A translation of the 400 year old Chinese sword manual 單刀法選 Dandaofa Xuan. At the time, Wakou, Japanese pirates, were raiding the coast of China. The pirates used their razor sharp swords and unconventional fighting style to frustrate any attempts to subdue the constant attacks. Eventually, after capturing documents related to Japanese sword fighting and finding people who had trained with Japanese sword masters. The author Cheng Zongyou 程宗猷, trained at the Shaolin temple for 10 years before he began writing illustrated manuals about martial arts. He also studied under a Chinese master swordsman who had leaned directly from a Japanese master. With that knowledge he wrote a book about how the Japanese sword was crafted and the way it should be used. The training sequence introduced by Cheng in his book is the earliest known method for learning the Japanese sword.