On Not Knife Fighting

So I was in Japan the other day, and I got to Akihabara about half an hour after a knife-wielding maniac stabbed and killed seven people. And inevitably, when I got back, one of my friends asked what I'd have done if I'd been there at the time. As if I hadn't asked myself already.

For the record, I don't think it's that clear cut. From what I hear, lots of people thought there was a traffic incident and that the maniac, unrelatedly, was just pushing through the crowd, so nobody realised that anybody was getting stabbed until it was much too late. But assuming I'd been there, and seen a guy stabbing people like a character from Final Fight, would I have charged in to the rescue?

Honestly, probably not. Best-case scenario, I might have thrown something at him.

Here's the thing: before I got into Brazilian jujitsu (not good for 'knife defence'), I did about two years of Japanese jujitsu, which involved a lot of 'knife defence.' It involved a variety of more or less stylised counters to the six 'main' knife attacks (straight stab, forehand and backhand slashes, lunge to the kidneys, stab to the groin, downward Norman Bates classic), and we sometimes practised with real knives.

It was completely useless.

The reason I'm putting 'knife defence' in brackets is that there's almost no such thing. After jujitsu I did a couple of months' kickboxing with Bob Spour, a very nice man who used to be in the SAS and has probably been in more fights than the entire jujitsu faculty. On the subject of knife defence, he simply waved a knife around – like you, I, or anyone else might if we were seriously trying to murder someone – and said 'How're you gonna defend against that?'

If anyone's still unconvinced, here's a little game you can play: give a friend a marker pen. Wear some old clothes, maybe some glasses if you're feeling safety conscious. Now, the rules are simple: you have to get the pen off your friend. He has to draw on you with it.

If, by the time you get the pen away, you've got scribbled around your chest, you're probably dead. On the inside of your arms? You're dead? On the outside? You're injured, maybe badly enough that you'll bleed to death? On the face? You're almost certainly dead.

For an idea of how damaging and stupid most self-defence classes are, imagine somebody who teaches you to play football by making you dribble around cones and do keepy-ups over and over again but never actually lets you play against anybody else. And when you can do the cones without hitting any and 100 keepy ups in a row he gives you a black belt in football, and tells you can beat anybody at football. And then you enter a football match for the first time, except that the rules are if you lose, you die.