I'm watching High School of the Dead and I just watched Train to Busan. In both zombie apocalypse work, the more preferred weapon by the heroes is the baseball bat and most bystanders are using broomsticks, wrenches, crowbars, and one handed heavy clubs and sticks and other boring weapons. The few people who choose to use fancy martial arts stuff like Sai and Kama either get eaten quickly or are shown to be at an extremely high level of skill that a regular Joe can't expect to attain in years or even decades.
It leads me to ask why so many Westerners tend to search out specifically to train in weapons that are impossible to find in daily life and are often illegel or even impractical to carry around. Most commonly is wooden Japanese sword styles, nunchuks, Tonfas, and too many weapons I cannot name that are simply to bizarre to describe or to obscure even in Asia. Rather than learning the use of weapons that you can easily find an improvised tool to translate into impromptu such as flailing weapons (easily created with so many home tools, even simply putting a lockpad in a sock) and shield arts (you can simply pick up a metal trash can lid). Or even common weapons such as a bat.
I bring this up because in East Asia, the most common weapon to use is not a Tai Chi sword or Katar and these other fancy stuff but simply the baseball bat. Used in the most amount of non-passionate (angry housewife who caught you cheating) and non-criminal killings (esp in self defense) and the most common tool local gangs and thugs use for violence. That nowadays not only do most TKD and Karate RBSD-specific classes in Korea and Japan not only emphasize defense against bats but bats is actually far more common to teach for use as a weapon than any other traditional martial arts tool excepting for the nunchuks, bo staff, one handed clubs and stick, and knife arts. For the average non-committed weekend warrior, more time is spent on teaching bats than even those other practical weapons. In addition with how baseball has been dominating those countries in modern times, old heavy bat martial arts such as Kanabo styles have been in revival in dojos and school instructions. As baseball rises in popularity in China, there too is a revival of obscure and mostly forgotten styles using long heavy clubs.
But in the West there is s much emphasize on the fancy of bizarre weapons. Even stuff barely used back at home in Asia (such as some weird local Filipino fighting using a bullship). Excepting nunchuks (which can easily transitioned into improvised stuff like tying two sticks together and lockpad in socks), bo staff (broom sticks), and one handed clubs and sticks (obviously easiest to transition to as almost everything from tire irons to mallets can be used), all the practical self defense weapons style that can easily transition to civilian lifestyle are so damn ignored.
Why is this? In Asia as I mentioned the bat gets far more emphasized esp in civilian self defense and criminal activities than kendo styles and even advanced martial artists (esp since many top athletes also practise martial arts and are baseball fans in their spare time) prefer two handed bats even over staffs, knives, and other practical small arms. In China most commoners with some kung fu training tend to use kitchen knives esp heavy meat cutting blades for self defense over those strange swords More common than even stick and staff arts in Korea is the preferred use of fist based weapons like brass knuckles and training in forms of boxing that emphasize defenses against bats, etc under the use of brass knuckles and other older similar fist weapons in Korean history.
Why isn't the baseball bat a popular weapon to train in the West? I can barely find any school teaching about bats and those that do focus far more on defending against bats than using it. Same with other lots of practical tools. We don't have styles teaching how to use a crowbar to hook enemy weapons as common in the West. While the crowbar is quite popular among Chinese gangs and the Chinese police use a variation of it because of its ability to hook away and disarm weapons! Hooking weapons have seen a revival in Chinese kung fu lately. Yet this practical weapon type is ignored in the West's school just like baseball bats are.
What makes impractical weapons so popular in demand by Western students while day-to-day life tools like hitting with a hunting rifle, disarming with crowbars, and esp baseball bats not in demand for lessons?
