Levitas, Alex
(Editor/Translator: Journal of Asian Martial Arts)

Journal of Asian Martial Arts
Volume 9, Issue 1, pp. 35 - 55 (2000)

Highly Recommended

Mr. Levitas, the author of Ancient Weapons for Modern Police, is from Minsk but currently lives in Haifa, Israel where he is a computer programmer and researches modern police, military fighting systems and self-defense systems. He began his martial arts training in 1988 focusing on weapons, specifically the nunchaku. His training included study in the arts of Karate, Ninjutsu, Wu-shu and Krav-maga, the Israeli art of hand-to-hand combat. Mr. Levitas is currently training for his black belt in weapons under the underground Heiwa School where he gained most of his training. His experience in weapons includes, but is not limited to wooded weapons such as sticks, staff, baton, nonchaku, tonfa, etc. and knives.

Mr. Levitas wrote a thoughtful article on the practical application of ancient weapons from martial arts in today's society. He points out that although some schools teach martial arts practitioners to use various weapons (i.e. tonfa, yawara and nunchaku), their use in practical situations for the common person is quite limited. On the street, these weapons cannot compete with firearms. However, in the last three decades, these weapons (or similar weapons) have become popular in the modern police force.

For many years policemen carried billy clubs and similar weapons to beat suspects into submission. At least, that is the only method they were taught to utilize these weapons. In the 1960s, Robert Koga introduced the Koga baton and, most importantly, a training curriculum with simple strikes and thrusts. After this initial example, Mr. Levitas discusses several other variations in the batons and training. Each variation either makes the baton easier to use properly, inflicts less damage on the suspect or provides more tactical advantages than the first. One common theme is that most of the people who introduced a new variation had a solid background in the martial arts and that these variations resemble weapons from classical martial arts training.

Mr. Levitas does an excellent job of describing the variations, their advantages, disadvantages and common uses. He provides diagrams of the weapons and photos of policemen demonstrating their use throughout the article. However, at the end in the Technical section, Mr. Levitas shows six sequences with text and step-by-step pictures using various weapons in practical situations.

The article is interesting, easy to follow and lacks extraneous technical jargon. For these reasons and for the technical section at the end, I highly recommend this article.

Annotated by: Paige Rossillo (November 2000)

Martial Arts: Karate | other martial art: weapon-bearing arts

Topics: crime | history | weapons |