Haguro Shugendō discussed some of the features and history of the Dewa area mountain Shugendō (修験道) I encountered in 2004 and its early history. Dewa-area bujutsu (武術) were in contrast bushi-centric domain arts, and there is no well-attested surviving yamabushi (山伏) fighting tradition in the area. Shugendō connections are allegorical compared to arts like Kukishin-ryū (九鬼神流) that were based in the Kumano Sanzan area. They instead lived at the level of revelation-narrative and ascetic framing drawing on elements of Shugendō practice (in common knowledge during the early Edo period), rather than in specific tactical or physical-somatic content. The Kumano sanzan area is similarly venerated by martial traditions; and the eastern and western Shugendō nexuses of at Kumano and Dewa were at times in legal conflict over doctrinal differences.
The experiences we see described or passed down as framing legends surrounding the divine revelation of martial practices, after a period of seclusion and study, are kami-cult centric and ascetic in nature, so immediately adjacent to Shugendō imagery but not specifically having anything to do with the combatives (if any such practices existed) of mountain-priests or ascetics of particular complexes, except in the early case of Aisu’s Kage-ryū (陰流) of kenjutsu, which was formulated or revealed at the Udo shrine in Kyushu in the Muromachi period. This at the time was an independent southern nexus of Shugendō. Nen-ami Jion (念阿弥慈恩) has similar experiences at Kurama (鞍馬) and the religious complex at Kuramadera was inspiring to several later arts as well.
Later bushi who entered the mountains as ascetics or on pilgrimage retained whatever training they possessed when they were symbolically reborn into that new role. Regarding Dewa-area bushi, the Shōnai (庄内) domain in the Tsuruoka (鶴岡) area was the closest to Dewa Sanzan (出羽三山). Its Chidōkan (致道館) domain school taught a substantial set of martial ryū to samurai, but these were not shugenja or yamabushi arts.
Shōnai-han Bujutsu
The Shōnai-han was the Edo period clan responsible for Dewa.
Before the Sakai, Musubi (武藤義氏) held the three mountain complex (三山別當) as lord. On taking the 屋形 title he transferred the office to Hōzen-in’s Keishun as 兼帶 with 1,500-plus koku. Mogami Yoshiaki and Uesugi Kagekatsu then stripped the estate from three districts down to the residual 1,500 koku. Kagekatsu’s troops later sacked the mountain — 「景勝の軍勢當山へ亂入。寺寺の家財は勿論御本社內 陣迄狼籍」 — committing acts of vandalism and pillage everywhere. They not only seizing the household goods of the various sub-temples but also rampaged within the inner sanctum of the main shrine itself. What was salvaged burned in the Meireki 3 (1657) tenth-month fire, but the ancient records survived (什寶古記錄等不殘燒失).
Onozaki Norio’s Shōnai-han no bujutsu — compiled from the Shōnai-han domain academy Chidōkan and the Sakata/Tsuruoka archives — records a full curriculum:
- Kenjutsu: Shinkyū-ryū (新九流), Okuyama-ryū (奥山流), Mitomi-ryū (三富流), Inazuma-ryū (稲妻流), Shinshin Yagyū-ryū (心信柳生流) and Jikishinkage-ryū (直心影流)
- Iai: Tamiya-ryū (田宮流) and Kage-ryū (景流)
- Sōjutsu: Hōzōin-ryū (宝蔵院流)
- Jūjutsu: Shibukawa-ryū (渋川流), Sakamaki-ryū 〔坂巻流?〕 and Shishin-ryū (torite)
- Kyūjutsu: Heki-ryū (日置流)
In addition, Ōtsubo/Hitomi horsemanship, several gunnery lines, and Kōshū-/Naganuma-ryū military science (甲州流／長沼流軍学) were taught.
Jikishinkage-ryū was in the Shōnai han, and Shinshin Yagyū-ryū (心信柳生流) is a Yagyū Shinkage line. Note that the iai Kage-ryū here (景流) is a different school from Aisu’s Kage-ryū (陰流) discussed above, despite the shared romaji. The Shōnai branch domain of Matsuyama separately held Tenshin Shōden-ryū 〔天真正伝流 (?)), the Enki-ryū of kenjutsu and Tamiya-ryū iai.
