In a recent blog, I questioned the mythos around the founders of various traditional ryūha. However, beyond the question of whether the founder truly created his martial system in the archetypal manner that is the usual account, there are several other questions:
A very common trope in the accounts of the origins of traditional Japanese martial arts goes as follows:
According to the Takenouchi Keisho Kogo Den . . . Takenouchi Hisamori retired to the mountains near the Sannomiya shrine to train his martial skills. He practiced there for six days and six nights, wielding a bokken (wooden sword) two shaku and four sun in length (about 2 ft. 4 in. or 72 cm), a relatively long weapon for his purportedly short stature. On the sixth night he fell asleep from exhaustion, using his bokken as a pillow. He was awakened by a mountain priest with white hair and a long beard who seemed so fearsome to Hisamori that he thought it must be an incarnation of the avatar Atago Gongen. Hisamori attacked the stranger, but was defeated. The priest said to him “When you meet the enemy, in that instant, life and death are decided. That is what is called hyōhō (military strategy).” He then took Hisamori’s bokken, told him that long weapons were not useful in combat, and broke it into two daggers one shaku and two sun long. The priest told Hisamori to put these in his belt and call them kogusoku, and taught him how to use them in grappling and close combat. These techniques became called koshi no mawari, (around the hips). The priest then taught Hisamori how to bind and restrain enemies with rope, using a vine from a tree. Then the priest disappeared mysteriously amidst wind and lightning. – Wikipedia entry Takenouchi-ryū (with several grammatical corrections by this author)
Bōnote (‘staff and hand’) is a festival-centered activity focused around small groups in the old Mikawa and Ryūsenji districts of Aichi. Collectively they hold numerous presentations at many local shrines and events in the surrounding areas, and have even flown overseas to demonstrate. For over 300 years, participants of bōnote have gathered at shrines to practice, organize and perform techniques with weapons as an offering to the ‘spirits of the altar,’ as well as parading new horses, and making offerings to ensure blessings and good fortune.
Bōnote was originally made up of groups called ryū or ryūha whose primary function was to teach prearranged training drills called kata to their members. The area where one lived decided which ryū each person belonged to, and the length of time spent performing, determined the ‘rank’ each person had, and what position they held in the group’s organization.
The kata of bōnote could be summed up as positioning, striking, and evading within set patterns. Going further, what is taught within those patterns is the number and frequency of striking; deflections, blocks and evasions; hand, leg, and body positions: all of which is accompanied by kakegoi (‘spirit yelling’).
A typical bōnote arsenal consists of bō (wooden sticks), yari (spears), uchigatana (disposable ‘side swords’), nagagama (war hooks), kama (sickles), naginata (glaives), and a host of others. Sticks are the primary training tool and a legitimate all-purpose substitute for the other weapons; they are what beginners start training with because authentic weapons are expensive and not something one wants to damage in training. Of course, they are also much safer.
Musubi is a talismanic word in some aikidō circles. Its mundane definition is to tie things together. In aikidō, it is often linked with another term, awase (to link or blend together). For those with a romantic view of aikidō, this is imagined as a martial pas de deux in which, at the moment of contact, peace is established and two spirits blend together in harmony.
This was not the viewpoint of Ueshiba Morihei, however. To establish aiki was to impose order on chaos. Ueshiba’s oft-quoted formulation of man establishing harmony between heaven and earth made humanity, potentially, a cosmic force, reconciling disorder in any realm, be it that between people in conflict to the universe itself. Musubi and awase, therefore, imply blending and twining with another’s essence to move them in the direction that they should go.
Half a century ago, my parents took me a talk by Rabbi Abraham J. Twersky. Twersky was a descendent of the Chernobyl dynasty of Hasidic Rabbis. Over the decades I have seen the name Twersky elsewhere: always on attorney or doctor’s offices or on academic papers – beyond religion, they have been a dynasty of intellect. Rabbi Twersky, a psychiatrist, merged Mussar (Jewish ethics) with elements of the Twelve Step Program, becoming a profoundly important figure in the field of the treatment of substance abuse. Despite his incandescent intellect, he was a down-to-earth man, who worked with those suffering from addiction disorders from any walk of life, and who wrote books whose profundity was encased in simple accessible prose and images.
