ancient Japan. Translator William Scott Wilson explains that in Chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning to wait upon a person in the upper ranks of society, just as the original term in Japanese, saburau. The terms were came to mean “those who serve in close attendance to nobility,” the pronunciation in Japanese changing to saburai. An early reference to the word “samurai” appears in the Kokin Wakashū (905–914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century.
By the end of the 12th century, samurai became almost entirely synonymous with bushi (武士), and the word was closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the warrior class. The samurai followed a set of rules that came to be known as Bushidō.
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The code of Bushido was also was a code of respect and fair play, if only towards samurai. No samurai was to to kill another in cold blood and many samurai were reluctant to engage in various aspects of warfare which they regarded as cowardice even if it meant disobeying their lord. Such areas of warfare such as spying and assassination and other forms of covert warfare were regarded as distasteful to many samurai. So many daimyo began to look elsewhere for their spies and assassins.
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Ninja (忍者) or shinobi (忍び) was a mercenary of feudal Japan specializing in unorthodox arts of war. The ninja arts included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassinations. The ninja, using covert methods of waging war, were contrasted with the samurai, who had strict rules about honor and combat.
The origin of the ninja is difficult to know, but could be around the 14th century. Few written records exist to detail the activities of the ninja. The word shinobi did not exist to describe a ninja-like agent until the 15th century. In the Sengoku period (15th – 17th centuries), mercenaries and spies for hire arose out of the Iga and Kōga regions. From these clans knowledge regarding the ninja is inferred. Following the unification of Japan by the Tokugawa shogunate, the ninja descended into obscurity. In the 17th and 18th centuries, manuals like the Bansenshukai (1676) appeared and revealed philosophies, religious beliefs, warfare, espionage techniques of the ninja’s art. The word ninjutsu would later come to describe a wide variety of practices related to the ninja.
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