Asociated jūjutsu to Shinkage-ryū

In our discussion of the Kōbusho we saw Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū and Kitō-ryū taught alongside Jikishinkage-ryū and other bakufu kenjutsu. What about other lines of Shinkage-ryū?

Owari’s jūjutsu was Seigō-ryū (制剛流). It occupied the same domain-school role that Yōshin-ryū and Kitō-ryū held at the Kōbusho, but it got there much earlier and bound itself more tightly to the sword line of the Owari line of Shinkage-ryu.

Seigō-ryū is a comprehensive grappling tradition — jū/yawara, torite, kogusoku, kumiuchi, iai, and rope technique, founded by Mizuhaya Chōzaemon Nobumasa, who by tradition received the grappling from a monk named Seigō at Mt. Kōya.

Its Owari footing is old and official: Mizuhaya’s pupil Kajiwara Genzaemon Naokage became the Owari domain’s jūjutsu instructor (jūjutsu shihan-yaku), and from then Seigō-ryū spread with Owari as its center, the transmission into domain service dating to the first lord Tokugawa Yoshinao’s era.¹

It appears that while topics relating to kogusoku are taught to this day in the Owari line of Shinkage-ryū, the grappling parent art (the Kajiwara domain line of Seigō-ryū) is not part of its curriculum under that name.

The iai/battō branch of Seigō-ryū was pulled into the Yagyū curriculum through the Nagaoka family, the Yagyū house’s hereditary heihō assistants — Nagaoka Fusahide mastered the Seigō-ryū battō and served as heihō adjutant, his successor Fusanari (Tōrei) perfected it, and it was then refined by Yagyū Genshū and Genchō along Shinkage principles into “Yagyū Seigō-ryū.” That’s the 制剛流抜刀 that modern Owari Yagyū people carry beside the Shinkage tachi.

The Yagyū line is credited with producing the jūjutsu schools Kitō-ryū, Yagyū Shingan-ryū, and Oguri-ryū to various levels of influence. Kitō-ryū isn’t a separate stream from the Yagyū sphere of martial arts — its founders Fukuno Masakatsu and Ibaraki Toshifusa were both connected to Yagyū Shinkage-ryū and the Yagyū house, Ibaraki having entered Yagyū service and named his art “Ran,” which Takuan turned into “Ran Kitō-ryū.”

Kōbusho

The Edo/Kōbusho model of the Odani line of Jikishinkage-ryu sat in combined institutionally separate lineages: Odani’s kenjutsu plus Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū and Kitō-ryuha jūjutsu, together in one bakufu training hall.

Owari

Owari did the opposite: a single domain jūjutsu (Seigō), in service since the founding generation, partly absorbed into the sword school’s own curriculum rather than run alongside it.

Kurume

Katōda is Kurume. Katōda Shinkage-ryū descends from Katōda Shinsaku, a pupil of Nakamura Gonnai of Mujūshin Kenryū, who was invited to Kurume domain in 1716 and named his line “Shinkage-ryū”; the Katōda then became one of Kurume’s hereditary kenjutsu instructor houses and the line spread through northern Kyūshū. Its best-known figure is the ninth head, Katōda Heihachirō (1808–1875), the prolific dueller and author of the Katōta Diary, and that is also where Matsuzaki Namishirō sits as one of the dozen men Heihachirō granted advanced licence.

Katōda did pair an auxiliary art, but not grappling: after Heihachirō’s death his son Daisuke taught Katōda Shinkage-ryū swordsmanship together with Yōshin-ryū naginata and kusarigama.

In Kurume, there were lines of jūjutsu as one might expect.

Hisatomi Tetsutarō (久冨鉄太郎) was a famous Kurume-domain man who from childhood studied Shibukawa-ryū (渋川流) jūjutsu under the seventh-generation Shibukawa Bangorō Hidezane (渋川伴五郎英実) for some twenty-seven years, and in 1854 set out to test his randori against teachers of other schools. He later mattered nationally — in the Meiji period he became a Keishichō jūjutsu instructor and helped found its jūjutsu office, drawing on Shibukawa-ryū and several other schools to frame the Keishichō kenpō forms. In an 1859 bout against two Tenjin Shin’yō-ryū men, Hisatomi appears as a disciple of Shimosaka Gorōbei (下坂五郎兵衛) of Kurume domain’s Ryōi Shintō-ryū (良移心頭流).

Hisatomi’s randori tour led him, among others, to Totsuka Hikosuke of Numazu’s Yōshin-ryū, whom he entered under, and Aizawa Katsuyuki (藍沢勝之) — Totsuka’s disciple — recorded Hisatomi as a regular Totsuka-ha attendant in his Rentai gokeihō (練体五形法).

