The Dialogue Between Jissen Budō and Seishin Shugyō Budō
By Anthony Deen
Masaoka Kazumi/ Katuskane hanshi, (1896-1973) director of ZNKR Iaido
Kono Hyakuren hanshi (1898-1974), kaicho of the ZNIR
The proposition of this essay is that to understand the dichotomy between the two contrasting approaches to the study of Japanese fencing — the combative and the philosophical — we need to consider their historicity, especially the role of Japanese fencing (kenjutsū) in 20th century warfare and its legacy immediately after WWII. Secondly, that despite acknowledged differences between the two methodologies, the way in which this family of arts have been practiced in recent decades often mitigates the differences between them. The essay examines a variety of sources in relating both the history and ideas behind the schism.
Introduction
The word battō (抜刀) translates as “to unsheathe the sword.” The term iai consisting of i (居) and ai (合), is a contraction of “to be constantly prepared”. The underlaying idea of iai is to be mentally present and ever alert. Both words are used to describe the use of a metal sword, or katana, in Japanese fencing. This is as opposed to kendo which uses a light-weight, edgeless, bamboo sword called a shinai. Like most other Japanese martial arts iaidō or battōdō is a budō, a way or path to study war. Today, to study a budō is to study archaic warfare, but it’s also an applied study – that is it requires physical practice in the use of feudal weapons such as a sword, staff, spear, and bow. As in many Japanese martial arts, there’s a dichotomy in iaidō between two prevailing and seemingly contradictory methodologies regarding how these budō should be practiced. We taxonomize the two approaches as jissen budō and seishin shugyō budō, or simply as shugyō. While jissen oriented students focus on the effectiveness of their practice, shugyō students de-emphasize practicality in favor of personal development. This dichotomy can most overtly be observed in the practice of Toyama-ryu and Nakamura-ryu Battodō and some ryuha of Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryu Iai Heihō representing Jissen budō when compared to the practice of Musō Shinden-ryu Iaidō and Zen Ken Ren Iaidō.
The challenge is that within the Japanese sword arts community, the two approaches border on polemical. One side criticizes the reliance on solo techniques (waza), complain of a lack of martial applicability, and questions if iaidō practiced as a metaphysical pursuit is still budō? The other side condemns practice with an opponent (kumitachi); the use of real swords (shinken), and test cutting (tameshigiri). There are strong feelings on both sides of the debate as generations of kenshi have studied either the more combat oriented or the more metaphysical versions of iai. This has led kenshi to not practice with each other or acknowledge the veracity of each other’s curriculum.
At its most superficial this debate can be posed as a single question, do kenshi — sword students — train with their swords as tools of combat, or as sacred tokens to aid them in their maturation as individuals? To understand the origins of this schism, and to lay the groundwork to address it, we have to delve into the history of modern kenjutsū and understand the dramatic transformations in Japanese society directly before and after the Great Pacific War.
Defining the Dichotomy
Jissen is the easier of the two terms to define as jissen is commonly translated as “actual combat” or “realistic fighting.” By contrast, shugyō has a variety of translations including “austere training,” “cultivating conduct,” “repeatedly training,” “conducting oneself in a way that inspires mastery,” and “deep mind-body training.”
Seishin means soul or spirit or will. Shugyō has its origins in the Sanskrit word, Sādhanā, “an ego-transcending spiritual practice” and “is done for attaining detachment from worldly things.” If seishin is translated as spirit, and shugyō translated in parts — shu as ascetic practices and gyō as journey, seishin shugyō may be defined as training (keikō) to achieve senshin, an enlightened mind. Seishin shugyō budō is also described as a form of moving meditation or meisō offering naisei or introspection. The ultimate goal of seishin shugyō is to free oneself of worldly thoughts and desires.
The origins of jissen budō are as old as warfare itself. Shugyō as its practiced today is a correlation of Zen practice with Iaidō — claimed to derive from esoteric Buddhist traditions from prefeudal times. Ascetic practices in Japan go back before the 9th century in both Shinto and Buddhism. Whether the manner in which samurai practiced budō or the Buddhist influence on that practice is the origin of the schism is the question addressed in this essay.
The Origins of Enlightenment Practice in Budo
All Japanese weapon arts as practiced today - regardless of whether they’re gendai or koryu (modern or traditional), can be organized into a three set Venn diagram as 1. sports (undō kyogi, athletic competition), 2. combat arts, and 3. metaphysical arts.
The kyogi set may include arts which have a goal of developing physical fitness and defeating an opponent in friendly competition (e.g., kendo and jukendō). Next is jissen set that retains the hypothetical goal of defeating an opponent in combat, this set might include most kenjutsū, iaidō and battōdō ryuha. Finally, the metaphysical arts are focused on goals other than defeating an opponent, at least an external one. This set includes numerous iai ryuha including and the seite iai of the Japan’s iaidō and kendo federations.
Shugyō as austere training and kenshō as enlightenment are not exclusive to any one set of practices and as in any Venn diagram are both adjacent to and overlapping with the others.
Over the years, martial artists have written numerous essays trying to define the differences between the two approaches. In his 2015 essay on martial arts as a strategy for coping with violence Sixt Wetzler taxonomized this dichotomy as internal arts versus military arts:
The 'internal' art would stress the calm of mind to overcome confrontational tension, while the 'military' system would stress aggressivity and forward drive.
The 'internal' art would promise technical perfection by repetitive training of traditional techniques, while the 'military' system would probably claim to use combat-proven methods based on natural reflexes.
