The koryu bugei are the classical styles or systems through which the samurai acquired their military skills, as well as many of their key values and convictions. They are distinguished from the better-known and more widely practiced modern cognate arts of Japan, such as kendo and judo, by their origins, organizational structures, and senses of purpose.
To be classified as a koryu, a school must be able to trace its origins to at least the early nineteenth century. Most are in fact considerably older than this, and the traditional histories of some profess roots in the twelfth, tenth, or even the seventh century—although scholars generally view such claims as hyperbole.
Military training in Japan dates back to before the dawn of recorded history, and organized drill can be documented by the early eighth century, but the solidification of martial art into systems, or ryuha, was a development of the mid to late medieval period, a part of a broad trend toward the systemization of knowledge and teaching in various pursuits. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, virtuosos of poetry, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, music, No drama, and the like began to think of their approaches to their arts as packages of information that could be transmitted to students in organized patterns, and began to certify their students’ mastery of the teachings by issuing written documents. Thus, samurai began to seek out warriors with reputations as expert fighters and appeal to them for instruction, even as such masters of combat began to codify their knowledge and experience and to methodize its study. During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), bugei training became increasingly formalized and businesslike, with adepts opening commercial training halls and instructing students for fees, turning the teaching of martial art into a full-time profession.
The opening to the West and rapid modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century brought dramatic changes to the role and status of the koryu by virtually ending perceptions of practical military value in the arts of sword, spear, bow, glaive, and grappling. Participation in the classical bugei flagged rapidly as the new Meiji government closed many urban martial art academies and encouraged instead the development of a new military system based on European models. When public and government interest in traditional martial arts began to revive, from the 1890s onward, it was directed not to the koryu, but to new, synthesized forms of fencing and grappling promulgated as means of physical and moral education for the general public. By the 1930s, the study of these modern cognate arts had become compulsory in Japanese middle schools, where the emphasis was on developing aggression, speed, and a self-sacrificing “martial spirit” appropriate to the imperial armed forces. Consequently, the martial arts became closely identified with militarism, “feudalism,” and the war effort, resulting, under the postwar Allied Occupation, in a ban on most forms of bugei training that lasted until 1952, when the Ministry of Education permitted the reintroduction of fencing to high schools, provided that it be taught as physical education and not as a martial art.
A great many koryu died out during the Meiji transformation or the upheavals of the postwar era. Nevertheless, many survived and several dozen thrive today. A few are even practiced overseas.
While modern enthusiasts tend to view the koryu as corporate entities existing across time, this perception is anachronistic. Until the very end of the medieval period, most ryuha had no institutional structure at all, and those that did derived it from familial or territorially based relationships between teachers and students. Medieval bugei masters often traveled about, instructing students as and where they found them. Some students followed their teachers from place to place; others trained under them for short periods while the teacher was in the area. In either case, during this era a ryuha had little practical existence beyond the man who taught it.
Bugei ryuha can often be clearly identified only in retrospect. Teacher-student relationships can be traced backward through time to establish the continuity of lineages, but few martial art adepts prior to modern times belonged exclusively to a single lineage, and few had only a single successor. Unlike many schools of tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy, and other traditional Japanese arts, in the premodern era most bugei ryuha did not develop articulated organizational structures whereby senior disciples were licensed to open branch schools that remained under the authority of the ryuha headmaster. Instead, martial art teachers tended to practice total transmission, in which all students certified as having mastered the school’s arts were given complete possession of them—effectively graduated from the school with full rights to propagate or modify what they had been taught as they saw fit. Such students normally left their masters to open their own schools, teaching on their own authority; instructors retained no residual control over former students or students of students. It was common practice for such graduates to blend what they had learned with personal insights and/or with techniques and ideas gleaned from other teachers. Often, the former students changed the name of the style, in effect founding new ryuha in each generation. Consequently, lines of descent from famous warriors tend to fork and branch again and again, over time giving rise to many hundreds of ryuha.
During the Tokugawa period, the procedures surrounding martial art instruction and the master-disciple bond became much more formal and cabalistic, and the koryu assumed the shapes they have retained into modern times. One of the first steps toward institutionalization of martial art ko-ryu was the issuing of diplomas and licenses to students. This practice began in the sixteenth century with certificates given to acknowledge “graduation” from an instructor’s tutelage. The vocabulary used on and for these certificates varied from teacher to teacher, but the most common term for this level of achievement was menkyo-kaiden. Kaiden, which means “complete transmission,” indicated that the student had learned all that the teacher had to offer. Menkyo means “license” or “permission,” and signified authorization to use the name of the teacher’s style in dealings with persons outside the school—such as in duels or when seeking employment.
