The Dai Nippon Butokukai

The Dai Nippon Butokukai (大日本武徳会) is where gekken-kōgyō and the state police-gekken terminate in a single standardized kendō, and where the “office, not license” logic traced through the Kōbusho and the Keishichō reaches its institutional form as a national shōgō (称号) system of grades and titles that led to modern kendō.

Founding

The Dai Nippon Butokukai was established in Kyoto in April 1895 (Meiji 28), its stated purpose to encourage budō, cultivate martial virtue (butoku 武徳), and rouse the national spirit; an imperial endowment of ¥20,000 followed in 1909 (Meiji 42) (Dai Nippon Butokukai Budō Senmon Gakkō 1927). The first Butokusai (武徳祭), in 1895, conferred the earliest seirenshō (精錬証), among them Matsuzaki Namishirō, Okumura Sakonta (奥村左近太), and Tokunō Sekishirō (得能関四郎).¹

The Shōgō System

The Butokukai’s ranking machinery is the terminus of the arc’s through-line. It began with the single seirenshō, added the hanshi (範士) and kyōshi (教士) titles around the years 1902 to 1903, and the renshi (錬士) title in 1934 (Dai Nippon Butokukai (大日本武徳会), n.d.). This is a conferred national title graded by a central body — the same office-and-grade principle as the Kōbusho appointment ranks and the Keishichō gekken kyūi (撃剣級位), not a ryūha transmission — now detached from any single school and administered nationally.

The 1927 Busen handbook shows this system in full administration: a fifteen-step dan/kyū ladder (jūdan 十段 down to gokyū 五級), the titles hanshi, kyōshi, and seirenshō held by examiners, and the examination and local-review (chihō shinsakai 地方審査会) procedures that governed grading (Dai Nippon Butokukai Budō Senmon Gakkō 1927).

The Butokuden and the Honbu Teaching Staff

When the Butokuden (武徳殿) was completed in Kyoto in 1899, the Butokukai named five men to its teaching staff — Okumura Sakonta, Mitsuhashi Kan’ichirō (三橋鑑一郎), Naitō Takaharu (内藤高治), Sasaki Masayoshi (佐々木正宜), and Koseki Norimasa (小関教政) — the step that began converting the honbu from a tournament site into a teaching institution (Naitō Takaharu (内藤高治), n.d.). The accompanying recruiting telegram to Naitō is a traditional anecdote (see the Naitō entry) and is not treated here as documentary.

The Busen

The teaching institution proper evolved through four names, and its own chronology corrects the common conflation of the 1899 honbu appointment with the founding of the training school. The Butokukai formally established the Bujutsu Kyōin Yōseijo (武術教員養成所) — a teacher-training institute for kendō and jūdō — on 1 October 1905 (Meiji 38), six years after the 1899 Butokuden staffing (Dai Nippon Butokukai Budō Senmon Gakkō 1927). The institute was reorganized as the short-lived Butoku Gakkō (武徳学校) in 1911, chartered under the Senmon Gakkō-rei as the Bujutsu Senmon Gakkō (武術専門学校) in January 1912, and finally renamed the Budō Senmon Gakkō (武道専門学校, “Busen”) in February 1919 (Dai Nippon Butokukai Budō Senmon Gakkō 1927).

That last renaming is telling: the school became a budō rather than a bujutsu school in Taishō 8, in step with the terminological unification described below.

Naitō served as chief kendō instructor and formed the interwar generation, including the future tenth-dan holders Mochida Moriji (持田盛二) and Saimura Gorō (斎村五郎) (Naitō Takaharu (内藤高治), n.d.). The interwar generation is treated in the Busen section.

The 1911 Kendō-kata

The 1911 kata had a precursor: in 1906 a body of the first-generation hanshi — Mitsuhashi Kan’ichirō and Watanabe Noboru among them — framed a Dai Nippon Butokukai kenjutsu-kata (大日本武徳会剣術形), the immediate forerunner from which the 1911 committee worked. (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.)

