Jōdō (Modern Way of the Staff)
杖道The modern form of staff against sword: twelve standardised kata under the All Japan Kendo Federation, studied alongside the original koryū.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Jōdō (Modern Way of the Staff)
Jōdō is the modern form of the Japanese fight of the short staff, the jō, against the sword. It derives from Shintō Musō-ryū and relates to that entry as the sporting, unified layer above the classical school. The substance of modern jōdō is the seitei set — twelve prearranged kata practised by the All Japan Kendo Federation. The number speaks for itself: Shintō Musō-ryū has sixty-four. Seitei is therefore not a simplification in the sense of an impoverishment but a common language — twelve forms that everyone knows regardless of which line they belong to, and on which one can be graded and can compete across schools. That leads to an arrangement uncommon in other budō: the student studies seitei and his own koryū side by side. The unified set serves for gradings and for meeting practitioners from elsewhere, the classical school for depth. Neither replaces the other. The implement stays the same. The jō measures roughly ninety centimetres to a metre and a half depending on school and build; in Shintō Musō-ryū it is fixed at 128 centimetres — Gonnosuke, by tradition, shortened it from an original 185 or so precisely so that it could be worked close in against a sword. The year the seitei set was created is not recorded in this catalogue: the verified source does not contain it.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.