Matsuoka Katsunosuke [松岡克之助]

Matsuoka Katsunosuke (松岡克之助, 1836–1898), founder of Shindō Yōshin-ryū (神道楊心流) jūjutsu, was the second son of a Kuroda-han (Fukuoka) physician.

The school’s records from before 1870 were lost to flood, so the account below rests on Fujiwara’s 1983 Shindō Yōshin-ryū history, which reports that he studied several martial traditions and was licensed in two. We examine additional primary sources.

Important disambiguation: Katsunosuke was from the Kuroda-han and is a different person than the higher-ranking hatamoto (旗本; bannerman) Matsuoka Yorozu.

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Early Martial Education

Matsuoka Katsunosuke is said to have enrolled in Hōzōin-ryū sōjutsu (宝蔵院流槍術; Hōzōin-ryū spear art) under Komazawa Yoshitsugu (駒沢義次) in the 5th month of 1842 as a young child. This may have been somewhat of a formality, given the size of spear used in the art. He trained into his adolescence and at age 16 received inka (印可; master’s certification seal) in the 5th month of 1852.

He entered the Tenjin Shin’yō-ryū at Kanda Otamagaike in the 1st month of 1853 at age 17, and in the 9th month of 1855 at age 19 received menkyo kaiden from the third head, Iso Masatomo (磯正智), then served as shihan-dai at the Iso dōjō.

Matsuoka is also said to have studied Ittō-ryū kenjutsu at the Otamagaike neighborhood Genbukan of Chiba Shūsaku, but this could also have happened at the Kōbusho.

Kōbusho Training

Sent by his domain to the Kōbusho as a shugyōnin (修業人; trainee) from the 1st month of 1860 at age 24, he took a three-bout randori loss to Totsuka Hikosuke Hidetoshi (戸塚彦介英俊, 1813–1886; gō Isshinsai 一心斎). This drew him into Totsuka’s orbit as well as that of Sakakibara Kenkichi, more details of which can be found below.

In the 4th month of 1862 (Bunkyū 2) he was made jūjutsu kyōju-kokoroe hosa (柔術教授心得補佐; jūjutsu teaching assistant) — “assistant to the provisional jūjutsu instructor,” a junior teaching-aide grade. He trained at the Kōbusho for two years and nine months in all, the last six of them after reaching the assistant grade.

Fujiwara states that Matsuoka studied Ittō-ryū and then:

剣術を直心影流の名手・榊原鍵吉友善（三一才）について学ぶことを決意した。 He resolved to study kenjutsu under the Jikishinkage-ryū (直心影流) expert Sakakibara Kenkichi Tomoyoshi (aged 31).

His book lists Matsuoka’s keiko-nakama (稽古仲間; training companions) as including Chiba Michisaburō (千葉道三郎), Okano Toranosuke (岡野虎之助, 25), Odani Tetsutarō (男谷鉄太郎, 25) and Katō Sutesaburō (加藤捨三郎, 26).

Matsuoka Katsunosuke (26), on becoming a Kōbusho trainee (修業人, shugyōnin), studied kenjutsu under 〔the Jikishinkage-ryū expert Sakakibara Kenkichi Tomoyoshi〕 and jūjutsu under Totsuka Hikosuke Hidetoshi (49) of the Yōshin-ryū (揚心流).

The history does not mention Matsuoka having a traditional license in Jikishinkage-ryū; it uses careful language to say he studied under Sakakibara and then taught Jikishinkage-ryū. He likely learned portions of the art during his time at the Kōbusho, similar to how his training under Totsuka was in addition to his earlier jūjutsu studies.

Moving to Ibaraki

After attending the Kōbusho he left Edo: in the 12th month of 1862 he married into the Ishizuma (石妻) family of Ueno village (上野村) in rural Hitachi (modern day Ibaraki). This was some distance from Edo: Ueno village is not the Ueno ward of Edo, the battle of which would be fateful for Matsuoka later on. He set up as a kanpō and bone-setting doctor, opening a clinic in the village.

