In a popular myth which has been repeated in book after book, we have been told that the nunchaku was originally a rice flail which was converted by Japanese farmers into a deadly weapon to fight against samurai. This myth, however, is incorrect on all four points: The nunchaku was not a Japanese weapon, it was never used as a rice flail, it was not developed by villagers and it was never used against samurai.

 

Syllables "nu-n-cha-ku"

The nunchaku, as we know it, comes from Okinawa (Uchina), today a part of Japan. Okinawa lies almost midway between Taiwan and the Japanese "mainland", and is the largest island in the Ryukyu (literally "rope") archipelago, a 650 mile long chain of small islands between southern Japan and Taiwan.

Okinawa today is part of Japan, but the Okinawa's are not Japanese and have their own culture and language, although the latter is gradually being replaced by Japanese. The Japanese language does not even contain a word for the nunchaku. When one needs to write "nunchaku" in Japanese he may do it in one of two ways: He may use katakana, the syllabic/phonetic alphabet used in the Japanese language to write foreign and loan words, writing the syllables "nu-n-cha-ku". Or, instead, he may use the Chinese characters for "two member stick" (or "double part baton"), which is pronounced "shuang jie gun" in Chinese, "nun cha kun" in Okinawa and "so setsu kon" in Japanese.