Kanabo

The kanabo, literally metal stick or metal club, is a heavy, two-handed blunt weapon of feudal Japan, its wooden or metal shaft studded across much of its length with metal spikes or knobs to concentrate crushing force on impact rather than relying on an edge. Wielded by samurai and by the warrior-monks and other combatants of medieval Japan, the weapon is documented in use as far back as the Nanboku-cho period of the fourteenth century, and its heavy blunt strikes were valued for their ability to injure an armored opponent through blunt trauma even when the armor itself resisted penetration. Several related Japanese club weapons shared the same basic design family, including the tetsubo, the tapered konsaibo, the smooth iron kanemuchi, and other regional variants, together forming a distinct and long-lived category of Japanese battlefield blunt weapons alongside the more famous edged weapons of the samurai.