Kagawa Zenjirō (香川善治郎, c. 1849–1921) was the second-generation head of Yamaoka Tesshū’s Mutō-ryū (無刀流) and the man who carried that Zen-sword line into the modern educational-kendō system. He is the figure against whom Matsuzaki Namishirō fought his very last recorded match, at the 1895 Butokukai.1
Succeeding Yamaoka as second-generation head of Ittō Shōden Mutō-ryū, Kagawa went on to hold the Dai Nippon Butokukai’s kendō hanshi title. He carried Mutō-ryū into the modern system as an instructor at the Hiroshima Higher Normal School kendō club — one of the principal training grounds for the nation’s kendō teachers — helping establish Mutō-ryū kendō there. He died on 7 March 1921, at seventy-two (Hori Shōhei (堀正平) 1934; Yokoyama Kendō (横山健堂) 1943).
Open Questions
- Birth year is inferred from the age (72) at death and should be fixed against a Mutō-ryū / Shunpūkan source; the same source should confirm the basis and date of his succession to the second generation.
- His given name reading (Zenjirō) and any imina are unconfirmed here.
References
secondary
End Notes
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That Matsuzaki’s final match was against the second-generation Mutō-ryū head is a fitting coda to his late turn toward Yamaoka’s swordsmanship; the succession itself (Yamaoka → Kagawa) should be corroborated from the Mutō-ryū line’s own records rather than the Matsuzaki literature. (Hori Shōhei (堀正平) 1934) ↩
