Niten Ichi-ryu
二天一流Miyamoto Musashi's seventeenth-century school, teaching combat with two swords at once — the long in one hand, the short in the other.
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About Niten Ichi-ryu
Niten Ichi-ryu is the school of swordsmanship founded by Miyamoto Musashi in the first half of the seventeenth century. Musashi is the best known of all Japanese swordsmen — by his own account he fought over sixty duels without defeat — and late in life he wrote The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin no Sho), a text still read far beyond fencing. The school's essence is fighting with two swords at once: the long katana in one hand and the short wakizashi in the other. Hence the name, "the school of two heavens as one". Musashi's argument was practical: a samurai carries both weapons, so why leave one in the scabbard. Holding a katana in one hand demands wrist strength and a different use of the hips than two-handed fencing, which is the principal technical obstacle. The school works not with a large number of techniques but with a small number of principles repeated in depth. What matters is keeping the initiative and imposing distance and rhythm on the opponent — Musashi's notion of "transferring" (utsuru) means passing one's own tempo onto the adversary and thereby breaking him up. Practice is in pairs with wooden swords (bokuto) in prescribed forms (kata); the school has no free fighting, which is normal for koryu. Niten Ichi-ryu survives in several lines and is one of the few classical schools with a documented unbroken tradition. Anyone drawn to it by Musashi's name should expect patient work on forms rather than duelling.
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