The 'internal art' could promise to balance out the emotional energy between attacker and attacked, while the 'military' system would aim to fight fire with fire and turn the hierarchy around.
The 'internal' art would claim to allow the control of one's emotions, while the 'military' system could integrate overkill as a desired option.
The 'internal' art would aestheticize violence and maybe dissolve it by only using an attacker's energy against them', while the 'military' system would use quasi-scientific terms and amateur research to suggest a 'true' understanding of 'real' violence to its practitioners.
Yamaoka Tesshū (1836 – 1888)
Wetzler is bullish on what he defines as internal arts and seems to miss the mark in using the two descriptors. Certainly, in as much as all martial arts have internal training — that is tanden or ki development — internal and military are problematic. What Wetzler seems not to appreciate is that there is a psychological component to budō in addition to the physical, and it is the psychological one that is actually the harder to learn. Mochida Seiji, the last kendo master awarded 10th dan, and a practitioner of both Toyama-ryū Battōdō and Eishin-ryū Iaidō said, “I began my true kendo shugyo when I was past fifty. This is because I strove to do kendo with my heart and mind.”
The application of senshin practice to budō is encapsulated in the relationship between Zen Buddhism and kenjutsū, as articulated in Rinzai Buddhist priest Takuan Soho’s 17th century correspondence with samurai Yagyū Munenori, the founder of the Edo ha of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū kenjutsū. The original title of the text was “The Mysterious Records of Immovable Wisdom” and was translated into English in 1986 by William Scott Wilson as The Unfettered Mind (Fudōchi Shinmyōroku).
During the late Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods, this relationship was also expressed in Yamaoka Tesshū’s Itto Shoden Mutō-ryū (no sword) school of swordsmanship, which to summarize, posited that for the master kenshi there is no enemy. Tesshū’s views were popularized in the West by John Stevens’s 1984 book, The Sword of No Sword, which contains Stevens’s oft-noted expressions of orientalism and over-simplification. A more reliable account of Tesshū’s life is Anatolly Ashin’s 2012 The Truth in Ancient Ways, which is a well-rounded biography and recommended reading.
The modern translation of The Unfettered Mind and Steven’s work on Tesshū were both produced in the postwar years during Japan’s explosive reemergence onto the international stage as an aspect of kenzen ichinyo, an ad hoc campaign to correlate Zen with budō.
A similar discussion of Zen and budō was brought into the modern era in Nukariya Kaiten’s 1913, The Religion of the Samurai: A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline. More recently Ogawa Chutaro’s One Hundred Keiko (1954) emphasized shugyō over other aspects of budō practice.
Robert Grey in a 2024 essay “From Temples to Dojos: Zen’s Influence on Samurai and the Martial Arts” lists the following as the attributes that budō and Zen have in common:
Focused Concentration
Action over Thought
Facing Death
Interest in Poetry
No Thought, No Mind (Munen-Muso)
Enlightenment (Satori)
We may agree with some or all of the items on Grey’s list, but as others have done, Grey didn’t critically appraise his sources and based his essay on what are essentially platitudes, many of which had previously been challenged by scholars of the subject.
“What makes swordsmanship come closer to Zen than any other art that has developed in Japan is that it involves the problem of death in the most immediately threatening manner.”
Suzuki wrote this after the war, but recent scholars have challenged his statements. From George Lazopoulos’s 2015 book, “More troubling, scholars argue that Suzuki’s characterization of Japanese culture as a marriage of Zen and the martial spirit of the samurai is congruent with the ideology of Japanese imperialism and chauvinistic nationalism. In this view, the conflation of Zen, violence, and Japan indirectly facilitated the state’s wartime mobilization.”
In addition to Lazopoulos, another critical source is Yamada Shoji’s 2011 book, Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen and the West. Yamada’s observations were introduced in his 2001 article “The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery” in which he concluded that the historical foundation of the widespread adoption of Zen by Japanese samurai was a fallacy.
Although criticized in turn, Brian Victoria’s 1997 Zen at War debunked the role of Zen as pacifist force as he traced the explicit support by Zen priests and practitioners for Japan’s “glorious cause” during the Second Sino-Japanese and Second World wars. Oleg Benesh, author of Inventing the Way of The Samurai, also wrote a 2016 essay, “Reconsidering Zen, Samurai, and The Martial Arts” in which he methodically dismantled the supposed historical relationship between Zen and the martial arts by detailing the modern invention of Bushido.
With these recent critiques noted, written work to the contrary may be considered post-rationalized mythologies of budō. Whether as part of a postwar campaign to sanitize problematic legacies of both Zen and budō; as an expression of Nihonjinron (Japanese ethnocentric nationalism), or more innocently to promote Japanese tourism, the dichotomy between jissen and seishin shugyō isn’t based in a historical relationship between Zen and budō, but rather in events related to the Great Pacific War. Today’s schools of Jissen Budō — and the split — can be traced in the postwar period through the students of the Eishin-ryū master, Ōe Masaji.
Tosa Eishin-ryū
Ōe Masaji (Masamichi) (1852 – 1927)
Ōe Masaji was one of the most famous swordsmen of his time. Born in Tosa — present day Kochi Prefecture — he grew up in the waning years of the Bakufu and in 1868 at age 15, fought in the 4-day Battle of Toba-Fushimi (Toba-Fushimi no Tatakai) during the Boshin War. Swords were by that time already anachronistic, but even with guns, rifles and cannons on both sides, when the weather was too wet, or when ammunition ran out, or the protagonists thought it more honorable — melee weapons — bows, yari, juken and shinken became weapons of last resort.
