Takahashi Deishū

An excerpt from my book From the Kōbusho to the Butokukai: Swordsmanship in Transition on 19th and 20th century Japanese swordsmanship.

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Takahashi Deishū (高橋泥舟, 1835–1903)

Takahashi Deishū (opens in a new tab) (高橋泥舟; 1835–1903, died at age 69; tsūshō Kenzaburō, imina Masaakira, gō first Ninsai then Deishū) was a bakumatsu spear master and calligrapher.

The Yamaoka family spear art was called Jitokuin-ryū (自得院流) sōjutsu, also recorded as Ninshin-ryū (忍心流). Deishū trained under his elder brother Seizan and was praised as reaching divine skill; he became a Kōbusho spear instructor at 22 (1856) and a founding shihan-yaku of the spear department.

Deishū’s “peerless / divine-skill” reputation was personal brilliance inside a tiny private line, and it reached the historical record through two channels that had nothing to do with a documented school: the Kōbusho, where as a founding spear shihan-yaku he effectively put the Yamaoka family art at the head of the academy’s spear instruction over the body of Hōzōin men, and the bakumatsu political stage, where he stands as one of the Bakumatsu no sanshū (幕末の三舟; the “Three Shū”).

Deishū performed a celebrated bout at the Kōbusho’s reopening when it relocated to Kanda Ogawamachi in early 1860, at an exhibition staged before Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi and Tairō Ii Naosuke. Deishū faced Sakakibara Kenkichi of Jikishinkage-ryū, Odani Nobutomo’s foremost pupil. By 1860 Odani was the elderly Kōbusho head, the “sword-saint” in his sixties, seated as a dignitary rather than fencing. That was left to Sakakibara and his co-disciples. According to Jikishinkage-ryū lore, Deishū first faced Ido Kinpei and beat him using Ido’s own signature leg-entanglement (ashigarami), which brought the house down; he then met Sakakibara — and lost, Sakakibara taking the sword-versus-spear match to general acclaim.

The Ido bout is told differently in the institutional history of the academy, and the difference is instructive. There, Takahashi took up his post on the twenty-seventh of the fourth month already “called the finest spear in the realm.” Ido Kinpei — who had been throwing the entire teaching staff with a foot-entanglement and answering every complaint by appealing to what decides a real fight — challenged him at once, on the reasoning that to beat the man called first in the realm was to become first in the realm oneself, and went in intending the same technique. Takahashi knew what was coming. After a crossing or two of the spears Ido prostrated himself and said he was much obliged, and it is related that the ashigarami was given up from that day. The school’s telling, in which Deishū beats Ido with Ido’s own technique, is the more dramatic; the period source has him simply forestalling it.¹

He was born on Tenpō 6/2/17 (15 March 1835) in Edo, the second son of the hatamoto Yamaoka Masanari, into a house distinguished for the Jitokuin-ryū (自得院流), also given as Ninshin-ryū (忍心流), spear. The family was a small-stipend bakufu line — he is described elsewhere as the second son of a poor minor official — so this was modest, not grand, samurai circumstance. His names shifted over a life, as was normal: his common/childhood name was Kenzaburō (謙三郎), his imina Masaakira (政晃), his azana Kanmō (寛猛) and his gō first Ninsai (忍歳) and only later Deishū (泥舟); after the Restoration he went by Seiichi (精一).

The “Takahashi” comes from an adoption: he succeeded on his mother’s side, becoming the adopted heir of Takahashi Kanetsugu. His spear, though, came from the Yamaoka side — he trained under his elder brother Yamaoka Seizan, the family’s prodigy, and was eventually reckoned to have reached “peerless in the realm,” divine-skill level. So a boy from a poor hatamoto house made his name on the spear alone.

The pivot of his early life — and what ties him to the rest of the Three Shū — was his brother’s death. Seizan died suddenly at twenty-seven (by the dramatic telling, entering the Sumida River while ill to defend his swimming teacher and succumbing to heart failure), and Deishū, who revered him, was said to have been so stricken he nearly took his own life to follow. With the Yamaoka sons all married out to other houses and only the sister Fusako left, it was Deishū — then still Kenzaburō — who arranged for his fellow spear-student Ono Tetsutarō to marry Fusako and be adopted as the Yamaoka heir; that student became Yamaoka Tesshū, and so Deishū was his brother-in-law. In the split that followed, Tesshū carried on the Yamaoka house name while Deishū kept the spear dōjō — which is how the family spear line stayed with him.

In 1863 he oversaw the Rōshi-gumi as rōshi-torishimari and was titled Ise-no-kami, and in 1866 he was made head (tōdori) of the newly created Yūgeki-tai while concurrently heading spear instruction for the unit. The Yūgeki-tai’s institutional head was Deishū, with Iba Sōtarō commanding in the field.

After Toba-Fushimi he urged Yoshinobu toward submission and guarded him at Kan’eiji, and when Katsu Kaishū chose him as envoy to Saigō, he declined out of concern for Yoshinobu and proposed his brother-in-law Yamaoka Tesshū go to Sunpu instead — the deferral that set up the Tesshū–Saigō talks behind the bloodless surrender. He is one of the Three Shū with Katsu and Tesshū; Katsu’s famous line was that Deishū “became Ise-no-kami on the strength of a single spear.”