I received a set of related questions on licensure and succession within koryū:
- What are your thoughts on koryū that predominantly only give out one menkyō kaiden, essentially declaring that person to be sōke?
- Would that mean the rest of the senior practitioners are not allowed to teach or open their own school, since they didn’t achieve the highest possible teaching license?
- What’s your thoughts on those who stay for decades, even though they would never receive a full teaching license, or how about other schools that might take a person 30, 40 or 50 years to get a license. Does a practitioner in one of these schools ever question why it needs to take so long, even though they have already learned and mastered everything there is to know, but they are unable to break away because they would lose legitimacy or recognition to be a certified instructor?
- Then there are those that face discrimination whether it is openly shown or not. Only Japanese people or people the sōke likes ever get promoted. What’s your thoughts on that?
This is an ostensibly simple set of question that quickly becomes complex. In what follows, I address certain questions as if talking to someone specific: “you,” in other words. I do not mean the person who asked the initial questions. It’s a rhetorical device only.