Ōe had been taught Hasegawa Eishin-ryū Heihō, also known as Tosa Eishin-ryū, in both its more offensive oriented Tanimura Ha and more defensive Shimomura Ha variations. Ōe became the 17th soke of the Tanimura Ha and reworked the curriculum to what we know of as modern Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū. Eishin-ryū already had a reputation for being an effective martial arts system, but Ōe’s battlefield experiences informed his reorganization of its pedagogy using a more empirical approach for modern students. In addition, Ōe created what may have been the first battō waza of the modern era, the Okuiai Bangai no Bū, based on his experience in melee fighting. Ōe was also the first to allow men from outside of Tosa domain to study Eishin-ryū. It was Ōe’s students, along with the next generation of Eishin-ryū practitioners, who created the dichotomy between jissen and seishin shugyō budō.
Although there is some debate over Ōe’s budō progeny — his Oe-mon-ka as they’re known — he awarded Kongen no Maki, the equivalent to Menkyō Kaiden — a certificate of transmission — to perhaps six men. Those who received Soden or complete transmission may be as few as three, Hogiyama Namio (1891-1935), Mori Shigeki, and Masaoka Katuskane, all of whom played a role in the schism between shugyō and jissen.
Nakayama Hakudō (1872 – 1958)
In 1916, sword master Nakayama Hakudo, the most influential martial artist of his time, resolved to learn Tosa Iai but not being from Tosa, for him to receive training required quite a bit of perseverance. Also, already being ranked higher than most Tosa Iai sensei, they in turn didn’t want to train him. Ōe eventually allowed Nakayama to watch Ōe’s private practice of the Tanimura Ha thereby allowing Nakayama to discretely learn it. Itagaki Taisuke, another student of Ōe’s, introduced Nakayama to Hosokawa Yoshimasa who taught the Shimomura Ha of Hasegawa Eishin-ryū and Morimoto Tokumi of the Goto Ha Muso Jikiden Eishin-ryū (Tanimura Ha Hasegawa Eishin-ryū). With a foundation in Tanimura Ha, Nakayama was accepted as a student by both teachers. Nakayama received Menkyō Kaiden in the Shimomura Ha and began to teach it under the name Musō Shinden-ryū Battōjutsū.
Tosa-iai was not publicly demonstrated until 1919 and while kenjutsu was still popular in the military and with higher-level kendoka, sword arts had long been considered antiquated. With no practical self-defense applications these were dying arts. There was no widespread practice of kenjutsū at the start of the Showa era, so to attract new audiences the merits of kenjutsū had to be recontextualized. Like Ōe, Nakayama believed that for kenjutsū to survive in the modern era, it had to offer something beyond anachronistic fighting techniques. By connecting with Zen, kenjutsū was reimagined as a form of kokorō no shugyō - “tempering oneself through austere practices” - and he expressed this opinion well before it was politically expedient to do so.
“The ethics of swordsmanship, Mr. Nakayama wishes to clarify, is not in aggressive manslaughter. It lies primarily in psychic training. In the same manner in which the Yogis developed their physical inhibition to attain meditative states for higher psychical conditions, kendo trains the nervous system to respond, making awkward conscious efforts into reflex. The instrument, the sword, is necessary to give that serious frame of mind.”
Mass media, relatively new to Japan, gave Nakayama a platform to reintroduce kenjutsū to a larger audience than had probably experienced it since the 17th century. Although Nakayama described budō as a means of polish the soul, this was a time of change in Japan, and not for the better. The military became ascendant in government, and budō as such were absorbed by questions of how they could be made relevant in modern warfare. Answers and applications evolved as archaic weapons took on a controversial place on the battlefield. Kenjutsū took on the role of steeling officers for combat.
The Demise of Kenjutsu
After military victories in the first Sino-Japanese (1894 -1895) and the Russo-Japanese (1904-1905) wars, Japanese pride and ethnocentrism led to a rejection of many aspects of Western culture adopted during modernization efforts. This was partially expressed in the army’s 1909 replacement of French sabers with katana. Although specifically focused on World War II, Dr. Karl Friday’s 1994 essay, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian's Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition” summarizes how author and educator Nitobe Inazo’s interpretation of “Bushidō” (way of the warrior) was problematically utilized by the Japanese military to embed a martial culture into popular Japanese culture. Inazo’s 1899 book, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, became a collective mnemonic for an infant empire which in a quest for modernization over the previous five decades had eviscerated its actual history. In Inazo’s portrayal the samurai who had ruthlessly dominated Japan’s feudal populations were uncritically venerated, and although samurai per se no longer existed, an idolized and nostalgic interpretation of them became popular in Japanese society. Subsequently, during the Taisho era, budō became part of the standard educational curriculum in Japanese schools - kendo for boys and naginata (spear) for girls.
In 1915 the military began development of guntō-jutsū — sword fighting for war — and in 1925 the Rikuan Toyama Gakkō (Imperial Toyama Military Academy) assigned Lieutenant Morinaga Kiyoshi (1897-1981) to develop modern and effective kenjutsū training. Morinaga and Kunii Zenya (1894-1960), both Gakkō instructors, in turn invited Nakayama and Takano Sasaburo (1862-1950) to work with them to develop techniques for the Gakkō that could be taught to officers in a matter of months. The result was Guntō Sohō Battō-jutsū — seven waza that are the foundation of today’s Toyama-ryū Battōdō. Please note that battō-jutsū was taught at the Gakkō in concert with kendo, judo, jukenjutsū (bayonet), tanken (dagger), marksmanship, and marching.
