Japanese grappling styles varied in the organization of their technical content. Some examples of classical (pre Meiji-era) arts include:
- Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū jūjutsu has 124 kata divided in several sections including themes of idori (kneeling), tachi-ai (standing) and koppo (ressucitation).
- Nakae Kitō-ryū jūjutsu taught 30 kata, although 21 are preserved in Jūdō's koshiki no kata.
- Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū is said to have preserved 303 kata in four sections (shoden, chuden, joden, kaiden) passed down from older styles of Yōshin-ryū.
- Sōsuishi-ryū preserves a curriculum of kumi-uchi organized into 48 kata. Its weapons curriculum called koshi-no-mawari adds to this.
- Katori Shintō-ryū, albeit a weapons-focused tradition, has a section of 36 yawara kata in its curriculum that are rarely demonstrated.
- In contrast to those smaller traditions, the Bitchu-den of Takenouchi-ryū has accumilated hundreds of kata in its curriculum over almost five hundred years.
The list goes on. In most of these arts, kata is practiced in a classical manner, with a focus on zanshin (awareness) and combative mindset, with the teacher acting as the attacker to be able to gauge the student's effectiveness and draw out their skill over time.
Transitional or what I might call neoclassical arts typically reverse that role, either having the teacher in the demonstrating role (almost as a form of performance art, especially in arts with complicated many-step techniques or intricate submission holds) or abandon that dichotamy to focus on sport:
- Daitō-ryū Aiki-jūjutsu, a Meiji-era form of yawara, contains 118 'basic' jūjutsu techniques and then adds 53 aiki-no-jutsu kata, 36 advanced or hiden techniques, and a self-defense curriculum of 84 waza. Later additions to its curriculum include so-called menkyo-kaiden kata.
- Daitō-ryū Takumakai maintains a curriculum of around 500 techniques recorded in their sōden record of teachings of two of its early teachers, Morihei Ueshiba and Sokaku Takeda.
- Modern Sumo, albeit ritualized grappling, has traditionally 48 basic techniques and today 82 possible winning techniques.
- Modern Jūdō, albeit a form of sport in the modern era, has 100 techniques encompassing throwing and grappling that are synthesized from Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū, Kitō-ryū and other sources.
Some of the above grappling styles have a limited curriculum, while others that include a variety of weapons practices (such as the different lines of Yōshin-ryū and Takenouchi-ryū) wind up with much larger set of teachings than those listed as a result, while other such as Sōsuishi-ryū teach grappling, iai and kenjutsu utilizing a smaller number of teachings. This is similar to fierce arts such as Jikishinkage-ryū that maintain a more compact curriculum to great effect.
In the case of Japanese jūjutsu, many traditions died out as Japan modernized and Kodōkan Judō became a standard part of the Japanese educational system. Many jūjutsu dōjō wound up teaching a standard Judō currciulum alongside their older kata.
Interest in grappling and throwing was not limited to Japan, although those are possibly the best known examples in the west. In China, qinna is an important part of many martial traditions:
Along with Fujian White Crane, styles such as Northern Eagle Claw (Ying Jow Pai) and Tiger Claw (Fu Jow Pai) have qinna as their martial focus and tend to rely on these advanced techniques.
For example, Eagle Claw contains a set of 108 qinna teachings. In addition, internal martial arts styles such as Bagua, Taiji and Xingyi incorporate various grappling and throwing methods into their curricula.
Shuāijiāo or Chinese jacket wrestling was popular among Manchu warrior caste members in Qing Dynasty China. Yang Chengfu of Taiji Quan fame was a firearms instructor to the guard of King Duan and interacted with the palace wrestling corps during his tenure. Contemporary Shuāijiāo was codified in 1917 and taught in schools from 1928 — I don't think this is accidental, given the popularity of Judō in Japan at that time. Modern Shuāijiāo may have borrowed from or been influenced by Judō in terms of its rules and methods as it standardized.
However,
there are several forms of traditional Chinese wrestling that differed in emphasis by geographical region.
