Shibata Emori (柴田衛守, 1849–1925) was the fifteenth sōke of Kurama-ryū (鞍馬流), a Keishichō gekken instructor of forty-seven years’ service, and — before Nakayama Hakudō — its chief kendō instructor; his Kurama-ryū form entered the Keishi-ryū composite, which places him beside Henmi and the Shigakukan men as a swordsman whose own school fed the police kata.1
Born the eldest son of the Shibata house, direct retainers of the shogun from Mikawa, at Yotsuya Nakadono-chō in Edo, he learned Honshin Kyōchi-ryū (本心鏡知流) spearmanship from his father Masao, a bakufu sōjutsu instructor. At eight he entered the Kurama-ryū of its fourteenth head Kaneko Sukesaburō, trained also under the son Kumaichirō, and took full transmission at eighteen; he then studied Chūya-ha Ittō-ryū (忠也派一刀流, a sub-line of Ono-ha Ittō-ryū) under Mamiya Tetsujirō, a former Kōbusho instructor, and was in time licensed in it, adding jūjutsu and rope-binding. In the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion he served as an army nursing chief (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.; Shūseikan, n.d.).
In December 1879 he took a gekken-sewakari post at the Keishichō’s Yotsuya station and opened a dōjō at Yotsuya Tansu-machi, which Katsu Kaishū named the Shūseikan (習成館) and for which he wrote the plaque. Around 1886 his Kurama-ryū form henka (変化) was adopted into the Keishi-ryū wooden-sword kata (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.; Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.). He served the metropolitan force for forty-seven years, rising to chief kendō instructor — the post’s holder immediately before Nakayama Hakudō — and in 1915 received the kendō hanshi title from the Dai Nippon Butokukai. He is remembered as the reviver of Kurama-ryū. He died in 1925 at seventy-six; the headship passed to his son Susumu as sixteenth sōke, and the Shūseikan line continues.2
Open Questions
- His given name is read Emori (えもり); guard against the mis-reading “Morimori,” which the characters 衛守 can invite.
- The exact date his Kurama-ryū henka was fixed into the Keishi-ryū, as against the 1886 promulgation of the composite as a whole, is given only approximately and could be sharpened from the police histories.
References
secondary
End Notes
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The entry rests on the Japanese Wikipedia article for Shibata and the Shūseikan dōjō’s own history page, which agree on the Kurama-ryū headship, the forty-seven-year Keishichō service, the chief-instructorship before Nakayama, and the 1915 hanshi. His third-grade placement in the 1888 register (rank of assistant inspector) sits below Tokunō and Mitsuhashi but within the same senior body. (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.; Shūseikan, n.d.) ↩
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That a Kurama-ryū form was taken into the Keishi-ryū is the detail that lifts Shibata above a roster name: like Tatsumi-ryū through Henmi and Kyōshin Meichi-ryū through the Shigakukan men, his school is one of the identifiable strands in the police composite, and his tenure as chief instructor before Nakayama Hakudō marks the institutional hand-off from the Meiji sewakari generation to the Taishō–Shōwa kendō establishment. (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.) ↩
