Mochida Moriji

Mochida Moriji (持田盛二, 1885–1974) was, with Saimura Gorō, the most eminent of the interwar kendō masters formed at the Butokukai’s teacher-training school, and one of only five men ever awarded the tenth dan. He is remembered as one of the “sword-sages of the Shōwa era” (昭和の剣聖).¹

Born in Gunma (Seta-gun Shimokawabuchi-mura, now Maebashi), he learned Hōshin-ryū (法神流) from his father Mochida Zensaku, a licensed disciple of the school’s fourth-generation head Nei Yukio, who kept a dōjō at home. At seventeen he went to Tokyo for brief training at Nakayama Hakudō’s Yūshinkan (有信館) and Takano Sasaburō’s Meishinkan (明信館). When the Butokukai’s Gunma branch opened he became its first enrollee, and on the strong urging of the honbu professor Naitō Takaharu he entered the Bujutsu Kyōin Yōseijo (武術教員養成所), where he took up Hokushin Ittō-ryū (北辰一刀流) under Naitō. He passed the institute’s fourth-grade graduation standard early and left before the two-year term was out; there he was ranked one of the “three brave youths” (三勇士) alongside Hori Shōhei and Ōshima Jikita (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.).

He took the seirenshō (精錬証) at twenty-six, the kyōshi title at thirty-four, and the hanshi title at forty-two, and served in turn as kendō instructor to the Kyoto Prefectural Police, kendō master to the Chiba Prefectural Police, lecturer at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, and kendō master to the police bureau of the Korea Government-General; the biographical dictionaries add a spell as assistant professor at the Budō Senmon Gakkō itself (Nichigai Associates, n.d.). In 1929, while posted in Korea, he won the imperial-review tournament (天覧試合). Brought to the center thereafter, he taught at the Kōdansha Noma dōjō, the Metropolitan Police, the Imperial Palace Police, the Army Toyama School, and several universities and higher schools. He received the ninth dan in 1937 and, in 1957, the tenth dan — accepting only under the federation’s insistence, since predecessors had not held it. In 1964 he performed the Nihon Kendō Kata with Saimura Gorō as a demonstration at the Tokyo Olympics.²

Open Questions

• The exact year Mochida entered the Yōseijo is given variously (Meiji 40 / 1907 in some accounts); pin it against the Busen record, since the institute’s own 1905 founding date bears on which term he could have entered.
• His Hōshin-ryū (法神流) transmission — grade received from his father, and the school’s own lineage — is thinly documented here and worth a dedicated source.

References

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End Notes