As a young teenager I was obsessed with Samurai weapons.
One of my faves were the Karimata or braid cutting arrows.
Recent I saw this set of hangers in a DIY shop and it all came flooding back, how I used the Y shaped ones to make my own Karimata, shoving the screw end into a bamboo stick and inserting card fletches at the other end.
With my massively long bow they flew perfectly.
Here's a sketch gallery of arrows including Karimata.
And here are the real thing with their tangs, minus the arrow bodies.
It's hard to put into words just how passionately obsessed I was with samurai and all things Martial Arts back when I was around 12 or 13 in the early 1970's. They were such gloriously happy days.
Here's a very grainy pic I took back then on an instamatic of my Kung Fu cellar in our house. You can just about make out a couple of bows far left on the back wall and at least one whistling arrow, but sadly no Karimata.
We're you into samurai or martial arts?
Oh sure, we were all very much into it back then. When I moved to the New York City area my best friend gave me one of those martial arts instruction manuals from the ads in the back of comic books. As a going-away present. He said, "You'll need to know this, in your new neighborhood." I remember that there were photos inside showing how you were supposed to tear off an attacker's face. Somehow, years later when my kid was taking karate lessons, they never seemed to get to the face-tearing-off moves...
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