Mitsuhashi Torazō [三橋虎蔵]

Register record

Identity & authority

Disambiguation

Mitsuhashi Torazō (三橋虎蔵), Odani-line fellow disciple of Sakakibara — NOT Mitsuhashi Kan'ichirō (三橋鑑一郎).

Attestation

corroboration: —

Names

type	kanji	romaji	reading
myoji		Mitsuhashi
tsusho		Torazō

Mitsuhashi Torazō (三橋虎蔵) was a Shingyōtō-ryū swordsman and a nephew of Iba Gunbei Hidenari. The connection is genealogically pointed: the eighth Iba head, Hidenari, was himself born into the Mitsuhashi (三橋) house — a bakufu accounting family — before being adopted into the Iba line, so Torazō belonged to the headmaster’s natal family. Apart from his school, his kinship to the Iba house and his Kōbusho appointment (in the ko-jūnin, 小十人, unit under Miyazaki Jirōdayū), the sources provide little further detail.

Mitsuhashi Torazō also appears in Odani’s disciple list, yet on the 1856 Kōbusho roster he is registered under Shingyōtō-ryū (心形刀流), which suggests he was better known for his Shingyōtō-ryū.

The institutional history of the academy sharpens both points. It makes Torazō and Minato Nobuhachirō sons of Hidenari’s elder brother, sent into Kōbusho service together with Sōtarō Hidetoshi when Hidenari declined the summons himself; and it has Torazō studying in the school of Iba Gunbei Hidenari, “renowned as a master of Shingyōtō-ryū,” which is the likeliest reason the roster files him under that school rather than under Jikishinkage-ryū.¹

Two episodes from the same source show how visible he was. He was drawn as Imai Shirō Kanehira in the print series Taihei eiyū kagami (泰平英雄鏡), which cast Kōbusho men as warriors of the Genpei wars — the set of five, which also portrayed Odani Seiichirō (opens in a new tab), Matsudaira Chikaranosuke, Honda Tetsujirō and Sakakibara Kenkichi (opens in a new tab), sold eight hundred sheets. And on the seventeenth of the fifth month (the source gives no year) he fought Ikeda Shinnosuke, a ryōban retainer of five hundred koku living at Honjo Waregesui. Ikeda failed to receive the thrust, took it through the throat and collapsed on the spot; attended by the supervising staff, he died in the palanquin carrying him home. The chronicler calls the bout the extreme of tragedy, while allowing that it testifies to the ferocity of spirit in which the academy’s men trained.