Once he settled in Hitachi, Matsuoka had no training partners, and examined his martial practice alone — shutting himself in his room after seeing patients to analyze Tenjin Shin’yō-ryū, Totsuka-ha and Jikishinkage-ryū and work out their riai. He founded his own school of jūjutsu in 1864 (元治元年), combining the Tenjin Shin’yō-ryū he had first learned with Totsuka-ha methods and folded in the riai (理合; coordinating principle) of Jikishinkage-ryū he had experienced. He first taught in the courtyard of his medical clinic, attracting fifty students before he was called into bakumatsu service.

Timeline of Bakufu Service

Matsuoka was a Kuroda-han sub-vassal (陪臣; baishin) by birth — his family were domain physicians — and his time at the Kōbusho was itself a domain posting: a han could command a retainer into active service, and the Kuroda did exactly that in sending him there in 1860. When Kōbusho jūjutsu training was abolished in the 10th month of 1862 he was released from his trainee status, and two months later married and settled in Hitachi, outside both Edo and Kuroda territory — by which point he had, to all appearances, left service for a civilian life.

School tradition (as related on JA.wikipedia.org) states that in the 7th month of 1866, he received orders of elevation to bakushin (幕臣登用; shogunal retainer), with the rank sashizu-yaku kakushiki (撒兵指図役格式; “[granted] the standing of an officer of the skirmisher / light-infantry corps”; the JA-Wikipedia founder-bio miswrites 撒 as 撤):

• sappei (撒兵) — the Edo bakufu’s Western-style light infantry, or skirmishers. The bakufu army divided its foot soldiers into line hohei (歩兵; infantry soldier) and light infantry, the latter called sappei (撒兵; skirmisher troops), Western-style infantry the Edo bakufu created in the Bunkyū era (1861–64), trained by Frenchmen and posted at the gates of Edo Castle.
• sashizu-yaku (指図役; directing officer) - The standard bakufu-army spelling is 差図役 (same reading and sense, sashizu = “direction, orders”).
• kakushiki (格式; rank and protocol) — “rank, formal standing.” As a suffix to an office it denotes being granted the formal status of that post; so the whole phrase is “with the rank/status of a sappei directing officer,” conferred as part of his elevation to bakushin.

In the bakufu army, sashizu-yaku and sashizu-yaku tōdori were the junior-officer grades, both chronically understaffed. Sashizu-yaku is similar to a platoon leader or company commander in modern military. This was a bakufu military appointment, incompatible with still being under Kuroda command.

Inconsistent Biographies

The school tradition credits Matsuoka with a bakumatsu military career, but its accounts disagree with one another and none is corroborated outside the school.

Acting on the 1866 appointment described above, he is said to have been sent against the Keiō-2 uchikowashi (打ちこわし; 1866 rice-riots) risings, summoned to Edo in 1867 to guard Yoshinobu, and assigned to the elite Seieitai (精鋭隊) under Chūjō Kinnosuke. The 1983 Shindō Yōshin-ryū history (Fujiwara), copied near-verbatim into the Japanese Wikipedia life, then gives this of the Battle of Ueno (5th month, 1868):

At the Battle of Ueno, around two in the afternoon, fighting several enemies in a vegetable field, he took a bullet in the right back and was disabled; he cut a blood-path and fled via Mikawajima toward Aizu; hiding in a farmhouse along the Tone River while his wound healed, he learned of Aizu’s surrender, and returned to Ueno village.

Back in Ueno village he is said to have taken the alias Ishizuma-no-suke (石妻之助), his wife’s family name, to escape the Satchō searches, and to have convalesced there rather than going west to Sunpu with the other bakufu retainers.