Aizawa visited the Odani-dōjō: mid-Bakumatsu jūjutsu cross-training ran through a tightly networked dueling circuit, so a Kurume swordsman’s grappling wasn’t necessarily confined to his own domain’s house.

Kumamoto

Hikida’s line is the Higo (Kumamoto) one: the Hikida-derived Shinkage transmission reached Kumamoto through Ueno Sōma-no-suke, then split into the five instructor houses of Wada, Yokota, Hayami, Tonami and Hayashi, with the Wada line surviving. In the Hosokawa domain this was simply called “Shinkage-ryū,” reserving “Yagyū-ryū” for the Yagyū-derived line.

The Hikida lineage mostly transmitted swordsmanship, with spear and naginata fame attaching only to the Inota branch of the art. Neither Hikita or Katōda Shinkage-ryū was a sword-plus-jūjutsu package the way Owari Yagyū carried Seigō-ryū.

Kumamoto’s jūjutsu was instead a wholly separate cluster of dedicated grappling houses. The domain recognized the “three jūjutsu dōjō of Higo”: Shiten-ryū kumiuchi at the Hoshino dōjō, Takeuchi Santō-ryū jūjutsu at the Yano dōjō, and Kishin-ryū taijutsu at the Eguchi dōjō, whose masters served as the domain’s jūjutsu instructors.²

Their roots have nothing to do with Shinkage swordsmanship — Shiten-ryū’s founder Narita Seibei (1638–1718) came out of Toda-ryū iai and kenjutsu and devised his kumiuchi method from there before entering Hosokawa service.

Beyond the three, the Kumamoto grappling roster ran wider still: when Hoshino Kumon consolidated the domain’s surviving jūjutsu in 1902 into the unified Higo-ryū taijutsu, the participating lines were Shiten-ryū kumiuchi, Takeuchi Santō-ryū, Kishin-ryū taijutsu, Yōshin-ryū jūjutsu, Tenka-musō-ryū torite, and Shioda-ryū kogusoku — and notably, the Yōshin-ryū jūjutsu there was held by the Santō house paired with Niten Ichi-ryū swordsmanship, not with either Shinkage line.

The Kyūshū milieu looks to be closer to Edo than Owari: distinct traditions associated by being favored by the government and taught along-side each other, but distinct from one another.

Sagara-han

Taisha-ryū is the one Kyūshū Shinkage line where the grappling is inside the school rather than something a swordsman went elsewhere for.

Marume Kurando-no-suke Nagayoshi, the founder, was a retainer of the Sagara clan that held southern Higo; he became Kamiizumi Nobutsuna’s pupil, spread Shinkage-ryū across Kyūshū, and then worked his own modifications into what became Taisha-ryū, serving the Sagara as their fencing instructor. So the base is Hitoyoshi domain (人吉藩), the Sagara house, in the Kuma region of southern Higo. This wasthe part of Higo the Hosokawa/Kumamoto domain did not hold, so this is institutionally distinct from the Hikida-line of Shinkage practice.

The surviving line is the one transmitted in Hitoyoshi, guarded from the sixth generation by the Oda family, with the headquarters dōjō now in Yatsushiro. From there it spread widely: in the Edo period it flourished in Hitoyoshi and across Hizen, and in Bakumatsu Saga the Taisha-ryū Kawara-kōji dōjō and the Jikishinkage-ryū Mizugae dōjō split the field so evenly that people spoke of “Jikishinkage-ryū in the east, Taisha-ryū in the west,” with the tenth Saga lord Nabeshima Naomasa himself enrolling.

In Saga, Taisha-ryū was the western counterweight to Jikishinkage influence. It also fed Satsuma: Tōgō Shigemasa, founder of Jigen-ryū, was a Taisha-ryū adept before combining it with Tenshinshō Jigen-ryū.

Taisha-ryū folds taijutsu — kicks, eye-attacks, joint locks — into the swordsmanship itself. Its okuden kumitachi are said to be packed with jūjutsu and kenpō strikes, kicks, and throws to a degree seen in no other school, and the dōjō curriculum lists torite and kumiuchi alongside the sword. The school is routinely described as effectively a comprehensive combat art rather than a pure kenjutsu.

Its unarmed element is traditionally credited to Chinese boxing via Denrinbō Raikei (伝林坊頼慶), a Ming-born martial artist who eventually became a senior Taisha-ryū disciple after first dueling Marume Nagayoshi’s disciple Oda Rokuemon Yūka at Nagasaki and losing, thus becoming Marume’s student. In Kan’ei 12 (1635) Denrinbō granted an inka to Nagata Morimasa, then became a Shugendō ascetic at Mt. Iwaya in Hizen’s Fujitsu district.

References

End Notes