I do not remember the overall theme of his talk that evening, but part of it concerned his upbringing, which he told in the third person, in a charmingly lyrical Yiddish accent. “Twersky was a brilliant boy, a chess prodigy. He was crazy for chess, and would seize any moment to go and have a game. It became a kind of addiction. And one day, there was a chess tournament, and Twersky, only ten years old, had to go. Twersky had to go! He would be playing against much older boys, even adults, because chess is a game of intelligence, and winning and losing is based on the merits of the mind and the will. But it was the Sabbath, the most Holy day of the week, when G-d descends to earth to unite on that one day with the Sabbath bride, the Shekinah, the divine feminine presence of G-d. Think of that! G-d loved humanity so much that He exiled a portion of Himself so that creation could occur. It is on the Sabbath that G-d’s sacrifice is redeemed, that G-d in His Fullness is reunited. Our celebration of the Sabbath is in gratitude for G-d’s sacrifice for us. It’s that important!
There are only a few extant koryū bujutsu that date back to the Sengoku (‘warring states’) era. Despite claims to the contrary, none of them are pristine. Many claim founding dates that are historically inaccurate, often by many hundreds of years. Some claim founders who actually had nothing to do with the school in question. Still others have founders who may have initiated the ryūha, but they surely never imagined the current state of what they created—it has been altered over the centuries almost beyond recognition.
This is not fraud. The term 流 (ryū ‘flow’) means something quite different from ‘organization.’ Whoever truly created a school often gave credit to those who flowed into its creation, going back centuries, if not millennia. This could include one’s family lineage (the core of one’s identity), one’s inspiration (this could include deities, ancestors, even someone in a war tale or legend), as well as antecedent schools that were directly or indirectly related. For example, a large number of schools list famous warriors or tutelary deities associated with Shintō-ryū (schools associated with a nexus of activity in the general area of the Kashima and Katori shrines), as these are generally considered to be the primordial martial traditions of Northeastern Japan. However, the technical parameters of a particular school may have very little to do with Shintō-ryū itself.
Two decades ago, I read an article in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts entitled “Striving for Realism: Concerns Common to Martial Arts and Law Enforcement Training.” The article discussed problems common to martial arts training and police defensive tactics in terms of ‘realism.’ It offered perspectives on key concepts in the classical martial tradition that converged with the training needs of law enforcement, and made the observation that “Inadequate training, unmindful of zanshin, will result in the reactive under- or over-estimation of circumstances and/or the perpetrator. Poor decision making based on exaggerated skills or impairment of technique due to self doubt confronts both the martial arts student and the LEO.” (4) Twenty years later, we are all aware that little has changed.
When naginatajutsu was first taught as a specialty amongst Japanese weaponry is unknown. To start with, the claimed founding dates of almost all martial ryūha are dubious. Many claim a founding date hundreds of years previous to their actual inception. This is not dishonesty; in earlier periods of Japanese history, lineage was as much a spiritual sense as it was historical data. Therefore, lineage records often mixed generations of non-practicing family members, teachers of other ryūha who influenced the development of one’s own, and famous warriors of the past whom the founder regarded as inspirations.
It is likely that the genuine founding dates of naginata-specialty ryūha was in the mid-Edo period. Yazawa Isaō, a 16th generation instructor of Toda-ha Bukō-ryū (now properly known as Tenshin Bukō-ryū) then at Nihon Joshi Daigaku, wrote in 1916 “It is not clear when naginatajutsu began to be taught as a single discipline. I have gone around to the few remaining martial arts instructors of the former domains of Japan, and examined the various military manuals they own. Upon reviewing these I discovered the oldest school of naginata is the Shizuka-ryū.” [1]
Most of the schools she enumerated in her article are long extinct, but even a superficial consideration of remaining naginatajutsu schools will show something curious—many of them include the kusarigama (‘weighted chain and sickle) within their curricula; for example, this is true for Shizuka-ryū, Bukō-ryū, Tendō–ryū, and Jikishinkage-ryū. [2] Given that the naginata-specialty schools became associated with women within a few generations of their creation (certainly by the late Edo-period), I have wondered at the association of these two weapons.
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