The intent of kenjutsū training for officers was not combat and certainly not sword-fighting as bayonets, handguns and rifles were far more effective. It’s likely that the role of kenjutsū was as noted above, much like kendo training, to give officers a psychological edge. To help them maintain zanshin — level headedness — in stressful combat experiences.
1938 Horrors of War trading cards depicting Chinese and Japanese soldiers fighting in close combat.
Brian Toland’s 1970, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of Japan, and Ian Buruma’s 2004, Inventing Japan: 1853-1964, both do an excellent job of describing the Japanese government’s transformation from nominal democracy to military government. Herbert P. Bix’s lengthy 2016, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan also does yeoman’s work in recounting the inner workings of the Kokutai during this period.
Nevertheless, with Japan’s invasion of China’s northern provinces in 1931 and continuing attacks through the 1937, swords did come into use in combat. While Japan had nominally won earlier wars, in close combat and in urban environments Japanese soldiers had been schooled by their Chinese and Russian counterparts. Emblematic of this was an event during the Russo-Japanese War when Aleksandar Lekso Saicic, a Montenegrin lieutenant in the Russian army, killed a Japanese officer dressed in samurai armor during a mounted duel with swords. Now the use of swords had to be practical and became the study of quick and effective killing at close quarters - Jissen budō.
With this in mind, further development of guntō-jutsū was initiated, based in “research” on how to use a sword more effectively by Colonel Takayama Masakichi (1899-1972). Takayama was highly ranked in several budō including kendo, jukenjutsū and battō, and taught sword arts at several Japanese naval academies. In the early days of the Second Sino-Japanese war Takayama traveled to Northern China to study battlefield activity and concluded that then current guntō-jutsū training wasn’t effective. Without going into details of Takayama’s “research,” he performed it on between twenty and forty Chinese POWs between 1937 and 1939 including during the Nanjing Massacre.
Takayama’s activities may pale in comparison with that of war criminals such as Tanaka Gunkichi, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, but it was nevertheless horrific. Iris Chang’s 1997 The Rape of Nanjing is one of the definitive books on the subject. Current consensus is that in just eight weeks, Japanese soldiers killed over 200,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians, and that between 20,000 and 80,000 girls and women were raped and tortured. The Japanese government not only allowed these atrocities to occur, it also simultaneously denied they happened. That women were raped and tortured is unfathomable, and that children were tortured and murdered even more so.
There’s no rational explanation for Japanese behavior at Nanjing. Dr. Carl Friday noted that “Nanking-type incidents ran counter to the formal tenets of the modem version of bushidō as well. The Senjinkun, or Code of Battlefield Conduct, issued in January of 1941 repeatedly forbids this sort of behavior: Section 3, Part 1 states, "Do not despise your enemy or the inhabitants …"
Throughout this period gendai martial arts and swords made with modern steels (gunto) became more and more popular in the military and with budōka. In 1939, Kono Hyakuren, also a kenjutsū field instructor and the top student of Hogiyama Namio, was asked to develop a set of live blade exercises for the Busen, the Gakko prep school of the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai (Greater Japan Martial Virtue Society). Kono and Fukui Harumasa created the Dai Nihon Battō Hō, a series of eleven standing waza based on Eishin-ryū. We have to surmise that at this time any higher aspirations for budō had been subsumed to a combat focus.
“Shin Budo (新武道, lit. New Budo) was a now defunct magazine that ran through most of World War II. It argued that budo could bear some worthwhile teachings that could, often literally, be applied within the greater scope of the Pacific War. Indeed, the journal’s editorial line was clearly pro-Japanese expansionism and it played its role as a propaganda medium, using such tactics as the glorification of the Japanese identity through its martial techniques, and drawing on a sense of tradition.”
After the Japanese loss at the Battle of Taierzhuang (1938), it was determined that guntō battō-jutsū required still further refinement. In 1939 Nakamura Taizaburo (1913-2003), a Gakkō instructor stationed in Manchuria and later progenitor of Toyama-ryū, worked to make the Guntō Sohō more effective, and in 1940 Mochida Seiji and Saimura Goro, instructors at the Gakkō and later famous kendōka, officially updated the Guntō Sohō waza. Also in 1940, Takayama was made a “lifelong instructor” at the Toyama Gakkō and his “Close Quarters Sword Techniques” integrated into Gunto Battō-jutsū and taught to the army, navy and air core as Toshū battō-jutsū (hand-to-hand drawing and cutting).
The Toyama Gakkō issued multiple textbooks and training manuals including “Military Sword Handling Techniques and Test-cutting” and "Intensive Gunto Training Manual — Killing with a single blow," which was revised and republished in 1942 and again in 1944, even as Japan was clearly losing the war. In 1943 the "Navy Martial Arts Manual" was published and was adopted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare for the general public as a "National Defense Martial Arts”. The Senjinkun with its death before surrender directive was distributed to the general public as well. Takayama’s work was supported by none other than Nakayama, a far cry from the lofty goals Nakayama had expounded only a decade earlier.
“The question is not so much: What happened exactly and when. The deeper question – an even impossible question … is: How, in heaven’s name, was this possible that human beings could lose to such a degree their true humanity, that they could lose themselves? ”
In the Spring of 1944 Life magazine — and subsequently newspapers around the Western world - published a photograph of a bound and blind-folded, 27-year-old, Australian soldier sergeant Leonard Siffleet, being beheaded by officer Chikao Yasuno. The execution was ordered by Rear Admiral Michiaki Kamada, commander of the 8th Fleet of the Japanese Imperial Naval Forces at Aitape in Papua, New Guinea. Two native soldiers, H. Pattiwal and M. Reharing were executed at the same time in this manner. As this form of execution was not an uncommon occurrence perhaps the Japanese military believed that killing with a single cut was more merciful to the victim. Nevertheless, publication of the photo expressed a level of barbarism that it isn’t hyperbolic to say, evoked a visceral reaction in most of the civilized world. I choose not to reproduce the image in this essay although it was for a generation a collective memory object — that is — a visual mnemonic for Japanese atrocities. This one photograph encapsulated so much of what had gone wrong with Japan, its culture, and its conception of budō.
