Kendo & Wushu

What are kendo and wushu?

Kendo — "the way of the sword" — is the Japanese martial art descended from samurai swordsmanship, practised with a bamboo shinai and armour, points awarded for valid, committed strikes to head, wrist, torso or throat, delivered with correct spirit and posture. Wushu is the modern codification of Chinese martial arts, split into taolu — judged routines of forms and weapons — and sanda, full-contact fighting with strikes and throws.^[1] [2]

How are they organized?

Kendo is governed by the International Kendo Federation, which holds the World Kendo Championships every three years and deliberately resists sportification — Japan's All Japan Kendo Federation guards the art's traditional standards. Wushu's IWUF has taken the opposite path: IOC-recognized, 150+ members, wushu on the Asian Games and Youth Olympic programmes, and a long-running Olympic campaign of its own.^[2] [3]

How are they awarded?

• World Championship medals — kendo's triennial worlds; wushu's taolu and sanda worlds.^[2] [3]
• Dan grades — both arts rank practitioners through traditional examination systems.^[1]
• Asian Games and World Games titles in wushu.^[3]

Who has won the most in kendo and wushu?

Two sports on one page, and two quite different record-keeping cultures. Kendo's federation publishes a complete table of past world championships, and it shows something no other sport on this site does: Japan has won every one of the nineteen women's titles, and thirty-five of the men's, with Korea and Hungary the only other winners. Eighteen men's individual championships have produced eighteen different champions — no man has ever won twice — while on the women's side one competitor has repeated, M. Matsumoto in 2015 and 2018. Wushu's federation publishes medal tables inside its own results books, but only for four editions, so the totals below cover 2017 to 2025 rather than all seventeen championships — China leads them, as it has at every edition that could be checked against an IWUF document, but the claim that it has topped all seventeen cannot be verified from the federation's own papers: the books for 1997 and 1999 leave the federation column blank, and its results archive stops at 2023, the 2025 book being reachable only by direct link. The number of golds differs from edition to edition, so the year columns are not comparable with one another.

Most World Wushu Championships gold medals by country (2017–2025, four editions)

Most World Kendo Championships titles by country — men (1970–2024)

Most World Kendo Championships titles by country — women (1997–2024)

Most World Kendo Championships individual titles by athlete — women (1997–2024)

Medal lists rank on total medals, then gold, then silver; title lists rank on titles. Equal totals are separated by golds, then silvers, and every table states the period it covers — several of these federations publish no all-time record, so some tables are a single championship and say so. Verified September 2026.^{[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]}