Monna Tadashi is Naitō Takaharu’s counterpart: the second of the two Mito swordsmen whom Shimoe Hidetarō brought into the Keishichō and who then became a pillar of Butokukai kendō.
He trained at the Mito Tōbukan (東武館) under Ozawa Torakichi, and while Shimoe taught there in 1885–1887 became his student, later reputed to have inherited Shimoe’s Hokushin Ittō-ryū technique most fully (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.).
In 1887 (Meiji 20) Shimoe called him to Tokyo, secured his Keishichō post, and assigned him to the Tomioka-monzen station alongside himself and Naitō (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.). He served as a gekken sewakari and rose within the force’s kenjutsu establishment.
In 1911 (Meiji 44) he was named — with Naitō Takaharu, Ozawa Ichirō, and Sasaki Masayoshi, all Tōbukan men — to the committee that drafted the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata (大日本帝国剣道形), and is recorded among its chief drafting members (shusa-iin 主査委員) (Mito Tōbukan (水戸東武館), n.d.).1
He rose to the level of Dai Nippon Butokukai kendō hanshi; with Naitō he carried the Hokushin Ittō-ryū / Mito line into the leadership of late-Meiji-to-early-Shōwa kendō (Hokushin Ittō-ryū (北辰一刀流), n.d.).
Monna is thinly documented individually he appears in the sources as a member of the Tōbukan kata-committee group rather than in his own right, so his entry leans on the Tōbukan, Shimoe, and police-history materials.
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Kenshi247 is an excellent kendō online resource and has an essay on the Busen (opens in a new tab) ↩
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