As a result of the horrific level of inhumanity demonstrated by the Japanese military throughout these wars, rather than the lofty goals Nakayama had earlier espoused, the entire world witnessed kenjutsū become synonymous with Japanese atrocities. Brian Toland’s 1970 book The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of Japan, and John Dower’s 1986 War without Mercy are still two of the best histories of this period although one would be hard pressed to find a book or movie on the Pacific theater that doesn’t include some reference to Japanese war atrocities. As it was made by a Japanese director, an interesting example is Nagisa Ōshima’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a film based on Laurens van der Post’s 1963 novel, The Seed and the Sower.
Dr. Friday provides further insight on the Japanese soldiers’ behavior — “For most of the conflict, Japanese troops lived on minimal rations and under conditions that were Spartan, even by the wartime standards. By the late years of the fighting, large numbers of soldiers were on the verge of starvation. Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that guards, commandants and supply officers would have grown to resent the food and supplies spent on caring for enemy prisoners or that they would have taken out this resentment on the prisoners themselves.” This understanding doesn’t dismiss the behavior of officers and their commanders.
After Japan’s surrender and the establishment of an American administration, budō were almost completely eradicated from Japanese schools and society in general, a ban that continued throughout the Allied Occupation. On October 22, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), initiated Operation Blacklist and communicated SCAPIN 178 to Japan’s Ministry of Education stating that the “dissemination of militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology will be prohibited and all military education and drill will be discontinued." The purpose of this and similar directives were nothing less than ending the militarism in Japanese culture in toto.
Acknowledging the barbarism inflicted on other peoples by the Japanese, Japanese civilians also suffered under fascism — poverty, starvation, political disappearances, forced suicides, fire-bombings and nuclear attack — and they knew exactly whom to blame for this. To an extent the SCAP bans were meant to mitigate the enmity felt by the Japanese people toward their own former leaders. This included related quasi-governmental budō organizations such as the DNBK that had been intimately connected to the educational and military ministries. As Dower notes, “Sixty-six major cities . . . [were] heavily bombed, destroying 40 percent of these urban areas overall and rendering 30 percent of their population homeless. In Tokyo, the largest metropolis, 65 percent of all residencies were destroyed. In Osaka and Nagoya, the country’s second and third largest cities, the figures were 57 and 89 percent.” After the war’s end over 45 organizations were formed to research and record civilian suffering caused by the Imperial government.
The Japanese people experienced both extreme trauma and shame concurrently. Of numerous books and papers written on the subject, Nishimura Kaoru’s 2019 essay sums up the situation succinctly, “After the war, the general people as well as the soldiers felt betrayed and humiliated by the nation.” In addition, what has been called a “culture of shame” was now visited on Japan by the international community as well as by the Japanese themselves. The phenomenon of cultural shaming has been written about extensively if not controversially, beginning with Ruth Benedict’s 1946, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, based on her entirely remote research for the US Office of War Information.8 Among the many essays written on the topic, Jung-Sun Han’s 2017 “The Heritage of Resentment and Shame in Postwar Japan” is particularly insightful in how this phenomenon of shaming carried on and gained power up to the present day.
“Any glorious achievement by the military personnel who fought at World War ll does not exist, whatever achievement he did.”
Some of the visceral reaction has been described as kyodatsujoutai, the Kyodatsu Condition, translated as “a state of lethargy which included deep exhaustion, declining morale, and despair.” No matter how ever defined we may conclude that throughout the late 1940s, the 1950s and even into the 1960s the popular reaction was a massive rejection of militaristic aspects of Japan’s recent past, including in all but the most sports oriented budō. This rejection carried through into popular culture as evidenced by the jidaigeki films (historical dramas) of Hideo Gosha, Kihachi Okamoto and Masaki Kobayashi, all of which to a greater or lesser degree blamed budō for creating a culture of oppression and cruelty. Even films which seemed to promote budō, such as Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961) did so in a manner that distanced an acceptable expression of budō from the normative or conformist. This is not to say that the entire culture responded in exactly the same manner - ascribing a single response to an entire populace of a country is misguided and differences in response can be cited within the budō community.
Before moving on, please note that Admiral Kamada surrendered to Australian forces in 1945, was tried for war crimes, and hanged on October 18, 1947. General Matsui Iwane who led the attack on Nanjing, was also tried, convicted and executed. Takayama meanwhile, hid near Mount Kuzumi in Kyushu and remained in obscurity for 25 years. He was tried in absentia and convicted as a class B war criminal. That 50,000 other Japanese soldiers who took part in the Nanjing Massacre weren’t tried along with him was a travesty of the Cold War and the U.S. Government’s 1947 anti-communist “Reverse Course” (gyaku kōsu) change in policies.
The Rehabilitation of Iai
The corruption of kenjutsū was based in strategic decisions by Japanese leadership, and aberrant behavior by a modern military that despoiled its own culture and history through horrible acts of brutality. Any connection between budō and some code of honor under the mantle of Bushidō, or the influence of Zen, was revealed to be a fiction. The postwar conversion of budō to seishin shugyō was not based in any historical connection between Zen or the samurai, but rather in the grief, guilt and shame brought on by the Japanese military’s wartime atrocities and the extreme trauma that had been inflicted on the Japanese people.
