Hakomori Yosaburo

Hakomori Yosaburō Suokuni (箱守与三郎祐郷) is an Ibaraki area Jikishinkage-ryū teacher to whom Matsuoka Katsunosuke referred Nakayama Tatsusaburō for further instruction.

Basic details on Hakomori Yosaburō are found in the 1915 work 茨城人名辞書いはらき新聞社 編いはらき新聞社 the (Taishō 4) Ibaraki prefectural biographical dictionary — a kana-ordered who’s-who of the province, each entry giving native place, birth, career, and tax standing (NDL 950464):

• Hakomori Yosaburō 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 followed by an OCR-lost character, consistent with 祐郷.
• 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 (~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 his pupil Nakayama (中山行義) and retired to a quiet life.

Hakomori trained under the Kimura family of sword teachers from Sakya. The Kimura family of Sakuya is also well-attested in the local biography from 1915 (p 396):

• Kimura Yatayū (木村彌太夫), of Sakuya, Sakuoka-mura, Tsukuba-gun, 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 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.

Hakomori’s teacher based on the dates of the mens’ lives 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. The 1915 biographical work confirms a local Jikishinkage-family sword world in the province: it records 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 JSKR — then names the transmitters in order:

1. Yokogawa Shichirō Hiroharu
2. He was followed by one Mori Yōzō
3. Shimada Toranosuke
4. Sasa Hayata a domain samurai who was an Odani disciple
5. Tōyama Kunizō, who trained at Kasama and returned
6. Inō Naoyoshi

Yokogawa Shichirō (横川七郎) Hiroharu was among the distinguished products of the Jikishinkage line, in the specific company of Tokuno Sekishirō and — the operative pairing — as one of the 高弟 (senior disciples) of Odani Seiichirō.¹ He was a retainer (家来) of the Odani house under Odani Hikoshirō (男谷彦四郎).

The Tsuchiura line the Ibaraki Jinmei Jisho labeled “眞影流” is, in a source dedicated to Tsuchiura’s own history, the Odani-ha of Jikishinkage-ryū — carried in by a named Odani-gate man, Yokogawa Hiroharu, and running down to Inō Naoyoshi. And 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.

This is a documented Odani-ha Jikishinkage-ryū house with a named Edo-line transmitter behind it. Having a strong-local Jikishinkage presence would explain why Matsuoka sends Nakayama where he did. The Ibaraki Jinmei Jisho (茨城人名辞書), compiled and published by the Ibaraki Shimbun-sha in 1915 notes:

1. Shibasaki Tokuzō (柴崎德藏) of Ishikawa, Sekikawa-mura, Niihari-gun. He entered the Seikensha (靖献社), the gekken society founded by former Tsuchiura-domain samurai, learned there, and received a 眞影流 license from its head, Inō Naoyoshi (稻生尙義).
2. The head of the Tomita house of Tokitsue, whose ancestor Tomita Uneme-no-shō settled there fifty generations back, born Kaei 5 (1852). Broadly accomplished, he “mastered the inner secrets of 眞影流 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.

The Tsuchiura Seikensha is an institutional node, and Inō Naoyoshi its licensing head for a local line of Jikishinkage-ryū (眞影流) in the area Matsuoka Katsunosuke lived. Jikishinkage-ryū is written with different kanji at times, based on geographical area. Some Ibaraki area groups seem to have used 眞.