Asayama Ichiden-ryu
浅山一伝流A Japanese comprehensive old school from around 1600. Its unarmed part is the best preserved; the name is today borne by several separate lines.
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About Asayama Ichiden-ryu
Asayama Ichiden-ryu is a Japanese old school whose origin is placed at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and linked to Asayama Ichidensai Shigetatsu. It is a comprehensive martial art, a sogo bujutsu: the curriculum covers unarmed fighting, work with the sword, with the long staff and with further weapons, while the part devoted to bodily combat is the best preserved. The technical character matches the period of its origin. Work is done at short range, largely through gripping and breaking balance, with strikes to sensitive places and a passage into immobilisation; the movement is direct and economical, without the decorative elements that entered the Japanese schools only later. A peculiarity of the school is that it has not survived as a single closed line. The name Asayama Ichiden-ryu is today borne by several currents, passed on separately and differing in technical content and in the names of the kata. Part of it is carried independently in Japan, part is transmitted in the circle of schools connected with modern ninjutsu, and this is precisely why accounts of the curriculum diverge between sources. Biographical information about the founder is moreover fragmentary. The name Ichidensai is an epithet, not a birth name, and details of his life differ between the lines so much that they cannot be regarded as documented. This is usual for Japanese schools of the period: written lineages tend to be younger than the school itself, and their older part is a reconstruction after the fact.
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