Umezaki Yaichirō (梅崎弥一郎, 1847–1913) was a Kurume swordsman of the Katōda Shinkage-ryū (加藤田神陰流) and, with Matsuzaki Namishirō, the best remembered of the twelve inner-license holders of Katōda Heihachirō. The two are the paired names by which that dormant Kurume line is now chiefly known.1
He trained in the Katōda tradition under Katōda Heihachirō (加藤田平八郎) and also took up Tsuda Ichiden-ryū (津田一伝流), the progressive, competition-oriented Kurume sword school. In 1895 he and Matsuzaki jointly received the Seirenshō (精錬証) at the Dai Nippon Butokukai Taikai — co-recipients standing in the same group, not teacher and student, though Umezaki was the junior by fourteen years — and in 1909 he became a Butokukai kendō hanshi. He lived to 1913 (Watatani Kiyoshi (綿谷雪) and Yamada Tadashi (山田忠史) 1978; Majima Isao (間島勲) 1996).
Open Questions
- Umezaki’s own transmission line within Katōda Shinkage-ryū, and how far his practice ran to Tsuda Ichiden-ryū versus the Katōda art, want a dedicated Kurume source.
- The given-name reading (Yaichirō) is taken from the Matsuzaki literature and should be confirmed.
References
secondary
End Notes
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In the Japanese sources Umezaki appears as a dōmon (同門; fellow disciple of the same school) of Matsuzaki within the Katōda Shinkage-ryū line; the pairing, and the joint 1895 Seirenshō, are the load-bearing facts. (Kobayashi Masanori (小林正憲) et al. 1986) ↩