Shangxi wresting is said to date from the Song Dynasty and Mongolian methods were practiced especially
in the eastern regions. Beijing wrestling was heavily influenced by Manchu buku methods taught as
part of the Manchu Imperial
Guard Shan Pu Ying (
Arts like Jikishinkage-ryū were said to contain methods of yawara but lost those teachings during the Edo period — famous masters taught at the Kobusho academy of the Tokugawa, where Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū was the jūjutsu style favored. Some masters cross-trained in Yōshin-ryū and also learned spear methods related to Shinkage-ryū such as Hozoin-ryū. By the late Edo there was already quite a bit of specialization in martial traditions, especially those associated to elite shogunate academies or domain schools.
Jikishinkage-ryū,small sword or kodachi curriculum introduces teachings about power and stability at close range that are useful armed or unarmed.
Similarly, classical traditions that place an empahsis on engaging an armed attacker or providing an armed response with small or auxiliary weapons or in batto, deploying a traditional katana, can develop their practitioners to the point where they are formidable at close range.
The rise of popularity of sportive grappling has had a mixed effect on classical grappling — first potentially improving it as it provided a mechanism for repeated free practice and competitive matches and later altering it to be optimized to those supervised encounters within the context of sport. Just because an art has changed to emphasize sport, does not make it less effective in some way than its antecedents, especially if modern fitness methods improve the competitive athletes far beyond levels martial arts hobbyists might have and greater time is spent training in preparation for competition.
However, with the deprioritization of traditional kata, some of the mindset (e.g., zanshin) needed for armed combat can indeed be lost. Strategy can be optimized to the point where it becomes nonsensical in a civilian self-defense scenario (let alone a military environment). Familiarity with weapons practices (deployment, application, retention, avoidance) become lost to the point where we see very stylized attacks in Daitō-ryū and Aikidō using swords.
Meanwhile, modern mixed martial arts raise the level of fitness and training intensity today far beyond that found in the typical martial arts school of the 1980s and 1990s. Early competitions demonstrated the need for a complete approach to free sparring, including grappling and ground fighting, but then evolved over time to incorporate additional emphasis on pugilism once its athletes developed a common expertise with ground-based jūjutsu so that it was no longer a discriminator for one dominant school.
It is fair to say the quality of non contact sport martial arts has on average declined since the advance of mixed martial arts. First, there is a smaller population to draw from as the energy and excitement of contemporary MMA draws interested youth who are willing to push themselves to higher levels of skill. The remaining population interested in traditional martial arts has thus aged — the average age in an Aikidō dōjō might be 50, even given that art's accessibility. In the classical koryū community, small groups might struggle to even train once a week due to other commitments and a limited number of potential training partners.
Traditional arts that restrict teachings (what level person can teach new people kata, who is allowed to work on advanced kata) and teach in a distance-learning seminar or gasshuku format are at a further disadvantage, potentially collecting a larger number of practitioners as a result of a federated model, but then slowing down their progress with infrequent access to instructors, limited access to information (training video, coaching, feedback, progressive testing if they are not allowed to spar on their own) and limited opportunities to train (if upper level teachings can only be done in private, without junior students present and only done with people of a certain level that might train together only once or twice a year).
Compounded is the case of arts such as those listed above that maintain a large curriculum that has been agglomerated over time around what was once a vibrant and concentrated practice. When you cannot get mentorship often enough and you are attempting to wield a very large curriculum, things will be even more difficult — not just for the student but also the teacher, whose attention is limited.
These are substantial challenges. I appreciate very much that in the kenjutsu I focus on Jikishinkage-ryū, while quite small in its number of practitioners, has at least already gone through its near total collapse and has preserved a set of kata that are limited in number (5 sets of teachings that contain possibly only 33 kata in total) and also well documented due to the efforts of Yamada Jirokichi and others.