Fujiwara supplies the surrounding frame and, inadvertently, the reason to distrust it. His page 87 places Matsuoka among those escorting Yoshinobu to Kyoto, records the shogunal defeat at Toba-Fushimi (1/3) and Yoshinobu’s flight from Osaka Castle to Shinagawa aboard the 〔開陽丸〕 (Kaiyō-maru), and introduces the two corps: the Seieitai under Chūjō, some 〔130〕 blood-oath comrades guarding Yoshinobu, and the Shōgitai (彰義隊) under Shibusawa Seiichirō (渋沢成一郎) and his deputy Amano Hachirō, swelling to about three thousand. Page 89 simply repeats the Seieitai-under-Chūjō assignment and the Ueno wound. Page 90 concedes that all pre-1870 school records were lost to flood, so that no founding-era register survives and even the later one is partly illegible — the school itself holds no contemporaneous document for the founder’s earlier life, the military period included.

The incoherence is what settles it. The Seieitai left Edo with Yoshinobu for Mito and then Suruga and never fought at Ueno, whereas a wound at Ueno and a flight toward Aizu is the course of an Ueno defender, not of a Seieitai guardsman; a man cannot be both. Sinec there is no record of Matsuoka Katsunosuke as being associated to the Seieitai as a ranking member, but he could very well have participated in its actions. If he did, it would mean he did not fight at Ueno, unless he had left the unit for some reason.

An English language retelling published on koryu.com diverges on the concrete event, placing the wound not at Ueno but at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi (鳥羽伏見の戦い; near Kyoto, 1st month 1868) — after which he likewise escapes to Ueno village and takes the wife’s name, there rendered “Ishijima.”¹

Toba-Fushimi and Ueno lie some five hundred kilometers and four months apart, so there is disagreement on where its founder was shot. This essay, by a master practitioner of a descendent line, has several contradictory statements compared to Japanese language sources.

Kenjutsu Teaching

Matsuoka Katsunosuke is not listed as a ranking Kōbusho spear and sword instructor in Japanese language primary sources, which do provide detailed lists of the high-level instructors and their grades. Fujiwara lists him as a grappling trainee who rose to the level of assistant, as described above. There is also no easily discovberable primary source level evidence for Matsuoka’s attendance at the Kōbusho, unlike Amano Shōshō, whose enrollment card survives. There is no reason to doubt he was in attendance, but more extensive searches of late Tokugawa records would be useful to conduct.

That being said, Matsuoka could not have been ‘honbu-chō’ of Sakakibara’s dōjō during 1860-1862. Sakakibara did not have a dōjō at the time. Sakakibara’s time was spent teaching at the Kōbusho. In addition, Sakakibara held no private dōjō during his shogunal-guard years. He accompanied Iemochi to Kyoto in Bunkyū 3 (1863) – after Matsuoka was residing in Hitachi. The jūjutsu section in which Matsuoka served ran only from 1860 to its abolition in 1862, before the escort. Matsuoka was, according to Fujiwara, released from his assignment, not reassigned to the kenjutsu or sōjutsu cadre.

There may indeed be errors in Fujiwara’s biography. What we do know is the Sakakibara, as a well-attested public figure of the time, opened his own dōjō — at Shitaya Kurumazaka (下谷車坂) — in the eleventh month of Keiō 2 (1866), upon resigning when the Kōbusho was reorganized into the Rikugunsho (陸軍所) (Japanese Wikipedia, n.d.). Before 1866 Sakakibara’s teaching platform was his Kōbusho office (kyōju-kata 教授方, later shihan-yaku 師範役), not a private school; after 1866 he held the dōjō but had left shogunal service, and Iemochi was dead.

The Jikishinkage-ryū private dōjō of that earlier time was not Sakakibara’s but instead Odani Seiichirō’s (男谷精一郎). In Odani’s absences it was run by his shihan-dai (師範代) Honme Yarijirō (本目鑓次郎) — himself a Kōbusho Jikishinkage-ryū kyōju-kata level instructor. A traveling Kōbusho kyōju-kata’s kenjutsu duties would have fallen to the academy’s other kenjutsu instructors.

