Meifu Shinkage-ryū (Shuriken Throwing)
明府真影流A modern Japanese blade-throwing school derived from the shurikenjutsu of Katori Shintō-ryū. Its throw is shorter, faster, and harder to read.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
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 Meifu Shinkage-ryū (Shuriken Throwing)
Meifu Shinkage-ryū is a Japanese school of blade-throwing founded by Someya Chikatoshi. The sources disagree on the date: some give the year 1979, others only say the nineteen-seventies, and the catalog therefore treats the year as approximate. Unlike the old schools, it did not arise in a warrior's armory but from one teacher's decision to draw a single skill out of an older tradition and build a standalone curriculum around it. Its roots lie in the shurikenjutsu of Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū; Someya trained under Sugino Yoshio and reworked the throw to make it shorter, faster, and harder to read for an opponent. That is what defines the school. It is not about reach or striking from a great distance, but about making sure the movement of the hand cannot be recognized in advance as a throw — the blade should emerge from a motion that gives nothing away. Practitioners train with the school's own type of blade, but students also throw blades from other schools, so they learn how the behavior of the point changes with shape and weight. The current head of the school is Ōtsuka Yasuyuki. Despite its youth, the school has spread internationally: according to the source, as of October 2016 it had over two hundred practitioners outside Japan, with branches or study groups in Europe as well as North and South America, Australia, and the Czech Republic. For a discipline that for most of its history was merely a supplement in the training of advanced students, that is an unusual spread.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.