The Hontai Takagi Yoshin Ryu and its Founder
What is the History of the Hontai Takagi Yoshin Ryu?
The roots of the Takagi Yoshin Ryu trace back to the thirteenth year of the Eiroku Period (1570) at the foot of Mount Futagata in the ancient province of Rikuzen (now Miyagi Prefecture) where a monk named Unryu lived. He devised methods for shurikenjutsu, bojutsu and taijutsu, which he referred to as “Sessho Hiden”. Among his disciples was a samurai named Ito Kii no Kami Sukesada, who combined the Sessho Hiden with his own knowledge of bojutsu to create methods of sojutsu, naginatajutsu, san shaku bojutsu, kenjutsu and kodachijutsu and founded his own bujutsu lineage, the Ito Ryu. In the second year of Shoho (1645), Takagi Oriemon Shigetoshi received menkyo kaiden in this lineage and incorporated techniques influenced by sumo to create his own Jujutsu lineage, the Takagi Ryu, containing 12 techniques Omote, 24 techniques Ura and 12 techniques Sabaki. During the Tenpo Era, at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, three top students of the thirteenth soke of the Takagi Yoshin Ryu (Yagi Ikugoro Hisayoshi) branched off to create their own lines of Takagi Ryu. The resulting lineages were the Seito-ha Fujita Takagi Yoshin Ryu, Ishibashi Takagi Ryu and Ishitani Takagi Yoshin Ryu. The Fujita and Ishitiani Takagi Yoshin Ryu are taught within the curriculum of the Jinenkan.
Takagi Oriemon Shigetoshi, Founder of the Takagi Ryu
Takagi Oriemon Shigetoshi was born on April 2nd, 1625 as the second son of Inato Sanzaemon, a kenjutsu instructor and samurai retainer of Katakura Kojuro. According to the records of the Hontai Yoshin Ryu, he traveled at a young age to the city of Dewa (in modern day Akita and Yamagata prefectures) where he studied the Muto Ryu Kodachijutsu as well as Kyochi Ryu Sojutsu. One night during his absence, his father was murdered by an assailant. Upon hearing the news of his fathers death, Oriemon swiftly returned to his home town for vengeance and changed his name to Yoshin Ryu Takagi Oriemon Shigenobu, a decision that was influenced by his father’s words, “yoboku wa tsuyoku, takagi wa oreruzoyo” roughly meaning “a willow is flexible, but a tall tree will break”. He died on October 7th, 1711.
Little Known Ninjutsu History: Toda Shinryuken Masamitsu
Little is known about Ninjutsu – since it’s been open to the West in only the past 30 years. Where does it come from? What inspired masters to keep with their training? How did they begin? Where here is a little background that goes past what is considered ‘common knowledge’ that is really not so common.Bisento (War Halberd) Seminar – Taming a Beast!
BAM!
That will definitely leave a mark! The Bisento techniques that we will be going through on Sunday, August 29th during the seminar comes from the Kukishin family (a well-known Samurai lineage). However, in order be considered a ‘true’ ninja, one would have to be well versed in a variety of disciplines. From Gunryaku-heiho (war strategy) to the ten Kontou (hiding techniques), you would also be required to be practiced in a myriad of weapons, one of them being the giant Bisento. If you could wield that, then your coordination, strength, taijutsu, and so on were probably right on point.
When handling the Bisento you must have a reasonable understanding of Sutemi (sacrifice or putting yourself at risk). Due to the heft of this weapon your recovery time is slower, thus you must invite your opponent in appropriately and give everything in every attack. This makes training with the Bisento good for your taijutsu and your kakehiki (strategy/ give & take).
Contrary to what most might believe, the Bisento can be wielded quite effectively by any with a decent amount of skill, not just the big folks. When I first trained in Bisento with Manaka Sensei and Peter Sensei in Japan, Dante Park, one of the LA Dojo’s students who was a mere 13 years old and not the largest for his age, handled it with such grace that even Manaka Sensei commented on his technique.
seminar the last Sunday of August – 29th, from 9am-4pm.
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Why Is Mixed Martial Arts So Different?
What’s in our training now?
Imagine that you had to experience only one segment of training at our Dojo. Your friend could train in another segment, and yet another friend studied another segment, etc. If you all got together to compare notes and reflect on training, you’d find you all had worked on:
- swords
- knives
- sticks
- punching
- kicking
- grappling
- etc
So, what would then happen if you (accurately) put them all back together? If done very well, you’d have the Jinenkan. Simple enough. So, why doesn’t Mixed Martial Arts look like our stuff? Good question.
How could that get “mixed” up?
Let’s take another look at that situation. You and your friends all have limited exposure to our training. Now, add in some creativity within each individual piece. Why? Well, maybe in the sword classes some folks decided to test their particular skills by having a little friendly competition. The soft swords are hard to use, and the wooden ones are too dangerous, so maybe you’d use the bamboo shinai. That’s still a little dangerous, so maybe a little protective gear would make sense – it’s ok that it limits your hand movements, since you’re doing just sword competition Now, to make sure you actually just test sword skills, leave out the punching and kicking stuff, and no extra weapons. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair for only one person to leave that stuff out, so you’d need to establish some rules you could all follow.
Now, in the grappling session, your other friends decide to something similar: they want to just test out their grappling skills. So, they decide to keep an even playing field by restricting the techniques to use, and would certainly not be interested in starting with spear, then seeing if somebody lost one weapon, and transitioned to swords, then maybe knives, or short sticks, or throwing dirt … they have to eliminate hidden weapons or blinding powders … that would take far too long to organize in a competition, and if somebody used those kinds of cheating tactics, it would be impossible to know if they’d be any good at grappling – and that was the whole point of this for them, right?
Ok – if we follow those logical extensions long enough we see that each group would get pretty good at their particular thing – probably much much better than the other group would ever get at their piece of the puzzle. In fact, it would be hard to say they made parts of one puzzle anymore: they each have assumptions that would be entirely against the established rules in the other’s competitive sphere. They would simply have evolved far too effectively and efficiently into their very different worlds. Imagine if those processes of differentiation were allowed to go on for hundreds of years, growing constantly further apart.
Now, “mix” them back together
If at that point you and your friends decided to keep the sporting aspect, but throw away most of the rules, and then start trying to put them back together for compare & contrast competitive tournament … it would likely be a very difficult thing to piece together. Most likely, at first people would try to just use what they knew well: the grapplers would probably try to avoid the swords and then grab on and wrestle, while the sword guys would do whatever they could to avoid getting too close, and keep their weapons in the best position for use, etc.
Maybe after some time some efficiency would find its way to the mainstream practice, and people interested in trying those competitions would learn a little sword, a little grappling, maybe some of the punching and kicking … you get the idea. but, would it look like our training? Would it remind you of your current experience in class? Probably not.
So, the question (for another post) needs to be: which one should I choose to pursue, and why? There are great reasons to choose each path, and we’ll explore those. For now, think about the course of history in Japan, which mostly disallowed the practice of traditional martial arts like ours, while allowing friendly competition and sportsman-like behavior. It has made a big difference over the generations. What do you think it has in store for the future?
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