In 1911 a committee including Monna Tadashi (門奈正), Naitō Takaharu, Ozawa Ichirō (小澤一郎), and Sasaki Masayoshi drafted the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata (大日本帝国剣道形). The standardized forms were then promulgated in 1912, as the Butokukai consolidated the many shinai-kenjutsu lines into one kendō (Mito Tōbukan (水戸東武館), n.d.). This is the same cross-school integration logic the Keishi-ryū kata prototyped a generation earlier: the police composite of 1886 is the forerunner of the national composite of 1911–12.

The 1919 Unification

In 1919 (Taishō 8) the Butokukai unified the terms kenjutsu and gekken under the single name kendō, completing the disciplinary relabeling that ran parallel to the school’s own renaming that year (Dai Nippon Butokukai (大日本武徳会), n.d.). The reform was pan-disciplinary rather than kendō-specific: the same jutsu→dō (術→道) relabeling recast jūjutsu as jūdō and kyūjutsu as kyūdō, and the Butokukai promulgated a standardized form for each art, not only the sword. For archery the same impulse produced a unified shooting form (武徳会形), codified — in the words of a contemporary manual — to unify shooting technique (shakei tōitsu 射形統一): the archery analogue of the 1911 kendō-kata, so that the same single standardized art was meant to emerge from many older lines here as with the sword (Kyūdō Kyōiku Kenkyūkai 1933). The Dai Nippon Butokukai kyūdō yōsoku (大日本武徳会弓道要則) that gave that program its formal shape came only in 1934, as described below.

The archery case shows how thin that imposed unity was. The surviving schools fell into two currents — the ceremonial Ogasawara-ryū (小笠原流), the reisha (礼射) tradition of front-raising (shōmen uchiokoshi 正面打起し), and the practical Heki-ryū lineages (Insai-ha 印西派, Sekka-ha 雪荷派, Chikurin-ha 竹林派), the busha (武射) tradition of oblique-raising (shamen uchiokoshi 斜面打起し) — with the modern Honda-ryū (本多流), drawn from the Heki Chikurin-ha and adopting front-raising, dominant in the university-and-Butokukai era. When representatives met at headquarters in 1934 (Shōwa 9) and enacted the Kyūdō Yōsoku after fierce debate, it drew sustained criticism, was mocked in the press as a “chimera shooting method” (nueteki shahō 鵺的射法), and was superseded in 1944 by a Kyūdō Kyōhan (弓道教範) that re-admitted both the front- and oblique-raising methods; genuine standardization — the shahō hassetsu (射法八節; eight stages of shooting) — came only after the war under the Nihon Kyūdō Renmei from 1949 (Kyūdō no rekishi (弓道の歴史), n.d.). Heki-ryū’s own transmission is followed in the Kawashima Takashi (opens in a new tab) entry.

Iai underwent the same gathering. The draw (battōjutsu, later iaidō) traces in its dominant tradition to Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚助重信, trad. 1542–1621), born in Hayashizaki village in Dewa, whose Shinmusō Hayashizaki-ryū stands at the head of most surviving iai — the Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū (無双直伝英信流), Tamiya-ryū (in the Select Traditions), Mugai-ryū (無外流) and their kin — a Dewa-centered network whose Kumano-Shugendō coloring the received tradition, following the Honchō Bugei Shōden, largely smoothed away (Hinatsu Shigetaka 1716). These lines entered the Butokukai’s orbit as the other arts did, and the sword-drawing curricula the modern federations carry forward descend from that older network rather than from any Butokukai invention.

Colonial and Overseas Honbu

The Butokukai’s reach extended into the empire through full colonial headquarters, not mere branches: a Taiwan honbu (台湾本部) was established in April 1906 (Meiji 39), one of three colonial honbu alongside the later Manchuria and Korea bodies, and its machinery ran on the police — prefectural and local governors headed the branches, and solicitation was carried mainly by police officers. In the colony this is more than a funding detail: kendō diffused through the police-and-school apparatus that was the instrument of colonial control. The Butokukai’s own headquarters register turns that from inference into a roster. Taiwan addresses occur in it on the order of three hundred and thirty times, spread across the island — Tainan, Taihoku, Taichū, Kīrun, Takao, Karenkō, Penghu, Taitō — and the striking feature is not the number but the uniformity of the employers behind it: the entries are overwhelmingly police-attached, to a keisatsusho (警察署; police station), a shū keimubu (州警務部) or keimuka (警務課) (prefectural and sectional police affairs), and to the Governor-General’s own police training institute, the Taiwan Sōtokufu Keisatsukan Renshūsho (臺灣總督府警察官練習所). Title-holders in the colony sat inside the policing apparatus as a matter of course, which is a different and harder claim than kendō merely spreading through institutions that happened to be official.