In 1952 the SCAP transferred control of Japan back to a civilian government which in turn rescinded many SCAP directives. Budō organizations were allowed to reorganize and did so with immediacy. At this time many former military leaders came out of hiding. Given the animosity still harbored by the populace, contrite budō organizations faced two options, they could rebrand themselves as sports organizations or emphasize the transcendental aspects of their budō. The change in emphasis to shugyō was also part of a desperate attempt to keep these arts alive at all. This was one of the few times in history when memory and power were embodied in the same polity, and perhaps for the first time in their history, Japanese people had direct control of their fate.
The common usage of the term iaidō has been attributed to feudal times, but the replacement of the word battōjutsū with iaidō actually took place in the early 1950s, beginning with Nakayama. Many gendai sword styles ceased to be practiced publicly including Gunto Soho Battōjutsū, Dai Nihon Batto Ho and Takayama’s Jissen Budō Takayama Ryū Hakuritsū Battōjutsū. Nakayama’s dojo, the Yushinkan, was near failure and in an attempt to whitewash or rebrand his art, Nakayama changed the name of his Musō Shinden-ryū Battō-jutsū to the less combative and innocuous Iaidō in 1952.
This transformation involved more than a simple name change. Kenjutsū ryuha abandoned wearing of military practice uniforms and adopted the traditional keiko-gi and hakama of kendo — commodifying memories to evoke a more honorable time. Many, including Nakayama’s MSR and various den of MJER also made alterations to their waza removing or softening more gruesome techniques. Notably in most ryuha, the physical act of cleaning blood from a sword was replaced with a new chiburi, described as an en garde position expressing resolve rather than the practical cleaning of blood from a sword before returning it to the saya. According to Dr. Benjamin Hazard before the war at the end of a waza he was taught to first thrust forcefully downward to the aggressor's throat; then chiburi. Many years later when Hazard saw the new version of the same waza he asked his sensei, "why the change?" Hazard was told that the old way was "too violent for today."
Iai quickly gravitated to an almost apologetic and nonviolent approbation. We can appreciate that when practiced as muteki no kyokushō — with no enemy — solo waza became the ideal manner to engender this more pacifist and introspective shugyō keikō. After the trauma of the war, practice of “moving Zen” promised an almost therapeutic response – a peaceful budō for the attainment of insight and self-knowledge. Returning to Nakayama’s 1926 admonition budōka now used sword arts to achieve ichinen sanzen, fudoshin and mushin no shin — a stillness of mind. While there may have been genuine contrition felt by the leadership of these organizations, given the avarice and rapacious behavior of many former military leaders directly after the war, and the continued suffering inflicted on the population during this period of food scarcity and economic collapse, one cannot help but maintain a certain amount of cynicism.
Reinventing budō — Shinbu Fusatsu — “true budō does not kill”
The Zen Nippon Iaido Renmei (All Japan Iaido Federation), was established in 1948 with future prime minister, Hayato Ikeda (1899-1965), as its Chairman and Kono as General Director. In 1950 Kono became 20th soke of the Seitei ha of MJER and in 1953 was awarded a Hanshi title by the re-established DNBK. In 1954 Kono became the second Chairman or Kaiso of the ZNIR after it had received government sanction. The Zen Nihon Kendo Renmei (All Japan Kendo Federation) was formed in 1952 and officially recognized in 1954. Two founding members were Nakayama and Masaoka, although both were also ZNIR members.
That same year, 1954, the now government approved ZNIR approached the ZNKR about a merger, but the ZNKR leadership thought that affiliating the jissen iai of the ZNIR with the sport of kendo was inappropriate. One year later though, the ZNKR added an iaidō division with Masaoka as its director. This honor was due to Masaoka’s standing as a graduate of the DNBK’s Budō Senmon Gakkō (School of Martial Virtue) and his also having taught there. Masaoka was awarded Kyoshi and a SōShihan title by the new DNBK. Meanwhile, Kōno was awarded 7th dan by the ZNKR. Masaoka and Kōno were now both leaders of different den — or direct transmissions — of Eishin-ryū.
How the division between the ZNIR and the ZNKR — or the now strained relationship between Kōno and Masaoka — impacted the development of iaidō practice hasn’t been well researched, but there was a clear division in how their senior students taught iai.
“The correlation of sword study and Zen lies both in the rigor and monotony required to master either. Known as ‘Herding the Ox, Wielding the Sword’.”
Iwata Norikazu sensei (1913 – 2011)
In a 2003 interview with The Japan Times, Esaka Seigen (1926 - 2023), another founder member of the ZNIR, a student of Kōno and a major figure in MJER through the Torao Den, completely rejected the use of the sword as a tool for cutting. For Esaka the sword was a religious artifact, a sacred tool to achieve wa or harmony with others.
Iwata Norikazu, who served in the army in Manchuria from 1933 to 1945, continued to teach Ōe’s Eishin-ryū after the war, but repudiated using iai for combat purposes. 52 The bifurcation of practices widened in the 1960s with the arrival of first the ZNIR’s Tohō Iai, a set of initially five and now seven hybridized waza, and a few years later, with the ZNKR’s Zen Nippon Kendō Renmei Iaidō kata or as it affectionately referred to - the Zen Ken Ren - a set of originally seven and now twelve standardized, hybrid waza.
