Kashima Shin-ryu
鹿島神流A Japanese old school of the sword from the Kashima shrine. It teaches not a collection of techniques but principles of movement from which techniques derive.
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About Kashima Shin-ryu
Kashima Shin-ryu is a Japanese old school whose centre of gravity lies in swordsmanship but which also covers unarmed fighting, the staff, the spear and the naginata. It is bound to the shrine at Kashima, one of the oldest centres of martial tradition in Japan, and tradition ascribes its origin to Matsumoto Bizen-no-kami, who is said to have lived around the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to have been a leading priest and warrior of the Kashima shrine. This part of the history is the school''s own account, not documented fact. The lineage can be followed securely only from the nineteenth century, and above all from Kunii Zen''ya, who lived from 1894 to 1966 and as the eighteenth head opened the school to public teaching. After him it was led by Seki Humitake, who taught it at the University of Tsukuba; an academic base is unusual for a Japanese old school and has meant that Kashima Shin-ryu has an unusually well worked-out body of theory for its size. The manner of teaching is what marks the school out. What is learned is not a collection of techniques but principles of movement from which techniques are derived; the kata serves as a carrier of principle, not as a pattern to copy.
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