The same pattern holds for the bow, where it can be counted from the other end. Sakai Hikotarō (酒井彦太郎, 1867–1951), the Heki-ryū Sekka-ha (雪荷派) teacher who carried kyūjutsu to the colony, left a disciple register (monjin meibo 門人名簿) recording 515 disciples in Taiwan against 104 in the mainland prefectures and 5 in Korea and Manchuria — 624 in all.² A provincial line of Japanese archery acquired five times as many students in one colony as in the home islands, and did so through the same police-and-school channels. Kyūdō’s colonial diffusion is thus not a footnote to the kendō story but a parallel case with a register behind it.

What practice at a colonial Butokuden actually looked like is attested photographically. An interior view of the first-generation Tainan Butokuden has been matched, by its ceiling and window forms, to a family-held group photograph of kenjutsu practice with a furibō (振り棒) — the swinging bar characteristic of Jikishinkage-ryū — placing that training inside the Butokuden itself.² A koryū tradition was being practiced in the colony’s official martial hall, under the same roof the police apparatus used for kendō.

The individual case behind these findings, Kawashima Takashi (opens in a new tab) — licensed by Sakai, the first man to enroll at Tainan, and a kendō instructor at the police normal school — is treated at length elsewhere.

Other Figures

The line of Katō Kanji (加藤完治) is carried on by the Nihon Budō Shūrenkai (日本武道修練会) in Ibaraki; the Nihon Dentō Bunka Hozonkai (日本伝統文化保存会) under Shiina Ichiei (椎名市衛); the Kōdōkai (宏道会) kendō dōjō attached to Ningen Zen (人間禅) in Chiba; and the Hōjinkan (保仁館) dōjō in Hiroshima.

The line of Ōnishi Hidetaka (大西英隆) is carried on by the Jikishinkage-ryū Hyakurenkai (直心影流百錬会), the Hōteikai (法定会), the kendō club of Takasaki City University of Economics, and other bodies.

The line of Ōmori Sōgen (大森曹玄) is carried on by the Kōhoin Tesshūkai (高歩院鉄舟会) and the Kozayama (小座山) dōjō in Ibaraki.

Beyond these, Okumura Sakonta (奥村左近太) trained in the Jikishinkage-ryū transmitted in the Bizen-Okayama shinden domain of Kamogata (備前岡山新田藩・ 鴨方藩) and founded Okumura Nitō-ryū (奥村二刀流), teaching both arts.

There is also the line of Toyama Madoka (富山圓), who transmitted the Jikishinkage-ryū of the Harima-Tatsuno domain (播磨龍野藩).

From the Naganuma house of the Mino-Kanō domain (美濃加納藩) — a shihan family, in the line of Tokusato (徳郷), the natural son of Naganuma Kunisato (長沼国郷) — came Naganuma Kazusato (長沼和郷), who studied Jikishinkage-ryū in the bakumatsu years and was awarded the Dai Nippon Butokukai’s kendō hanshi title in Taishō 14 (1925).

Japanese source for the lineages above — omitted from print

加藤完治の系統は、茨城・日本武道修練会、日本伝統文化保存会椎名市衛、千葉・人間禅付属剣道場宏道会、広島・保仁館道場に伝えられている。

大西英隆の系統は、直心影流百錬会、法定会、高崎経済大学剣道部他各地に伝えられている。

大森曹玄の系統は、高歩院鉄舟会や茨城・小座山道場に伝えられている。

これ以外には、備前岡山新田藩（鴨方藩）伝の直心影流を修行し奥村二刀流を開いた奥村左近太は直心影流と奥村二刀流の両流を指導していた。

また、播磨龍野藩伝の直心影流を伝えた富山圓の系統もある。

師範家の美濃加納藩の長沼家（長沼国郷の実子・徳郷の家系）から長沼和郷を輩出している。

長沼和郷は幕末に直心影流を修行し、大正14年（1925年）に大日本武徳会から剣道範士号を授与された。