Takano Sasaburō (高野佐三郎, 1862–1950) was one of the two principal architects of modern kendo. Born in Chichibu in Musashi province, he was trained from infancy in Nakanishi-ha Ittō-ryū (中西派一刀流) by his grandfather Takano Sakichirō, sword instructor to the Oshi domain, and at age five performed the school’s fifty-six kumitachi before the daimyō. A defeat at seventeen sent him to Tokyo, where he eventually studied under Yamaoka Tesshū.
Takano became a Metropolitan Police swordsman in 1886, counted among the police’s “three Saburō”. From there he built the modern art: invited to the Tokyo Higher Normal School in 1908, he taught there for more than thirty years, training the nation’s kendo teachers; he served as one of the five chief compilers of the standardized Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata (大日本帝国剣道形) in 1912, received the Butokukai’s kendō hanshi title in 1913, and published his classic textbook Kendō (剣道) in 1915.
Ranked beside Nakayama Hakudō (中山博道) as the supreme authority of early-Shōwa kendo, Takano was called the “sword-saint of the Shōwa era” and in the AJKF’s Gendai Kendō Hyakka-shin Takano named Matsuzaki the finest swordsman in Japan, said he had received his teachings, and singled out his seme — the pressing and breaking of the opponent’s spirit before the cut — as a swordsmanship of Zen depth.
Coming from the man who did more than almost anyone to shape modern kendo, that judgment is the primary reason Matsuzaki’s name and method survived into kendō circles today.