Birthplace of Iai
The most striking fact is that, in the dominant tradition, the Dewa area is the cradle of iai itself. Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚助重信, trad. 1542–1621), regarded as the founder of iai (battōjutsu, 抜刀術), was born Asano Tamijimaru (浅野民治丸) in Hayashizaki village in Dewa, and adopted the village name “Hayashizaki” as his surname at his coming-of-age. He is said to have secluded himself a hundred days at the Hayashizaki Myōjin (林崎明神) in Tatenoyama (楯山), Dewa province — present Murayama City, Yamagata. During that time he is said to have received the secret of the draw called the manuki (万字抜; manji draw) — in a dream-revelation, the dream-figure being a white-haired old man who taught the advantage of the long blade. This is the same sanrō (参籠; ritual seclusion) and shintaku (神託; oracle) structure as in Kashima-area bujutsu geneses, and it issued from a gongen (権現) deity likely of Shugendō-belief origin.
The deity was Kumano (熊野). The shrine’s own engi is explicit — Kumano Gongen was enshrined in a rock-cave on Sekijōgatake east of the village, later relocated and re-styled “Kumano Myōjin,” and revered locally as an ancestral deity.[^engi] The formal name today of the shrine is Kumano-Iai Ryō-Jinja (熊野居合両神社). The shrine was a Kumano Gongen site — a gongen deity, a rock-cave origin, and an okunoin (奥の院) at Kamagasawa Daimyōjin (釜ヶ沢大明神) where Jinsuke is said to have meditated at a stone — i.e., the Kumano-Shugendō register, not “pure” Shintō. And its modern name is a fossil of the very process we discussed: under the Meiji shinbutsu-hanzen (神仏判然) edict the Iai shrine was merged into the Kumano shrine and registered in 1877 as the combined “Kumano-Iai” shrine — the gongen identity processed, the founder-cult and the Kumano kami administratively joined under a registrable name.
The Hayashizaki/Kumano Iai shrine there is the only iai shrine in Japan. The lineages descending from his Shinmusō Hayashizaki-ryū include Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū (無双直伝英信流), Tamiya-ryū, Mugai-ryū (無外流) and others, so most surviving iai traces back to a Dewa area origin. Through the Edo period this was a living regional network: swordsmen of the Shinjō (新庄) domain’s Hayashizaki Shinmusō-ryū and the Shōnai domain’s Hayashizaki Tamiya-ryū came to Hayashizaki village to worship and dedicate votive plaques at the shrine.
As with many budō, we discover competing origin narratives with iai as well. There are competing Kashima-centric accounts, and the Dewa-origin versions became received tradition largely through the Kyōhō-era writing of the Honchō Bugei Shōden (本朝武芸小伝).
The mythic allure of Takemikazuchi-no-kami (武甕槌神) at Kashima Jingū (鹿島神宮) became very strong over time. One Hayashizaki Musō-ryū account (attributed to Okuyama Kanzen) has Jinsuke receiving Tsukahara Bokuden’s (塚原卜伝) Hitotsu-no-tachi (一之太刀) as the highest secret of Kashima Shintō-ryū (鹿島新当流), while a Kurama-ryū (鞍馬流) densho lists him as second-generation — both contested single-line traditions, but they place the Dewa-area iai founder at the junction of the Kashima-Bokuden and Kurama threads. This may have led to the story of Bokuden and Dewa related below.
Province-wide, the clearest Dewa thread is the iai network radiating from the Murayama shrine — swordsmen of the Shinjō domain’s Hayashizaki Shinmusō-ryū and the Shōnai domain’s Hayashizaki Tamiya-ryū came to worship and dedicate plaques there — alongside the Shōnai curriculum already noted (which included Jikishinkage-ryū and a Yagyū line). A clean Yonezawa (Uesugi) domain roster would round out the provincial picture but is not attempted here; a domain-specific bujutsu study would serve better than the aggregator sites. The cleanest test of the cliff story is whether Knutsen footnotes it: if it traces only to oral transmission, it stays in the “tradition, not record” column.