Odani’s dōjō was at Azabu Mamiana (麻布狸穴) only from its founding in Bunsei 6 (1824); on his teacher Danno Mahosai’s death he was given Danno’s dōjō at Honjo Kamezawa-chō (本所亀沢町) and moved there in Ansei 5 (1858). So through the Kōbusho years the Odani dōjō — the Honjo dōjō that Britannica calls the most prestigious of the bakumatsu, producing Shimada Toranosuke, Mitsuhashi Torazō, Yokokawa Shichirō, and Sakakibara — was at Kamezawa-chō.

My working hypothesis is that the koryu.com account and EN Wikipedia material that draws from it is likely conflated with portions of the biography of Matsuoka Yorozu, who was a Seieitai leader, a high-level Kōbusho administrator and a swordsman of some renown. They are different men – we will see this pattern continue in discussions of the later military career sources assert for Matsuoka Katsunosuke.

Military Service

Matsuoaka is said to have been recalled to Tokugawa service by Fujiwara. English language sources mistakenly attribute this action to the Kuroda-han, but Matsuoka would have been released from Kuroda-han service at the end of his appointment to the Kōbusho. Hitachi is not part of the Kuroda-han holdings, which are in Kyushu.

Regarding what unit he was attached to, Fujiwara mentions the Seieitai. The Shōgitai is also mentioned.

Yamazaki Arinobu’s Shōgitai Senshi (彰義隊戦史; 山崎有信, 1910), whose section 26 (精鋭隊の性質, “the nature of the Seieitai”) rosters the corps, confirms as much (山崎 有信 1910):

Among those gathered at Ueno to guard the lord, it says, was a corps not belonging to the Shōgitai but separately organized, the Seieitai — taichō Chūjō Kinnosuke, with Yamaoka Tetsutarō, Sekiguchi Ryōsuke (関口良輔), Ōkusa Takijirō (大草瀧次郎), Matsuoka Yorozu (松岡萬), and Umeda Katsutarō (梅田勝太郎), over seventy men, mostly bannermen’s sons and all skilled with the sword. When Yoshinobu entered Tōeizan the Seieitai guarded him exclusively; when he withdrew to Mito, Chūjō and the rest accompanied him; later the corps entered Shizuoka and petitioned to open Kanaya-ga-hara.

Yamazaki closes that the Seieitai was “an entirely separate thing from the Shōgitai” (精鋭隊は彰義隊とは全然別物なり). The one Matsuoka the roster names is therefore Matsuoka Yorozu (松岡萬) — a jikisan (直参; direct retainer) officer whose post-1868 path ran to Suruga and Makinohara — not the Kuroda baishin (陪臣; sub-vassal) Katsunosuke, who, lacking any documented jikisan appointment, would have been a poor fit for a corps of stipend-surrendering direct retainers, and who is absent from the Seieitai and Shōgitai records alike. The likeliest explanation is a Seieitai/Shōgitai conflation in the house biography, with Chūjō’s name — the noted Seieitai head — drawn in; if the Ueno wound has any basis it belongs to a Shōgitai or Ueno-defender role, but Katsunosuke does not appear there either.²

No independent source carries any of the ryuha-centric narrative of Matsuoka Katsunosuke. The record closest to him in place and time is silent on it: the Ibaraki dictionaries know Katsunosuke only as a civilian bone-setter and jūjutsu teacher (below). The military career rests wholly on the school tradition — in versions that cannot agree whether he was shot at Ueno or Toba-Fushimi, and that Fujiwara concedes rest on no surviving document. His name does not appear in the text of either the Tōkyō Shishi Gaihen or the Shōgitai Senshi – the older Matsuoka Yorozu does instead.

