Shimada Toranosuke (島田虎之助, 1814–1852) was born in 1814 to a Buzen Nakatsu-han samurai family, son of Shimada Ichirōemon Chikafusa (島田 市郎右衛門親房); from about ten he trained under the domain instructor Hori Jūrōzaemon (堀十郎左衛門) in an Ittō-ryū line (外他/外也一刀流) , was unbeatable in the domain by fifteen, and at sixteen went on musha-shugyō across Kyūshū. Notably for a swordsman, he was also schooled in letters — he is said to have studied under the Confucian Hirose Tansō at Hita and the Zen monk Sengai Gibon (仙厓義梵) in Chikuzen. He set out for Edo in 1831 at eighteen but did not arrive until 1838, having lingered in Shimonoseki and studied kangaku under the fellow Nakatsu scholar Nakamura Ritsuen (中村栗園) at Ōmi Minakuchi along the way.
In 1838 he walked into Odani’s Honjo Kamezawa-chō dōjō, demanded a match, and took a point off him in a three-bout bout; but on becoming a formal pupil (via an introduction from the Jiki Shinkage-ryū man Inoue Denbei) he found on the rematch he could not touch Odani at all. Within a little over a year he held the shihan license and served as Odani’s shihan-dai, while also training in Kitō-ryū jūjutsu at Suzuki Seibei’s (鈴木清兵衛) dōjō — the same Kitō-ryū line that later fed Kanō’s Kōdōkan, so the jūjutsu axis from our last exchange recurs here. Shimada is well-known as Katsu Kaishū’s teacher, who later continued his studies with Sakakibara.
At Suzuki’s dōjō he became a fellow student of Katsu Rintarō (the later Katsu Kaishū), and when Odani — Katsu’s cousin — introduced the two, Katsu entered Shimada’s dōjō as his sword pupil. Shimada told Katsu there is “a gentleman’s sword and a small man’s sword,” that dōjō practice alone was not enough — one must pursue learning and Zen to forge the spirit — and even urged him to take up Dutch studies and Western military science. His maxim, “the sword is the mind; if the mind is not correct, neither is the sword; one who would learn the sword must first learn from the mind,” is the seed of the ken-zen line of practice that influenced Yamaoka Tesshū and others. Ōmori Sōgen’s Ken to Zen (剣と禅) devotes its eleventh chapter to “the gentleman’s sword” and the 直心-to-person genealogy running through Seizan and Kaishū, i.e. to exactly Shimada’s phrase.
Like Odani (男谷派) and the line Sakakibara continued, Shimada styled his own Jiki Shinkage-ryū Shimada-ha (島田派); after a Tōhoku musha-shugyō he opened a dōjō at Asakusa Shinbori in 1843, with his elder brother Shimada Kotarō Tomochika (島田小太郎友親) as shihan-dai, and drew a stipend (20-nin fuchi) in connection with the Oshi-han (忍藩) Matsudaira house in Musashi. The Oshi lord during his active years was Matsudaira Tadakuni (松平忠国). Some accounts attach the name of the last Oshi lord, Matsudaira Tadanori (松平忠敬, 1855–1919), but he was born after Shimada’s death in 1852; the firmly datable link is that Shimada’s daughter Kiku later married a Tadanori retainer.
Shimada was ranked with Odani Nobutomo and Ōishi Susumu (大石進, of Ōishi Shinkage-ryū, the long-shinai left-hand-thrust man) as one of the “three swords of the Tenpō era” (天保三剣士).
Shimada died of illness in 1852 at thirty-nine and was buried at Shōjō-ji (正定寺) in Asakusa, his grave inscription written by Odani himself. He predeceased the Kōbusho era entirely, and overlapped Sakakibara at the Odani dōjō only as the senior figure of an earlier cohort (Shimada entered in 1838, Sakakibara in 1842).
This brother Shimada Kotarō Tomochika (島田小太郎友親) served as shihan-dai in his dōjō, but no succession from him is recorded. His known named pupils are the famous Katsu Rintarō (Kaishū) and one Makado Katsusuke (真角勝輔) of Chikuzen. Neither carried a sword transmission forward.
