Kajikawa Yoshimasa

11 July 2026

Kajikawa Yoshimasa (梶川義正) was one of the three swordsmen first hired into the Keishichō gekken sewakari (撃剣世話掛) in 1879, with Ueda Umanosuke and Henmi Sōsuke. His school was Ono-ha Ittō-ryū (小野派一刀流) — not the Kyōshin Meichi-ryū of the two men he was recruited alongside — a point worth holding, since the first trio is often taken as a single Shigakukan draft.1

Little of his life beyond the police service is recovered. He was treated at the Keishichō as being of special rank with Ueda and Henmi, and — being markedly the eldest of the group — served as the senior man who presided over and adjudicated matches. He was one of the five sewakari (with Ueda, Henmi, Tokunō Sekishirō, and Shingai Tadaatsu) who framed the Keishi-ryū wooden-sword forms (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.; Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.). His birth and death years have not been recovered in the sources used here.

Open Questions

  • No birth or death dates surfaced; a domain register or the police histories may supply them, and would raise this from a roster note to a dated entry.
  • His domain of origin and how an Ono-ha Ittō-ryū man came to be recruited alongside the Shigakukan figures are both undocumented in the sources used.

References

secondary

Japanese Wikipedia. n.d. Keishi-ryū (警視流). Wikipedia. Accessed July 3, 2026. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/警視流. Tertiary; the clearest summary of the Keishi-ryū kata composition and its framing as a Nihon Kendō Kata precursor. Verify the ten source ryūha individually against a primary kata listing.
Also cited in: Kawaji Toshiyoshi, The Police Swordsmanship of the Keihōkan and Keishichō, Henmi Sōsuke, Tokunō Sekishirō, Ueda Umanosuke, Shibata Emori
Japanese Wikipedia. n.d. Kajikawa Yoshimasa (梶川義正). Wikipedia. Accessed July 11, 2026. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/梶川義正. Tertiary and brief; gives the Ono-ha Ittō-ryū school, the 1879 first-hire with Ueda and Henmi, the special-rank treatment, and his role as senior match-examiner on account of age. No dates.

End Notes

  1. The Ono-ha Ittō-ryū attribution is from Kajikawa’s own biographical article; the school-mixing of the 1879 trio (Ono-ha Ittō-ryū, Kyōshin Meichi-ryū, and — through Henmi — Tatsumi-ryū) is itself the point the composite Keishi-ryū was built to resolve. (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.) ↩