I've carried Kazakh sabres two feet long in my checked luggage across three continents and I even got a one-foot long Chinese machete (a dao, which is a very imprecise term, but the Japanese equivalent would be a sai in terms of length) into the cabin on a China Southern flight from Beijing to Hong Kong provided I agreed to surrender it to the stewardess. Of course, that was before September 11th and it was sort of silly that they took it away from me given that the plane was hurtling down the runway in Hong Kong and hadn't even slowed down when she ran down the aisle and presented it to me as though asking me to use it.