These Seitei Iaidō waza — or alternative set of techniques — cemented the change in the tone and tenor of iai practice – at least within the largest communities of iai practitioners, the ZNIR and ZNKR, as the waza eliminated many aspects of keikō and focused intensely on solo waza. Were they tools for enlightenment or simply a sanitized budō?
The Reemergence of Jissen Budo
Not all kenshi jumped on the post-war bandwagon of contrition. In his own dojō, Masaoka continued to teach MJER as heihō — arts of war. He may have done this in a desire to transmit Ōe’s MJER as completely as possible, but Earl Hartman has noted that Masaoka was considered a maverick by his Tosa peers.
“Masaoka Sensei emphasized the point that solo iai practice was not enough to maintain any real martial efficacy and that the paired kata, as opposed to being “tacked on”, were an integral part of the curriculum and were essential to prevent iai from becoming “just a show for self-satisfaction where the enemy is forgotten” (his words). He also mentions that there is an Eishin Ryu “oboegaki” (addendum) that clearly states that “it is only by practicing the kata together with batto that the technique becomes useful in a real fight”. This is why he referred to his art as “iai heihō” as opposed to “iaidō”, emphasizing its nature as a comprehensive martial discipline (sogō bujutsu).”
Having been a military man for most of his life, after the war Nakamura Taizaburo continued to practice kendo and iaidō, and taught jukenjutsū and battōjutsū under the auspices of the Jukendō Federation. When practicing battōjutsū Nakamura wore a Japanese Defense Forces style training uniform, and also used a military sword belt. This isn’t to say that he didn’t have genuine regrets about the extreme violence perpetrated by Japanese forces during the war. In his books Nakamura noted that during the war he had an epiphany regarding katsujinken, the life-giving sword, and promised never again to practice satsujinken, the killing sword. With all due respect one imagines that this kind of transformative experience was shared by many Japanese soldiers — at the end of the war.
Nakamura Taizaburo (1912 -2003) and daughter Kyoko performing shinken-yari kumitachi on NHK television.
Nevertheless, of the three Toyama-ryū ryuha, it was Yamaguchi Yuuki’s ha, not Nakamura’s, that first switched to traditional keikō-gi and hakama. Nakamura taught battō, kumitachi and tameshigiri in television appearances in the late 1950s through the 1960s years when these activities were still frowned upon as antithetical to the post-war, pacifist spirit of iaidō.
During this time Masaoka continued to teach suemonogiri. His top students were so good at it that when his student, Miura Hidefusa (1922-1912), visited Nakamura’s dojo Muira’s cutting was so impressive that Nakamura awarded Miura an honorary 8th dan in Nakamura-ryū. Although many other Eishin-ryu instructors still had an aversion to it, Masaoka also taught Kono’s Dai Nihon Battō Hō in his school. In the 1960s Kono himself also began demonstrating the Dai Nihon Battō Hō again.
Masaoka helped develop the Zen Ken Ren gata which seems odd considering his observations about solo practice, but how he privately felt about them isn’t known. Nevertheless, the struggles of a few kenjutsū sensei to keep their arts alive doesn’t explain how or why jissen budō became acceptable in Japan again.
We may ask why anyone would want to study jissen budō ever again. There are two answers. As Carl Long observed, one is that a generation of Japanese born after 1945 didn’t carry the stigma of the war into their martial arts practice and teaching. They were comfortable teaching combat techniques unconnected to notions of ancient Bushidō or modern warfare. The second was Japan’s resurgence as an economic powerhouse in the 1970’s and 80’s, and the accompanying need to rewrite its collective mythology as validation for that resurgence.
This may be understood as a nationwide collective dissociation or defense mechanism. Japanese people in general and budōka specifically wanted a narrative where Japanese history and budō were again honorable. Post-resurgence media, films and books such as the popular chanbara films like those of Kurosawa Akira’s or the 1974 publication of Musashi Miyamoto’s Go Rin no Sho, re-romanticized the samurai and Japanese fencing. Mass media are what Marita Sturken in her 1997 book, Tangled Memories, called “technologies of memory,” and in this case, these technologies were given the task of creating new collective memories for Japan. Referencing Nishimura again, “The shame feelings which any unresolved misery of the defeat evokes in people an urge to “fabricate” pride and “chosen glories.”
“It is precisely the instability of memory that allows for renewal and redemption without letting the tension of the past in the present fade away.”
Knowledge of jissen budō arrived in Western martial arts communities through Japanese films promoted by Donald Richie; through the many books and articles of budōka such as Donn Draeger (1922-1982) and Dr. Gordon Warner (1913-2010), and through other Westerners who had studied martial arts in Japan and returned to their home countries to teach. By the mid-1970s jissen practice had reemerged in Japan and began to spread throughout the international martial arts community.
“Some students who have studied just iaido feel something is lacking in their training — they know how to cut the air but have no experience against an opponent who will strike back.”
This is not to say that any of this is bad. Re-remembering is therapeutic, and there were other benefits as well. The reemergence of jissen budō sparked a revived interest in koryū budō and in turn expanded our knowledge of iai. It initiated an appreciation of older ryuha and preserved a part of Japan’s feudal history that other cultures have lost, and it allowed many older ryuha to survive. Some classical ryuha were revived after having become essentially extinct - Tenshinsho Jingen-ryū and Tennen Rishin-ryū are examples. Others exist today only because they migrated from Japan and caught the passionate interest of non-Japanese budōka. The Takamura ha of Shindō Yoshin-ryū led by Toby Threadgill and the Edō ha of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū led by Paul Manogue are two examples.