Attempting to record variations of teachings (henka) as core teachings in an effort to have a larger curriculum that then must be maintained can disturb the learning process for principle-based martial arts. This seems to me to be the case in Daitō-ryū and other jūjutsu styles with very large curriculum. Maybe the vast number of kata are designed to stop people from learning the core principles of the art, if they were considered upper-level teachings, as opposed to being examples that facilitate the process. Kata as a means of social control.
Stress testing is important, whether it be sparring (with my Jiki students when I am able to meet with them, with students of other ryū in the past, or in formal tournaments such as those held in the HEMA community) or interacting with other martial artists (as I did at a kagami biraki in Seattle a few years ago and in Maryland many years ago when people from a variety of backgrounds all did Judō randori together). The randomness of those encounters and the feedback they provide are very useful to people like myself who train in older approaches that seem divorced from modern combat sport.
Mindsets matter. Arts have changed over time and modernization can very well be improvement but preservation needs to be looked at carefully. Given the size of traditional yawara curricula in the past, we need to remember they evolved largely during an extended period of peace during Edo Japan, inforced by a body politic consisting of strict military dictatorship. Novel combative insights in unscripted environments for many koryū may never have happened in the first place.
All kobudo and budo organizations today, as hobbies, fulfill primarily a social need for their practitioners. ryūha, even in Edo period, were largely social organizations. They maintained formalized mock combative practices that preserved portions of combative knowledge inherited from the past. As the practice of dueling fell out of favor, these traditions were not truly tested and in all cases, military application of Japanese martial traditions largely ended in 1615. Duels happened during the Edo period, but were regulated and inter school matches were initially more common in grappling arts that became popular in the mid 19th century. This led to the advent of Jūdō and at the same time we see the rise of shinai gekkō matches leading to Kendo. It is not as if the martial artists of that time period from 1600 to 1868 felt their arts too deadly to test against others. On the contrary, they were eager to do so and point systems, shinai and bogu enabled that process within the strictures of Tokugawa jurisprudence.
The contemporary soke and shihanke systems are genealogical or bureaucratic means, respectively, of establishing social order. The kata pattern system has then become a mechanism for maintaining social order once it is established. Most arts today, despite talk of licensure, are not set up to bring people through a training evolution and then send them on their way to be independent. Once you are in a group, you are generally in it for life if you are not sidelined due to injury or expelled for some reason — there is no strong social or economic advantage to actually graduating students.
Some cautions, beyond finding someone who can describe simply how they trained, where they learned, from a person who was known to have existed and who was known (even if not liked) by third parties:
- Teachers can improve over time and it is okay for kata and waza to change over time as their understanding and skill increase, but we should not take teachers at their word when they describe what they are presenting is always being wholly unchanged from the past.
- It is a weakness of a tradition if there are so many patterns of practice that senior teachers cannot keep track of them or rarely practice important portions of the full curriculum.
- If a teacher has so many students he cannot teach in the traditional uchi/shi paradigm we are used to in older arts, and is teaching much more similarly to how arts like Aikidō, Jūdō and Daitō-ryū are taught today then regardless of the art's genealogy, it has become a contemporary martial practice.
- Free practice should be part of all martial traditions — the extent to which varies between lineage. This can take many forms, but solely kata-based practices that are conducted without stress testing are no longer being maintained as active martial traditions.
These factors are compounded in the modern seminar format, with only limited interaction with senior teachers who have the full kabbalah of an art, who through their skill or reputation attract a very large number of students.
The shihanke and soke social constructs are designed in part to ameliorate some of these hazards and functioned to do so during the Edo period despite most martial traditions disappearing over time. But they also can introduce their own limitations, including a lack of free practice, increase of social or financial obligation and corruption of advancement based on factors other than through a display of skill at arms or proficiency at instruction. In that way, the main line of tradition of an art, or the one that preserves the largest curriculum, may often not be the most robust.
A collected set of works on Shinkage-ryū heihō is available as a book: The Truth of the Calm Spirit: The practice of Shinkage-ryū Heihō as Taoist Internal Alchemy, 2025.
