Kiri-oboeru is an old samurai saying that means, ‘Strike down your enemy, and learn.’ The term is used to explain training on the road and in battle sharpens ones instincts to a razor edge and teaches them to fight with the whole of their being. Something that training in a dojo doesn’t provide.
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Tsukahara, Bokuden, Itou, Miyamato Musashi were all famous samurai in their day. Samurai were warriors who earned their living fighting of those four they killed somewhere between three and five hundred men . Each. They didn’t have guns. They didn’t have bombs. Every single man they killed they cut down in hand-to-hand combat. Send one man to the great beyond each week, then do the same for ten years, you’ll have your five hundred. That’s why they’re known as master swordsmen. They didn’t just kill once and call it a day. They kept going. And they got better. While it sounds like something out of a video game their opponents weren’t training dummies or little digital aliens. These were living, breathing men they slaughtered. Like cattle. Men with swords. Men fighting for their lives, same as them. If they wanted to live, they had to catch their enemy off-guard, lay traps, and sometimes run away with their tail between their legs. Not the first image that sprang into your head when you thought of master swordsmen. Learning what would get you killed and how to get your enemy killed—the only way to know a thing like that is to do it. Some kid who’d been taught how to swing a sword in a dojo didn’t stand a chance against a man who’d been tested in battle. They knew it, and they kept doing it. That’s how they piled up hundreds of corpses. One swing at a time.