As to Hayashizaki-ryū iai’s technical content and iconography, it does not explicitly call out tengu or other mountain-religion based imagery in its kata curriculum. Documented Hayashizaki kata names are positional. The original art (written variously 神夢想林崎流 / 林崎新夢想流 / 林崎夢想流) survives in the Shinjō and Tsugaru (津軽; Hirose/Sasamori) transmissions, and its form-set is given by the Sasamori Junzō line and the Nihon Kobudō body as:
Omote Mukaemi (表向身), Migimi (右身), Hidarimi (左身), Sotomono (外物), Sotomono-yurushi (外物許), Nihō-zume / Shihō-zume (二方詰・四方詰), Goka-no-tachi (五箇之太刀), Hakka-no-tachi (八箇之太刀), Yurushi-no-hi (許之非〔possibly 許之秘〕), and Senkin-no-kurai (千金之位).
The seven-form middle stratum is transmitted across all the domain lines and the names largely coincide with the early Kishū (紀州) Tamiya-ryū. The Tamiya-ryū-style positional names above are the early stratum, but ordering and counts differ by domain (Shinjō vs Tsugaru).
The esoteric element in this line is not tengu at all but the manuki (万字抜), the manji sword draw that Hayashizaki is said to have received in a dream-revelation from the Hayashizaki Myōjin after a hundred-day seclusion.
Kashima Parallel Discourse
Roald Knutsen, in his book Rediscovering Budo (2004), relates a tale from Kashima Shintō-ryū of Tsukahara Bokuden being kidnapped after angering a group of yamabushi. He is taken away to Dewa and, tied up, held dangling over a cliff. Knutsen held menkyo-kaiden in a Hayashizaki-descended Eishin-ryū iai line and the rank of renshi 6th-dan in kendō, and in 1976 he trained in Japan with Yoshikawa Kōichirō-sensei (吉川), the renowned headmaster (sōke) of the Kashima Shintō-ryū.
Mainstream Kashima Shintō-ryū does not have a Tengu-shō component to its practice. This likely is why, in Tengu: The Shamanic and Esoteric Origins of the Japanese Martial Arts, the tengu images Knutsen reproduces are drawn from the wider densho corpus of Yagyū, Taisha-ryū (タイ捨流) and Kurama-ryū source material, not a single tradition (and not one he himself has studied).
Standard Bokuden and Matsumoto biographies contain no Dewa-monks cliff episode. The canonical ascetic motif in that lineage is the opposite in form — seclusion, not suspension. Matsumoto Bizen-no-kami (松本備前守) is said to have attained the secret “Hitotsu no Tachi” through sanrō (ritual seclusion) at Kashima Jingū, and to have urged the same seclusion-practice on the second generation Bokuden. Bokuden in turn secluded himself at the Kashima shrine for some three years and received the divine instruction called “renew your heart and meet the matter,” from which the Shintō-ryū (新当流) took its name.
The cliff-hanging episode as oral history may be a misremembered or intentionally obscured Shugendō rite, given the Shintō-centric identities of the Kashima and Katori (香取) area arts today (despite historical influences of mikkyō 密教 and figures such as Marishiten 摩利支天; Skt. Marīcī).
The obvious referent regarding cliff-hanging is the Nishi no Nozoki (西の覗き). A new initiate is lowered head-first over a sheer cliff while the sendatsu (先達; senior guide) demands “Will you be filial? Will you cherish your family?” until he shouts assent. This is a “body-abandoning” (sutemi, 捨身) ordeal framed explicitly as gishi-saisei (擬死再生; simulated death and rebirth), which practitioners gloss as zange-metsuzai (懺悔滅罪; confession and extinction of sins).
The involuntary abduction framing itself has a direct Shugendō analogue: an Ōmine (大峰) legend in which a man who mocked the mountain is seized by a great eagle, stranded on a crag, brought to repent, and only then restored — re-enacted as the Kinpusen-ji (金峯山寺) “frog-jump” (蛙飛び) rite.
A voluntary initiation re-narrated by outsiders as a hostile ordeal is a very natural transformation over the intervening centuries. It begs the question of who these Dewa monks were that could abduct a master swordsman like Bokuden. The likely explanation is that this is allegorical.
The famous cliff-nozoki is held at Ōmine, not Dewa; the ordeal-and-rebirth structure is pan-Shugendō, and Haguro’s Akinomine (秋の峰) has its own austerities, but there is no specific mention of Dewa cliff-suspension rites.
Knutsen draws on the oral history of multiple traditions in his writing, as well as a wide selection of art and other primary sources. The Dewa and Kashima competing narratives of Hayashizaki-ryū make parsing the origin of these tales difficult at times.
