A Martial Art You Can Shake a Stick at : Recreation: The ancient Japanese art of <i> naginata</i> has a small but devoted following in this country, led by Helen Nakano of Torrance.

Under the basketball hoops in a deserted gymnasium, two barefoot women face each other and bow.

They pace soundlessly along an invisible line, one woman gaining, one backing off, separated by the lengths of their long oak staffs. They move fluidly. Eyes locked together. Faces blank.

Then, wood clashes against wood.

A piercing cry rings out. This is the kiai , a call used for centuries in Japan by those practicing the martial art known as naginata. Now, on this chilly night in suburban Los Angeles, the call rises again.

Helen Nakano, 51, of Torrance, and her two dueling students are pioneers of sorts. They are part of a newly formed U.S. team that left Thursday for the first international naginata tournament Sunday in Tokyo.

For Nakano, the trip culminates a personal mission that began in 1966 when, as an American tourist, she first saw naginata-- named for the bamboo-tipped oak staffs--performed at a castle in Japan.

Entranced by the grace and power of the obscure, female-dominated martial art, she began teaching herself from books and films, instructing classes in Los Angeles and helping stir up interest in other cities. Today, she is acknowledged as a driving force behind the sport in the United States, and the coach-manager of the U.S. team.

She is a diminutive woman, just 5-feet-2, with delicate features and contained grace. As she swings her naginata, she exudes a cool control. But she talks of promoting naginata with fervor.

“Sometimes I think, Helen, why are you doing this? Are you crazy?” she said. “But I just love to see it grow.”

And it has grown. The 11-person team departing for Japan this week consists of seven women and four men from pockets of naginata activity nationwide. There are two people from Southern California, two from Northern California, three from the Denver area, two from Washington, D.C., and two from Lincoln, Neb.

They will compete with teams from nine other countries: Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Belgium, England, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

U.S. team members interviewed this week were introduced to naginata through classes or demonstrations given by Nakano. They praised her skill and dedication.

“She’s one of the best I’ve come across, and I’ve been in martial arts for 25 years now. I’d put her right at the top,” said member Richard J. Schmidt, a physical education professor and Asian studies committee member at the University of Nebraska.

“One of my instructors says that when you think of naginata in the United States, you automatically think of Helen Nakano,” said member Jean M. Yien, 38, an architect from the Denver suburb of Aurora.

In popularity, naginata is greatly overshadowed by karate, or even kendo, a similar ancient martial art that uses a shorter weapon. But it offers a unique blend of grace, coordination and competitive athletics, team members said.

“It’s not threatening, whereas in karate, you think of kicks and punches, and in judo, you get thrown down,” Yien said.

Practitioners strive to combine the key elements, which include the “cut,” or movement of the naginata , and the kiai .

In competition, the players fence with each other, using the naginatas to try to touch targets on their opponent’s body. They are scored according to their form and success in reaching various targets.

Last week, Nakano and two other women--Cathy Mikuni and Rita S. Mason--practiced in the gymnasium at the Southeast Japanese Community Center in Norwalk. They wore white shirts, or keiko-gi, and long black or navy culotte skirts, called hakama.

The session began with a warm-up and practice. The women touched the naginatas to the floor in front of them, swung them back over their heads and then forward to touch the floor again in a graceful, choreographed ritual.

The action changed abruptly when Nakano’s two students put on their bogu , or armor: the face masks, chest and hip shields, wooden shin guards and fat, three-fingered leather gloves. The equipment can weigh 20 pounds and costs $500 or more.

Now the students were dueling fiercely, each swinging her naginata and pointing it at targets--head, throat, shins--on her opponent’s body. Sounds of clashing wood and the kiai filled the room.

The sport does not promote bulky muscles, but it does develop grace, Nakano said. “Because it builds your confidence, you have a tendency to sit well and walk well. And it makes your mind more keen to anything around you. . . . It really is a character builder, and it teaches patience.”

Some are attracted to naginata because “there’s so much flash and flair,” Nakano said. But they quickly learn, she said, that its discipline and form takes many years to master.

“It’s something that’s very hard to achieve. Every once in a while, you hit it. It doesn’t happen all the time,” said team member Mason, 37, a California Department of Transportation accountant from Visalia.

Nakano knew nothing about naginata when she first saw it practiced. Her husband, Torrance City Councilman George Nakano, is an expert at kendo. She had accompanied him to Japan for a kendo tournament and attended a practice session at Osaka Castle.

There, she was taking photographs of kendo players when three women approached her, inquiring if she wanted to learn naginata. She declined, but they persisted, and Nakano finally joined in.

She describes the event now, 24 years later, in vivid detail. “I just had this great feeling,” Nakano said. Later she learned that the women were high-ranking Japanese teachers.

At the time, Nakano--who was born in Seattle--spoke only a few words of Japanese.

When she returned to California, she and a friend began practicing, learning from films and books shipped from Japan. The instructions were in Japanese, so she modeled her moves from the pictures.

“Then we’d go back to Japan, and they’d look at us and say, ‘They don’t look too bad,’ ” she said wryly.

Gradually, naginata spread in Southern California, and the Los Angeles-based U.S. Naginata Federation was founded in 1974.

Nakano now teaches classes twice a week, in Gardena and in Norwalk, squeezing the coaching around her work as director of administration at a Beverly Hills-based textile import firm. She often practices in her high-ceilinged bedroom, where she can swing her naginata around.

She is one of the highest-ranked naginata practitioners in the country. Her rank is so high that she had to travel to Japan this spring to be tested and ranked by experts there.

“When Helen Nakano does a move, you can hear her naginata slicing the air,” Yien said. “Her naginata literally whistles when she does her cuts, her form is so good and her precision is so precise.”

Today, the U.S. Naginata Federation has fewer than 100 members, although others could be taking up the art independently, as she did, Nakano said.

Whether naginata will become more popular is questioned by some. One martial arts specialist, Daniel Furuya, who teaches aikido in Los Angeles, said he finds naginata unchallenging because it uses long sticks. “It has kind of a nuance as an exclusively women’s sport, and you don’t find men attracted to it,” he said. Its popularity is limited even in Japan, he said.

Nevertheless, interest has spread far from the Pacific Rim. At the University of Nebraska, the martial arts club includes eight people doing naginata-- including four men.

Yien reports she recently found evidence that naginata is finally becoming popularized.

“I wrote Helen Nakano a little while ago that I think we are making inroads. I was in a video store, and one of the video games had a naginata player as one of the players. A woman. it was really exciting.”