Were non-bushi banned from owning bokken and other wooden practise weapons during the sword hunts esp early Tokugawa and later Meiji sword ban?

by RileyFonza

Considering Okinawan kobudo weapons tended to be blunt and wooden in nature, I am curious if non-Samurai were forbidden to own wooden practise weapons such as bokkens, suburitos, kanabos, and home made entirely wooden sticks sharpened at the edge into a stake to replicate a spear?

wotan_weevil

wooden sticks

A ban on ownership of wooden sticks (whether sharpened or not) wouldn't have been practical. The use of firewood as a common fuel would have turned almost everybody into criminals, and these men into big-time illegal arms dealers:

Further, it is quite possible to use a stick, chosen for a suitable thickness or weight, cut to length and otherwise left in its natural state, as a training sword. A bokken carved to resemble a sword isn't necessary (for general swordsmnship - iaido (sword drawing) will be a different story, since the smoothness and shape (including curvature) of a bokken will be desirable).

For example, Jigen-ryu (a koryu swordsmanship school) used, and still uses, sticks as their training weapons:

More generally, the Tokugawa sword laws were more to enforce distinctions between social classes (i.e., they were sumptuary laws), rather than working to reduce access to weapons. Sharp steel swords could still be owned, and people, including farmers and other commoners, could (and often did) own guns. Commoners couldn't wear long swords (except for self-defence when travelling between towns). They could still wear short swords (wakizashi), and many did. Extending the restrictions from real swords to wooden swords and practice weapons wasn't necessary to achieve the intended goal (of distinguishing samurai from commoners).

The Meiji bans were on wearing swords, not on ownership. Since people were still allowed to own swords, and practice swordsmanship, a ban on wooden swords would have made no sense.

Hideyoshi's "sword hunt" was also aimed to reinforce the distinctions between samurai and commoners. It also served the purpose of disarming trouble-making elements - mostly warrior monks, rather than regular commoners.

Okinawan kobudo weapons tended to be blunt and wooden in nature

The classic Okinawan blunt weapons (as you say, mostly wooden, but the same applies to the sai, which was used as a police weapon in China) were classic police weapons. The kata for these weapons suit police use (e.g., bo kata with techniques better suited for crowd control (vs multiple unarmed opponents) than fighting armed opponents).

Rather than general weapons restrictions, the motivations for the use of such blunt weapons appear to be (a) restrictions on the carry of weapons in palaces, and (b) to have less-than-lethal weapons for general police work.