Bashō on Dewa
涼しさやほの三日月の羽黒山 suzushisa ya / hono mikazuki no / Haguro-yama “Such coolness — a faint crescent moon over Mount Haguro”
Bashō had climbed dressed as the ascetics do, a yūshime cord at the neck and a hōkan wrapping the head, so the 涼しさ (coolness) is at once the literal relief of mountain air against the lowland summer and the felt sanctity of the place; ほの三日月 (the faint third-night crescent) gives the thin, understated brightness suited to that purity, set against the dark mass implied by 羽黒 (“black-wing”). An editorial reading takes the three verses together as praising the pure bearing of the three mountains as they shift through morning, noon, and evening. KyoushhuMie
雲の峰幾つ崩れて月の山 kumo no mine / ikutsu kuzurete / tsuki no yama “How many cloud-peaks have crumbled away — the moon mountain.”
The towering summer thunderheads (雲の峰) break apart to leave the serene bulk of Gassan, “the moon mountain,” standing; the crescent of the Haguro verse and the moon-mountain here knit the two by the lunar motif.
語られぬ湯殿にぬらす袂かな katararenu / Yudono ni nurasu / tamoto kana “Of Yudono, not to be spoken — and so my sleeves are wet.”
Pilgrims were forbidden to speak of what passed at Yudono, and Bashō, ascending that solemn place, wet his sleeves with tears of awe. Sora added his own Yudono verse — Yudonosan / zeni fumu michi no / namida kana — and the set is preceded by the Minamidani verse, arigata ya / yuki o kaorasu / Minamidani.
Descending from Gassan toward Yudono, Bashō passes the smiths’ hut and writes: the smiths of this province select sacred water, purify themselves there, forge their blades, and finally cut the signature “Gassan,” and so are esteemed by the world; it is said they quench their swords in the Ryūsen spring, revering the old example of Kanshō and Bakuya, and one sees their devotion to the Way runs deep.
The reach for Ryūsen (the Longquan spring) and for Kanshō and Bakuya — the legendary Chinese smith husband and wife who presented a sword to the king of Wu — is itself notable for your purposes: even Bashō frames the Dewa smiths through a Chinese sword-legend, the same gravitational pull toward Chinese provenance we saw in the Denrinbō material, here purely as poetic homage rather than a lineage claim.
Gassan Sword Making
Dewa is famous as the location of the Gassan school of sword smiths. Several Gassan blades are in the museum holdings, the oldest is a tachi signed simply “Gassan” (月山, two characters), a Nanbokuchō-period work designated an Important Art Object, which matches the from the Gassan smithing school’s documented peak.
The densest link from Dewa into the warrior world is the Gassan smiths who worked at the foot of Mt. Gassan, traced their founder to Kiō-maru, flourished from Kamakura through the Muromachi period with a Nanbokuchō peak, and are marked by the distinctive ayasugi-hada grain, also called “Gassan-hada.” Their blades, prized for both durability and that grain, were favored by warlords; Mogami Yoshiaki is said to have presented Oda Nobunaga a Gassan-forged spear.
The same ayasugi grain shows up in Mutsu’s Mokusa and Hōju, Echigo’s Momokawa, and as far off as Satsuma’s Naminohira in Kyūshū, which is attributed to yamabushi carrying technique and information along their networks. So the smithing rode the same Shugendō circuitry that has run through this whole conversation, tying Dewa to Kyūshū by the ascetics’ own movement. And the school’s fate mirrors the disarmament thread exactly: it declined sharply once the three mountains became disarmed, purely religious bodies in the Edo period, reviving only at the very end when Gassan Sadayoshi moved to Osaka and founded the Osaka Gassan line.
Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi still records the Gassan smith hut, where the smiths purified themselves with sacred water before forging and signed their blades Gassan.
Later, the first Gassan Sadakazu (1836–1918), an Imperial Household Artist who forged the Meiji Emperor’s military swords and devised the marshal’s sword modeled on the Heike heirloom Kogarasu-maru, then through Sadakatsu to the second Sadakazu (1907–1995), a Living National Treasure, and on to the present Sadatoshi and Sadanobu.
Shinbutsu Bunri
The shinbutsu bunri (神仏分離) of 1868 was advertised as a binary operation — unbraid kami from buddhas — and on the surface that is what it performed.