Notable Teaching

Matsuoka had recovered enough to resume his medical practice in the 4th month of 1870, and in the 9th month of that year his Shindōkan (神道館) dōjō was built. He taught thousands of students; one early student that became well-known in kendō circles was Nakayama Tatsusaburō.³

The license that attached to Matsuoka’s early sword teaching of Nakayama according to Fujiwara (1983) is his own school’s betsuden (別伝; separately-transmitted line) menjō. This included:

• kodachi-dori (小刀捕; short-sword capture)
• ōdachi-dori (大刀捕; long-sword capture)
• gokui atemi (極意当身; secret-essence striking)
• kappō (活法; resuscitation) material
• ki-ate (気当; spirit strike technique)

The betsuden was considered by Matsuoka to be the ura-waza (裏技; the “back techniques”) of kenjutsu, and was associated with an upper-level license, although it may also have been awarded to people who only trained in kenjutsu.⁴

Resuscitation appears earlier as well, given Matsuoka’s profession: yūkatsu (誘活; lure-and-resuscitate technique) and eri-kappō (襟活法; collar resuscitation method) already at the entry kirigami license and koppō (骨法; bone methods) at the next mokuroku license. Striking appears as the 103 kyūsho (急所; vital points) taught under sappō (殺法; killing methods) at that same level.

Shindō Yōshin-ryū kirigami (切紙) license requires the first two activations, yūkatsu (誘活) and eri-kappō (襟活法), precisely the opening pair of the parent four-article scheme, while the mokuroku adds some hundred named kyūsho (急所) and holds the death-mode revivals — san-kappō (三活法; for drowning, falling, hanging) and yon-kappō (四活法; for steam, smoke, cold, blow) — back as betsuden (別伝) (Wikipedia contributors 2023).

Matsuoka’s school appears as both 神道揚心流 and 神道楊心流, used interchangeably: the hand-radical 揚 (“raise”) matches the Totsuka-ha 揚心流 / 揚心古流 input, the wood-radical 楊 (“willow”) the parent 楊心流. Its shin is 神道 (“divine way”), but the Obata–Takamura offshoot took the homophonous 新道 (“new way”), so the modern Takamura-ha line is written 高村派新道楊心流. All of these romanize as “Shindō Yōshin-ryū”.

Late Life

The Ibaraki biographical dictionaries (茨城人名辞書 / 茨城人名録, 1915–1939) are local and near-contemporary — the 1915 edition is seventeen years after his 1898 death — and wholly independent of the Shindō Yōshin-ryū (神道楊心流) tradition (いはらき新聞社 1915): ⁵

は幼よ銳意宗〓界に貢献し、の詳傳に至つては自ら包みて顯はさず、大いに令望を隆む、名利其に恬淡にして至誠天職を盡すを以て志願と爲す、才學並び高き僧侶也、〓ほしの、もとしち(星野元七)有名なる整骨醫家、故松岡克之助の義息にして且つその繼業者なり、氏は眞壁郡上野村大字中上野の人、下都賀郡桑村星野萬吉の次男に生れ、明治十二年一月十八日栃木縣松岡克之助の女を娶りて妻と爲す、少年時代小山高等小學校を卒業後大越元之助に就いて明治十年九月二十日生る、家は地方の名門にして父祖累代名主役を務め聲望高し、曾祖父織右衛門に至り名主を辭し、祖父文治郞は性寬量洒脫、好んで武術を學び、就中柔道の妙術を極め、神道に心流の師範にして有名なる松岡克之助

Across four editions they hold a consistent picture: Matsuoka Katsunosuke of Naka-Ueno, Ueno village, Makabe district (中上野・上野村・真壁郡), a locally famous bone-setter (整骨医) and Shindō Yōshin-ryū jūjutsu master, referred to as 故 (the late).

They also add lineage and succession detail:

• His heir was his son-in-law Hoshino Motoshichi (星野元七), who carried on the 整骨 practice at Naka-Ueno — a documented, non-school succession line;
• At least one named local figure took the school and the bone-setting together under him, entering in Meiji 8 (1875), receiving a mokuroku (目録) in Meiji 19 (1886), then studying clinical bone-setting under Nakamura Gendō (中村元道) at Hōjō (北條町)
• Another notable’s grandfather, Bunjirō (文治郎), is recorded as a 神道楊心流 師範 in his line.

No mention is made of bakufu military service — no Seieitai, no Ueno, no 撒兵. The public record closest to him in place and time knows him as a doctor and a jūjutsu teacher, and stops there.

References

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