Medieval bugei instructors seldom formally differentiated students by level prior to graduation; there was little need for such distinctions, inasmuch as the period of tutelage was usually brief—sometimes only a few months. But during the Tokugawa period, as instruction became more professionalized and more commercialized, apprenticeships became longer. Thus, more elaborate systems of intermediate ranks were introduced, providing students with tangible measures of their progress.
Today, a few koryu have adopted the standardized dan-kyu system of ranks and grades introduced by judo pioneer Kano Jigoro in the late nineteenth century and embraced by most modern cognate martial arts. Prior to Kano’s innovation, however, each ryuha maintained its own system of ranks and its own terminology for them, and most koryu continue to use these systems today. This situation makes it difficult to compare the levels of students from different ryuha, inasmuch as even terms used in common sometimes represent completely different levels of achievement from school to school. Similarly, there is no simple formula for calculating equivalencies between koryu ranks and those of the dan-kyu system, which many koryu view as being based on fundamentally different premises from those of their own systems. Ranks within the koryu tend to certify not skills mastered or status achieved so much as initiation into new and deeper levels of training. Promotion in “rank,” therefore, signifies the granting of permission for the student to move on to the next level of training. The principal criteria for promotion are aptitude (including, but not limited to, skills and knowledge mastered) and moral fitness to be allowed to share in the teachings of the school at a higher and deeper level, and to be trusted with more of its secrets.
Koryu, in fact, tend to be far smaller, more closed, and more private organizations than those associated with the modern cognate martial arts. The membership of most numbers in the dozens or less. Many are, or were until a generation or two ago, restricted family traditions. Most are taught in only a single location, under the direct supervision of the headmaster and/or instructors (shihan) operating under him or her.
Traditionally, koryu teachers have been extremely careful about admitting students to instruction and have usually demanded long commitments and considerable control over students’ behavior during their terms of apprenticeship. Many still follow elaborate procedures for screening new students, requiring letters of recommendation and even investigations into the backgrounds of applicants. Those who pass such screenings are initiated into their ryuha as though into a brotherhood or secret society. Some koryu hold entrance ceremonies ranging from the very simple to the very ornate. Most collect initiation gifts and fees. And nearly all require students to sign written pledges, or kishomon, in which they promise to abide by the school’s rules and keep its secrets. In the past—and sometimes even today—these pledges were often sealed with the students’ own blood, pressed onto the paper next to their signatures or ciphers.
What most definitively distinguishes koryu bugei from modern cognate martial arts, however, is not the age or the organizational structure of the schools, but the holistic and cabalistic manner in which they view the educational process. The essence of the koryu bugei experience is one of socialization to the ryuha, the complete subordination of the individual to the system—a course that promises that those who stay with it long enough will emerge, paradoxically, with a more fully developed sense of individualism. This idea derives from basic Confucian principles of education that predate their application to bugei training in Japan by centuries. The process centers on wholehearted devotion to the mastery of detail.
The koryu bugei are extraordinarily complex arts. At their most fundamental levels as methodologies of combat and war, they are largely collections of particulars, expressed in dozens of individual techniques and strategies, described in a profoundly unsystematized, sometimes opaque, and often overlapping argot of terms. Much of this apparent chaos is intentional, for—at least until modern times—martial art schools, as competitive organizations training warriors for deadly combat, deliberately sought to keep outsiders from grasping what they taught.
And yet each ryuha does have an essence, a conceptual core around which the details of the school’s arts revolve. This core becomes increasingly perceptible to initiates as they advance in their studies, particularly as they turn their attentions beyond the initiatory functions of the bugei as arts of war to their deeper purpose as arts of peace and self-realization. To adepts who have entered this realm, each one of their school’s terms and concepts reveals multiple levels of meaning—mechanical, psychological, moral, and so forth—understood not as sequential steps, but as interpenetrating spheres of activity. As the koryu conceptualize it, the value and the benefits imparted by the practice of the bugei lie in the combination of all the various elements involved. Koryu see this combination as having a special meaning and existence over and above the sum of the parts. Thus ko-ryu bugei is a means to broad personal development that exists only in whole form: Studying a koryu necessarily involves a willingness to embrace the whole package in a particularly defined way.
The arcane nature of the arts themselves, the lack of competitions and other sportive applications, the cabalistic atmosphere surrounding admission and the educational process, and the length and seriousness of the commitments expected from initiates limit the appeal of classical martial art for modern audiences in, as well as outside of, Japan. Moreover, the aversion of most headmasters to licensing branch instructors and academies severely restricts opportunities for training for those who might otherwise be attracted. Thus koryu bugei are, and will likely continue to be, a rather small part of the Japanese martial art world. Nonetheless, the koryu are, historically and conceptually, the core of this world, and remain a vi-tal—and quintessential—part of it today.