Shugendō was never solely a Buddhism–Shintō blend; it was a third stream, a syncretic matrix that also carried the continental cosmological layer of gogyō (五行; wǔxíng; five phases) correspondences mapped onto the yamabushi vestments and the goma (護摩) rite, in’yō (陰陽; yin-yang) and astral worship of figures like Myōken (妙見; the pole-star) and the Hokuto (北斗; Big Dipper) cult, talismanic magic and the henbai (反閇; ritual pacing) step — the Yu step (禹歩; Yǔbù) of Daoist provenance — and the sennin (仙人; xiānrén; transcendent) imagery clinging to the mountain and to the tengu.
None of that fit either the “pure kami” box or the “Buddhism” box.
The reason the suppression was quiet is structural: Daoism never existed in Japan as an institution — it had no ordained clergy, no temples of its own — but entered as diffused elements absorbed into Onmyōdō (陰陽道), Shugendō, folk Shintō and mikkyō.
When the state dismantled the host bodies — gongen (権現) titles outlawed under shinbutsu bunri, the Shugendō sects abolished in 1872, the Tsuchimikado (土御門) onmyōdō monopoly dissolved around 1870 — the cosmological layer lost every institutional home at once and had no standalone body to defend it.
The gongen figures were the precise casualty: Zaō Gongen (蔵王権現) and the honji-suijaku (本地垂迹) manifestation-deities were exactly the fusion the edicts targeted, and Myōken shrines were re-skinned as Ame-no-Minakanushi (天之御中主) worship — the astral-Daoist deity overwritten by a “pure” kami.
Deemphasized rather than erased, as the material survived in folk practice and in the postwar Shugendō revival, but its institutional standing and public legitimacy were demoted by a single stroke that announced itself as something else. It was, in essence, unreified.
For the densho work this extends the prestige-vector from a China-to-Japan axis to also include a Shugendō-to-state-Shintō axis. The same Meiji impulse that scrubbed Chinese-combat pedigrees — modernizing, nationalizing, de-syncretizing — also stranded the gogyō/in’yō/gongen/astral substratum in the okuden of the bujutsu of that day.
This can be a rough dating heuristic. Shugendō or Ming (even more so Qing) elements would not be added or emphasized in Meiji; they are more likely to be muted in Meiji-era commentary on these arts, if previously present.
A stratum dense in five-phase correspondences, astral deities (Marishiten, Myōken), gongen tutelaries or henbai-like ritual movement is, like a Chinese-origin claim, a pre-Meiji marker — and a school that retains it openly past 1872, against the purifying grain, is displaying inherited material it could not easily shed (even if embarrassed from a social standpoint).
It also frames the broad arc above: a genuinely Daoist-inflected Shugendō substrate at Kage-ryū’s Udo origin, thinning to the naturalized Tenjin-cult founding of late-Edo Tenjin Shin’yō-ryū (天神真楊流), then actively deemphasized in the Meiji nationalization. These are three stages of one long retreat of the syncretic-cosmological layer from the surface of related arts.
What was suppressed was less institutional Daoism (道教; Dàojiào) than the diffuse in’yō–gogyō–astral–talismanic complex that reached Japan through Onmyōdō and mikkyō and is only adjectivally Daoist. The cleaner formulation — diffused continental cosmology carried by Shugendō and Onmyōdō — sidesteps the long academic argument over whether Japan ever had “real” Daoism like the broad monastic fixtures of China.
The shrine’s engi places the original Kumano Gongen enshrinement at Sekijōgatake in 807 but the Murayama tourism record instead dates the senza to the present location to the Eishō–Shōan window (1046–1300). The 1877 registration as Kumano-Iai Ryō-Jinja is well attested; the early-foundation particulars require further confirmation.
References
Onozaki is the Shōnai curriculum anchor. The Hayashizaki iai origin runs through the Kyōhō-era Honchō Bugei Shōden, with a competing Sagami-origin account (in the Bujutsu Taihaku Seiden) and the Bokuden/Kurama lines (in the Hayashizaki Musō-ryū and Kurama-ryū densho) on record. The documented Hayashizaki kata names are positional, not tengu — the esoteric element is the manuki (万字抜) dream-revelation. The founder-shrine is cited here as a text in its own right (its engi); the votive network radiating from it — Shinjō’s Hayashizaki Shinmusō-ryū and Shōnai’s Hayashizaki Tamiya-ryū swordsmen dedicating plaques — is corroborated independently in Kiyokawa Hachirō’s Saiyūsō.
