Yari

[Timo Nieminen]

Originally Posted by estcrh

The kikuchi yari I have seen were mounted on a round half, if any yari were to have been mounted on an oval haft you would expect it to have been kikuchi yari since that have a flat knife like blade.

I don't know of any yari with oval hafts. Round, round with small ridge (Knutsen, "Japanese Polearms", calls this "pear shaped"), and polygonal.

The "flat area", I guess, refers to having one side (matching the flat of a flattened sankaku yari) of the round haft planed flat near the butt. Hanwei makes a point of this in their ad copy for their reproduction yari, and their yari indeed are so. However, their haft is also uniform in thickness, not tapered like typical yari hafts, so their hafts are not so representative of historical examples.

Is it correct to say that kikuchi yari are yari because they're mounted like yari, rather than being mounted like naginata (in which case, they'd be short straight naginata)?