The short answer is no. The Bujinkan martial arts were born out of a medieval warrior culture where fighting did not involve rules or a sanitised environment. One didn't fight to "win" but to survive with minimal damage. While sparring is an excellent training tool that is practiced in the dojo it is not done in a competitive way but as another way of exploring some of the principles needed to survive real combat. This kind of sparring is more correctly called "randori" in Japanese Budo  - which translates literally as "chaos control".

Last updated on December 5, 2008 by Alex Martinez