Register record
Identity & authority
- Attestation
- corroboration: —
Names
| type | kanji | romaji | reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| myoji | Kagawa | ||
| tsusho | Zenjirō |
Dates
- Born
- (1849)
- Died
- (1921)
Kagawa Zenjirō 1 (香川善治郎 (opens in a new tab), c. 1849–1921) was the second-generation head of Yamaoka Tesshū’s Mutō-ryū (無刀流) and the man who carried that Zen-sword line into the modern educational-kendō system. He is the figure against whom Matsuzaki Namishirō fought his very last recorded match, at the 1895 Butokukai.2
Succeeding Yamaoka as second-generation head of Ittō Shōden Mutō-ryū, Kagawa went on to hold the Dai Nippon Butokukai’s kendō hanshi title. He carried Mutō-ryū into the modern system as an instructor at the Hiroshima Higher Normal School kendō club — one of the principal training grounds for the nation’s kendō teachers — helping establish Mutō-ryū kendō there. He died on 7 March 1921, at seventy-two (Hori Shōhei (堀正平) 1934; Yokoyama Kendō (横山健堂) 1943).
End Notes
-
We could not fully confirm his given name reading (Zenjirō) and imina. ↩
-
That Matsuzaki’s final match was against the second-generation Mutō-ryū head is a fitting coda to his late turn toward Yamaoka’s swordsmanship; the succession itself (Yamaoka → Kagawa) should be corroborated from the Mutō-ryū line’s own records rather than the Matsuzaki literature. (Hori Shōhei (堀正平) 1934) ↩