Another factor in the resurgent interest in jissen budō, as expressed by Draeger and other budōka, was a dissatisfaction with the Zen Ken Ren iai waza.
Nakayama sensei performs kumitachi
“...iaidō [is becoming] nothing more than a performance of form without reason or essence – judged on the mistakes that are made and not the criteria that was established to gauge the whole of one’s iai.”
Nakayama sensei preparing to perform tameshigiri
For those interested in the study and use of nihontō, postwar jissen budō emphasized use of shinken. Although they’re essentially performative - real swords create a very different experience, as Nakamura noted - to engender the seriousness of the endeavor and to connect physically and psychically to a semblance of actual budō. It’s also worth noting that tameshigiri and the faux combat of gekken are both fun. Jissen study brought a light-heartedness to keikō that was missing from the seishin shugyō iaidō experience.
At the time of this essay, the written works of Nakayama, Masaoka and Kono haven’t been translated into English. We do have a few out-of-print books and a translated compilation by Nakamura to reveal his thoughts and experiences. In them we see his passion to bring the different practices of iai back together. While Nakamura had criticisms of koryu iai, in his first two books of 1973 he wrote of the need to study kendo, koryū iaidō and battōdō together.
Common Ground between postwar Jissen and Seishin Shugyō
The jissen budō of the Great Pacific war doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no one alive who has used a Japanese sword in a duel or combat and therefore no one who can teach it. A katana is also an impractical weapon today. Therefore, we can surmise that for kenshi who study jissen budō, the expectation is not to learn to use a sword to kill an opponent or to engage in actual combat with a live blade, but rather to learn kenjutsū in as authentic a manner as is practical today.
“It’s the imagination that’s most important in bringing the art to life.”
Similarly, the training methods of Zen Ken Ren or other solo iai practice are clearly those of budō. The act of drawing a sword and cutting is in and of itself an act derived from combat. That these waza also have feints, parries and blocks also speaks to their martial nature.
These two observations bring together the two approaches to training, but there is a commonality that is even more fundamental. In as much as the sword was made obsolete well before World War II, we should again revisit what the goal of military sword training originally was. It wasn’t taught to soldiers as swords were only given to officers, and it was taught as an adjunct to kendo. Kendo — which teaches students to face conflict and maintain a level head. As noted earlier, this was the original intent of battojutsū training.
Given that we no longer face life and death confrontations with a sword in our hands, and the length of time we can study, isn’t jissen essentially the early stage of shugyō training? Today performing kata or tameshigiri or testing for rank before judges or at a public embu provides slightly similar — although safe — stress experience.
“In Japan, and across the globe, students undertake arduous physical, mental, and spiritual training regimens in the study of what may seem to most observers to be anachronistic systems of dueling and warfare. These pursuits can only be understood in the deeper meaning of exercises which transform the learners and provide meaning to their contemporary existence.”
With this in mind we may note that in many ways the two approaches have been coming back together. In the 2008 edition of Flashing Steel, Shimabukuro Masayuki noted that, “By its very nature, as a martial art that is highly ritualized, moderately paced and without obvious “street” application, provides an ideal environment in which to refine mental and spiritual discipline.” For Shimabukuro, not engaging in actual combat allowed students to delve deeper into the benefits of budō.
For those kenshi who believe iai can’t have kumitachi or tameshigiri and still be a dō, keep in mind that Nakayama never made such a distinction. Nakayama‘s MSR iai wasn’t solely focused on individual practice, and there are MSR kumitachi as well as numerous videos of Nakayama with his peers - and of his direct students - performing kumitachi. MJER likewise, has always had always tachi-iai.
Nakayama also performed tameshigiri — although he recommended it only for higher ranked students. For those who don’t believe that shinken is necessary in studying iai, note that Nakayama always used shinken, even in kumitachi, and the correlation of sword study and death romanticized by D.T. Suzuki is unrealistic without a live blade.
“… the act of shugyo can be applied to any serious endeavor or “michi” (path).”
The influence of seishin shugyō keikō on other budō is palpable in its own way, as the ryuha that practice solo waza exhibit intense focus, rigor and mastery not only on a technical level but with the goals of meisō and naisei that other iai ryuha can and do aspire to. That rigor can be observed in the keikō of ZNKR and ZNIR affiliated dojos throughout the world.
The transformative experience of self-mastery is not the exclusive province of any one budō school or style but can in fact be the goal of all of them. This blending of the two approaches can be observed in many dojo, including the keikō of the Masaoka Den of MJER, notably among the senior students of the US-based KNBK. It can also be seen in the technical proficiency required by the IBF in their Toyama-ryū and Nakamura-ryū waza. The exploration of esoteric studies within a blended context of jissen and seishin shugyō is also evident in London-based Kurikara-ryū Heiho as taught by John Evans Sensei.
“The psychic dimension implicit in ritualized combat serves to soothe anxiety. The physical skills acquired lend at least an illusion of control over events in a hostile universe.”
These are only a few examples out of hundreds of dojos in Japan, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and in these examples, we see that the goals of seishin shugyō are available to all budōka. In as much as a reconciliation is necessary, to paraphrase Nakamura, that when practiced together these arts inform and empower the kenshi. The conclusion we come to is that there is jissen in even the most meditative of martial arts, and importantly there is seishin shugyō in the most combative budō. The common ground between shugyō and jissen is the sword itself — the practice of which can be fun and rigorous and combative and enlightening.
Postscript
For this article, I’m indebted to conversations and correspondence with John Evans sensei, Guy H. Power sensei and Carl E. Long sensei.
Bibliography available upon request.
Copyright © 2024, Anthony Deen
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