Have you ever heard of Bokkens? They are wooden practice swords made in the shape of Katanas (sometimes Tantos as well). They’re made for sparring practice and to help Kendo students improve their Katas. All we know is that they are totally sweet looking and we just bought 4 of them from Amazon for a mere $12/ea. The only reason I knew they existed at all was a friend of mine had one during high school. He lived out the woods and every time we were out at his house, we’d take turns brandishing it and running through the woods hacking at weeds and thistles. Man that was fun.
So, we got these sweet Bokkens and of course the first thing that Nick, Scott, Maksym and I did was take them out of their packaging, run into the street and start hunting weeds to hack. We were pretty much all barefoot running around our paved residential street making “hiya!” noises while clumsily but eagerly swinging our wooden swords. We did praying mantis stances, we did imitations of anime fight sequences, Nick and I spouted gibberish Japanese several times, and numerous passing cars slowed down while the occupants (principally middle aged women) stared incredulously at the spectacle of 4 seemingly grown dudes running around with swords slicing weeds in twain.
At about this time our neighbor, who also happens to be the grant administrator that voted to give our company its seed capital, happened by walking his dog. He thought it was jolly good fun, and the day after, asked Scott where he could purchase one of the swords (presumably for his teenage son). We just kept on hacking after he went inside, and we experimented briefly with our ability to use our bullwhip to yank the Bokken out of a person’s hand. That didn’t work so well, and I managed to accidentally whip myself pretty hard, but it was still pretty awesome.