Henmi Sōsuke

Henmi Sōsuke (逸見宗助, 1843(4)–1894)¹ was one of the first three swordsmen hired into the Keishichō gekken sewakari (撃剣世話掛) in 1879 and the man through whom Tatsumi-ryū (立身流) entered Meiji police swordsmanship. Yamaoka Tesshū is said to have judged that of the many swordsmen of the day, “only Henmi wields the true sword.”²

Born a samurai of the Sakura domain, he was the son of Henmi Nobutaka, seventeenth-generation head of Tatsumi-ryū, and trained in the family art — an old style fought with a leather-covered shinai. When the domain, following the spread of shinai-and-armour gekken in Edo, permitted other-school study in 1850 and invited Hokushin Ittō-ryū and Kyōshin Meichi-ryū teachers, Henmi received Kyōshin Meichi-ryū instruction under Ueda Umanosuke. In 1861 he went to Edo — first to the Hokushin Ittō-ryū of Chiba Eijirō, then to Momonoi Shunzō’s Shigakukan, where the grounding of his Tatsumi-ryū training carried him to the position of juku-head in under a year — before returning to serve his domain (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.).

After the Restoration he was working the Yachimata reclamation land when, in 1879, the Keishichō established the gekken sewakari; he was among the first three recruited, with Ueda Umanosuke and Kajikawa Yoshimasa. As one of the central figures of the metropolitan force he took part in compiling the Keishi-ryū swordsmanship, iai, and jūjutsu, and Tatsumi-ryū technique entered the composite — the wrist-lock throw (巻落) among the sword forms and the “four directions” (四方) among the iai (Meiji-jidai no denshō to Keishichō-ryū (明治時代の伝承と警視庁流), n.d.; Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.).³

In December 1884, when the Shiga governor Kotenda Yasusada brought a body of Kansai swordsmen to challenge the Keishichō and thirty-odd sewakari were beaten in succession by Takayama Minesaburō, it was Henmi who took the final stand, winning from his favoured upper stance with a wrist strike and saving the force’s honour. The Kurume master Matsuzaki Namishirō is separately recorded as having defeated him in an imperial-viewing match. He died in 1894.

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