Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū jūjutsu was taught at the Kōbusho and lasted only about a year and five months before being dropped.
Totsuka Hikosuke Hidetoshi (戸塚彦介英俊, 1813–1886; gō Isshinsai), born in Edo Nishikubo, became head of the Kōbusho jūjutsu instructors. His prominence gave Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū its name. In 1837 restored the old name “Yōshin-ryū” and is called the father of early-modern randori. Totsuka served the Numazu-han Mizuno house as jūjutsu instructor. He entered Numazu-han service under Mizuno Tadanaga in 1830, and in 1860 was appointed jūjutsu kyōju-kata at the Kōbusho. When the Mizuno relocated to Kazusa Kikuma at the Restoration he moved to Bōsō, becoming a Chiba-prefecture jūjutsu instructor in 1885.
Totsuka-ha was the hard, randori-centric school of its day. Totsuka himself was a big man (178 cm, 86 kg) whose rough training was famous across Edo.
Hikosuke was appointed jūjutsu teaching head (教授方頭取) in 1860 at the Kōbusho on the fourteenth shōgun Tokugawa Iemochi’s recommendation, moving his dōjō to Atagoshita with a reported 1,600 entrants.
Kōbusho randori routinely produced injuries — there are accounts of a man dying from a chest kick and a large man choked unconscious who didn’t revive. The randori system Hisatomi Tetsutarō compiled from Totsuka’s teaching held 56 techniques across four categories — throws (nage), chokes (shime), holds (katame) and joint locks (kansetsu).
The Totsuka line’s proper name is simply Yōshin-ryū and it styled itself Yōshin-koryū (楊心古流; “old Yōshin-ryū”) to claim seniority over the Akiyama Shirōbei (秋山四郎兵衛) line of yawara practice.
Yōshin-koryū derives from the Chén Yuánbīn line through Miura Yōshin (三浦楊心), a Hizen-Nagasaki physician of the early Tokugawa period; its reviver (中興の祖) was Egami Takesune (江上武経; also read Egami Kanryū 江上観柳), who ran a dōjō in Edo at Shiba Akabane (present Mita); and from Egami it passed through an eighth-generation master, Totsuka Hidesumi (戸塚秀澄), to his son Totsuka Hikosuke Hidetoshi (戸塚彦介英俊, 1813–1886), after whom the Totsuka-ha prefix is named.
There is a name wrinkle along the way: Hikosuke’s father, Totsuka Hikoemon, had called the school Egami-ryū (江上流) in homage to his teacher but by Hikosuke’s generation the name was restored to Yōshin-ryū.
