With the Budō Senmon Gakkō — the “Busen” — the centre of gravity of kendō instruction passed from the Keishichō, where the sewakari had gathered the sword schools in the 1880s, to a formal academy that trained the teachers of the next generation. Its institutional founding, name-changes, and place in the Butokukai are set out in the Butokukai section; what follows is the school’s own chronology and the generation it produced.
Please also read Buden and Koshi (opens in a new tab) for an in-depth presentation by a kendō instructor and researcher.
Chronology
Drawn from the school’s own 1927 handbook, the ichiran (一覧) (Dai Nippon Butokukai Budō Senmon Gakkō 1927):
- 1905 (Meiji 38) — the Bujutsu Kyōin Yōseijo (武術教員養成所) is established in Kyoto, teaching kendō and jūdō with general subjects; Naitō Takaharu is its chief kendō professor.
- 1909 (Meiji 42) — an imperial endowment of ¥20,000 toward founding a proper school; the first graduates go out as budō teachers across the country.
- 1911 (Meiji 44) — the Yōseijo is abolished and reorganised as the short-lived Butoku Gakkō (武徳学校).
- 1912 (Meiji 45) — chartered under the Senmon Gakkō-rei as the Bujutsu Senmon Gakkō (武術専門学校).
- 1914 (Taishō 3) — graduates authorised for employment as gekken or jūjutsu teachers at normal and middle schools; a two-year research course added.
- 1919 (Taishō 8) — renamed the Budō Senmon Gakkō (武道専門学校) — a budō rather than a bujutsu school, in the same year the Butokukai unified kenjutsu and gekken under the name kendō.
- 1921 (Taishō 10) — graduates awarded the title budō gakushi (武道学士).
- 1946 (Shōwa 21) — the Butokukai is dissolved by order of the Occupation, and the school with it.
The interwar generation
The Busen is where the Hokushin Ittō-ryū cohort that had passed through Keishichō gekken — chiefly Naitō Takaharu — reproduced itself as a teaching lineage. Naitō served as chief kendō professor from the 1905 founding onward, and the first-term students who entered under him in 1906 included both of the men later reckoned among the “sword-sages of the Shōwa era”: Mochida Moriji and Saimura Gorō, each of whom would in 1957 receive one of the five kendō tenth dans ever awarded (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.; Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.). Mochida was further ranked one of the institute’s “three brave youths” (三勇士), with Hori Shōhei and Ōshima Jikita.
The through-line of the register’s arc closes here. The severe tachikiri culture of the Keishichō morning practice, the cross-school composite of the Keishi-ryū, and the standardised Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata of 1911 all fed into a single institution whose graduates became the kendō masters of the Taishō and early-Shōwa era — so that the “office, not license” logic traced from the Kōbusho through the police issued, finally, in a school that conferred a national qualification to teach.
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