Ibaraki area Jikishinkage-ryū

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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1908 Genbukan Photo Showing Tatsusaburo Nakayama

Hakomori Yosaburō (箱守与三郎祐郷; the reading of the imina is not recorded) is the Jikishinkage-ryū teacher to whom Matsuoka Katsunosuke (松岡克之助) sent Nakayama Tatsusaburō (中山辰三郎).¹

Hakomori was a man of Sekidate, Kawachi-mura, Makabe-gun — Matsuoka had settled in Ueno-mura, the same Makabe-gun. His imina is given as 祐鄕 (名は祐鄕と稱す). His birth falls around 1837–38 (sixty-seven in 1904, twenty-five or six in the early 1860s). From boyhood he loved gekken; at fourteen or fifteen he entered the school of a Kimura (木村) at Sakuya (作谷), four ri from Sekidate, and trained there daily for seven or eight years, through hard cold and fierce heat, until he mastered the innermost secrets of swordsmanship.

In the Bunkyū years (c. 1863), aged twenty-five or six, he opened a gekken dōjō at Sekidate and drew many followers. In Meiji 37 (1904), at sixty-seven, he founded a new gekken hall at Shimotsuma, named it the Genbukan (元武舘), served as its head, brought in noted swordsmen, and taught the youth of the three districts of Makabe, Tsukuba and Yūki for eight years. He then handed the Genbukan, building and equipment, to Nakayama — his shihan-dai — and retired to a quiet life.²

Hakomori trained under the Kimura family of sword teachers of Sakuya, who are themselves well attested in the same 1915 dictionary (p. 396). Kimura Yatayū (木村彌太夫), of Sakuya, Sakuoka-mura, Tsukuba-gun, was born Kaei 2 (1849). His family, it says, served for generations as hereditary kenjutsu teachers (家世々劒道[教]師を勤め) and as village heads; they descend from Taira Shigemoto, an ancestor having changed the surname to Kimura, and — the key line — by the generation of his father, Kimura Takanobu (高信), the family’s swordsmanship greatly flourished. Yatayū himself carried the martial teaching on after the Restoration, when the arts were in decline. Given the dates of the two men’s lives, Hakomori’s teacher was the father, Kimura Takanobu, in whose generation the family sword “greatly flourished” — with Yatayū (imina Takatoshi, sharing the 高 character) the next-generation continuator.

This is a local Ibaraki line of Jikishinkage-ryū, and the 1915 work confirms a Jikishinkage-family sword world in the province: it records Shinkage-ryū (眞影流) — the standard regional name for the Kashima-shinden line — held at Kashima and licensed at the Tsuchiura Seikensha under Inō Naoyoshi.

The Kinsei Tsuchiura Shōshi (1906) gives the Tsuchiura teaching succession explicitly, and it is a Jikishinkage-ryū succession: it recounts changing the jōdan sword to a seigan guard — a hallmark of the Odani-ha reform of Jikishinkage-ryū — then names the transmitters in order:

1. Yokokawa Shichirō Hiroharu
2. Mori Yōzō
3. Shimada Toranosuke (opens in a new tab)
4. Sasa Hayata, a domain samurai who was an Odani disciple
5. Tōyama Kunizō, who trained at Kasama and returned
6. Inō Naoyoshi

Yokokawa Shichirō (横川七郎) Hiroharu was among the distinguished products of the Jikishinkage line, in the specific company of Tokunō Sekishirō and as one of the kōtei (高弟; senior disciples) of Odani Seiichirō.³ He was a retainer (家来) of the Odani house under Odani Hikoshirō (男谷彦四郎).

So the Tsuchiura line the Ibaraki jinmei jisho labeled Shinkage-ryū is, in a source dedicated to Tsuchiura’s own history, the Odani-ha of Jikishinkage-ryū — carried in by a named Odani-gate man and running down to Inō Naoyoshi. The Niihari-gun Annai (1911) fixes the institution around him: the Seikensha, founded 1882 by Sasa Masaō, Shin Isao, Torii Masatake, Kihara Sasuke and Inō Naoyoshi, with Inō as its head. The 1915 dictionary shows it issuing licenses:

1. Shibasaki Tokuzō (柴崎德藏) of Ishikawa, Sekikawa-mura, Niihari-gun, entered the Seikensha (靖献社) — the gekken society founded by former Tsuchiura-domain samurai — learned there, and received a Shinkage-ryū license from its head, Inō Naoyoshi (稻生尙義).
2. The head of the Tomita house of Tokitsue, born Kaei 5 (1852), “mastered the inner secrets of Shinkage-ryū in the sword” (劍は眞影流奥祕を極め), transmitted Hasegawa-ryū in gunnery, and took a license in archery under the Itō line.

That is a documented Odani-ha Jikishinkage-ryū house with a named Edo-line transmitter in Ibaraki. Jikishinkage-ryū is written with different kanji at times according to region, and some Ibaraki groups appear to have used 眞.

End Notes