Tamiya-ryū

Tamiya-ryū (田宮流) is an iaijutsu / battōjutsu iaijutsu (居合術 / 抜刀術; the art of drawing and cutting from the scabbard) founded roughly four centuries ago by Tamiya Heibei Narimasa (田宮平兵衛業正), a direct student of Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚助重信), the figure conventionally regarded as the progenitor of iai. Carried into the Kishū Tokugawa house, the line was praised as “the Tamiya of beauty, the Tamiya of poise” (美の田宮, 位の田宮), language that points to its emphasis on refined, composed form rather than overt aggression. The branch directly relevant to the Kōbusho is the Kubota-ha Tamiya-ryū (窪田派田宮流) of the hatamoto Kubota Kiyooto (窪田清音), who demonstrated Tamiya-ryū iai before Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyoshi in Tenpō 12 (1841) and, when the Kōbusho opened, became a tōdori alongside Odani Seiichirō. Kubota was the senior figure of the contemporary martial world — credited with thousands of students in military science and hundreds in the martial arts, and with some 130 specialist works — and his instruction was noted for an unusual stress on shissō (疾走; sprinting / rapid movement), so that the swordsman could deliver full power under any condition.

A Tamiya-ryū iaijutsu line survives today, transmitted in the Tsumaki (妻木) family and associated with the Kishū / Tamiya Shinken-ryū tradition; the school is represented within the Nihon Kobudō Kyōkai, and the international Tamiya-ryū organizations maintain English-language material.

In the Gekiken Sōdan (1790)

Mikami admits Tamiya-ryū to a kenjutsu survey with an explicit methodological aside, since it is properly an iai school:

一、田宮流は居合なるを、こゝにまじへたるは微意無きにもあらず。…名は居合にして、勝負する所は太刀態也。

“Tamiya-ryū is an iai school, and it is not without deliberate intent that I have mixed it in here. In the Tamiya-ryū current today in Kii and Edo, what is transmitted in the omote is iai technique; from there it proceeds to the sword, and bouting practice with striking exchanges is made the principal training. The name is iai, but where it contends, it contends with sword technique.” On that ground he appends it.

He traces the line from Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚介重信) of Ōshū to his student Tamiya Tsushima-no-kami Shigemasa (田宮對馬守重正) and Shigemasa’s son Nagakatsu (對馬守長勝), who served Kii at eight hundred koku; Nagakatsu’s son Heibee (平兵衞) and grandson Sannosuke (三之助) succeeded in turn, Heibee’s iai being performed before the shogun. A pupil of Heibee, Saiki San’emon (齊木三右衞門), “of the first rank,” spread the school in Edo, fighting and defeating a number of the city’s swordsmanship teachers.¹

Mikami records in detail the school’s old transmission, yukiai (行合):

又古傳は、刀を拔かずして、左の手は鯉口を持ち、右の手は脇指の柄にかけて敵へ詰め寄り、敵の太刀おろす頭を先に、刀の柄にて敵の手首を打ち、其拍子に脇差を拔きて勝つ事を專とする也。

“Without drawing the sword, the left hand grips the koiguchi and the right rests on the hilt of the wakizashi as one closes on the opponent; forestalling the descent of his sword, one strikes his wrist with the hilt of the sheathed blade and, on that beat, draws the wakizashi and wins. Most schools’ iai contest, he adds, takes this technique as its first principle — and all of it “differs greatly from the Tamiya-ryū current in Bizen today” (皆今備前に行るゝ田宮流と大に異なり), which is precisely why he records it. As an Okayama-domain retainer reporting his own domain’s version against those he saw in Kii and Edo, this Bizen comparison is his first-hand observation.”