I ordered shuriken today.
Shuriken...
Looking up
shuriken online is a tougher than you might think. The internet seems to be overflowing with misinformation on the subject and people who do have the knowledge don't really seem all that keen on
sharing it. I'm always sending you to Wikipedia to start your searches into new topics but this is one time when the article could be improved upon drastically.
Let's get one thing out of the way: we're not just talking about ninja stars.
You can get
a lot of history but the general motif seems to be that even the most mundane items can be effective weapons. Coins, washers, needles, nails, knifes or even flat pieces of metal are potential weapons.
There are two basic forms that shuriken tend to take.
Bo shuriken are long spike-like throwing weapons. One can imagine that there will always be improvisational Bo Shuriken around:
chopsticks, hair pins, nails or even
screwdrivers.
The second type are shaken. While bo shurkien were straight and dart-like, shaken have some shape. Shaken can be further divided into two class. Hira shuriken are the most familiar: they are the throwing stars from the 1990's ninja craze- the ninja stars I mentioned earlier.
Hira shuriken can have any number of arms. As far as I can tell roppo shaken has six arms, juji shaken have only 4 and
enbangata shaken are washer-like disks that have no arms but just a sharpened circumfrence. Then finally there are
senban shaken that are more like lozenge shaped (i.e. diamond shaped). Both hira and senban shaken tend to have holes in their centers which apparently improves aerodynamics and can be used to string a bunch of shaken together.
To recap:
Bo Shuriken --- long spikes
Hira Shaken --- stars
Roppo --- 6 armed shaken
Juji --- 4 armed shaken
Enbangata --- washer
Senban Shaken --- diamonds
I ordered a
set of five bo shuriken from
Flying Steel. Flying Steel seems like a reputable manufacturer but at a fairly reasonable cost. There were a couple of other suppliers (other than the multitudes and multitudes of junk sites around) but just like it is hard to find trustworthy information on
shurikenjutsu, it's hard to find
trustworthy sellers(if you are aware of any other worthwhile suppliers let me know). That being said Flying Steel seems very professional.
Now I just have to figure out what I'll do for a target before they arrive and I start
practicing.
Walking home from work tonight at midnight (it's tough to be Batman when I spend so much of my time doing real people stuff) I found a boon. Someone is doing renovations to an old apartment building and there were a few pieces of scrap wood lying against the fence. It was clearly no good to anyone else but the blocks are quite thick (maybe 4' in width and depth) and maybe only 2"6' long. They might work perfectly as a target for the shuriken I should be receiving in the mail any day now.
