Overthinking the apocalypse

So even a girl such as you is interested in learning sukeban-shiki gyakute-no-bokutō, huh. I can show you, but it's gonna cost ya…

An all-female bōsōzoku gang posing in matching outfits for a “Teens Road” reportage, 1995.

I'm being silly, of course. First of all, don't get in brawls with your bokutō, you'll probably end up banned from every dōjo forever. Also, more importantly, there’s better ways to brawl. Sukeban-wielding bokutō may be iconic in pop culture but this was never much of a thing, as far as I can tell at least. Wooden weapons kinda suck, and there's not much reason to rely on one. If you're an adult criminal in Japan you'll surely get a gun, if you can't get one, then a knife or machete, like any other thug anywhere. If you're a teen criminal engaging in brawls it's more common and practical to use the good ol' lead pipe. For individual self-defence the pepper spray remains the queen of tools, and also won't get you in jail for years, which is usually a worse result than being beaten up by bigots. So fighting on the streets with wooden swords is mostly an anime aesthetic thing. I mean we do have documentation of bōsōzoku tokkōtai posing with bokutō (such as the above) and they always look cool as fuck doing that, but perhaps the entire point was to look cool as fuck and nothing else. In my heart I still like to imagine that sword-wielding girls have beaten up assholes sometimes at some point, but realistically that's probably a fantasy.

Still, we're martial arts nerds and we can't help but wonder about the technicalities of things like this. If you had to defend yourself and you had a bokutō at hand and you know how to wield it, that's surely better than a random stick, which is surely better than going at it bare-handed. (Russian antifas, who have plenty of experience with street violence, say confrontation outcomes mostly follow the hierarchy of tools; physical strength or combat skills can only rarely break the balance, in the large majority of cases blunt weapons beat bare-handed, edged weapons beat blunt weapons, and guns beat edged weapons; my own (limited) experiences with urban violence were also like this.)

The bokutō of course is not meant to be a weapon, it's a training tool, it's as blunted as you can blunt a weapon made of solid wood. But if that's all you have, how you would use it? A little bird told me delinquent-style bokutō adapts it for combat with three basic techniques:

1. Reverse grip. Go Rurōni Kenshin and flip the blade backwards. This feels awkward to swing at first, but it's easy to get used to. The back of most bokutō is smaller than the blade side and more angular, so it concentrates more power and does more damage.
2. Reverse tsuki. Without a blade, most slashing attacks have little stopping power. The biggest deterrent you have is the tsuki. This gets supported by the much sharper point at the back when wielding it in reverse grip. Your goal is then to go for tsuki (on throat ideally but face or torso probably will deter them well enough on shock alone), maybe with a distraction strike to arms or head first.
3. Half-swording. In indoor spaces, alleyways etc. a bokutō will often be too long. But since there's no blade, nothing stops you from holding it further up to reduce the range and use kind of like a jō. You can also do jō-type moves like pivoting to hit with the tsuka, to a limited degree.

Other than that the usual techniques of wielding a sword will transfer. A properly pivoted strike will have the tip moving much faster than humans can react to it; use that to your advantage.

One vulnerability of the bokutō is that it's easily grabbed. I experimented a bit with a bō (actually a flag pole) with a friend, and found out that if a resisting opponent gets a good lock on your stick, with mechanical leverage rather than just muscle power, I find it super hard to break free of their hold, even if I'm physically stronger than them—and in a self-defence situation your enemy will almost always be stronger than you (i.e. a man). I'm sure there must be techniques that bōjutsu/jōjutsu people use to effectively break free of a locked grip, but it's not something I could independently rediscover, so if you're interested in that I advise training some type of quarterstaff, arnis or cane self-defence. If I was using any type of stick or long weapon against an attacker, I would try to stay on the offensive to overwhelm them before they could try stuff like this—if you show any sort of fear or hesitation I'm afraid your weapon will just get seized, and now your harasser has a weapon.