Suijutsu
水術Japanese combat swimming of the samurai: swimming in armor and shooting a bow or matchlock while treading water.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
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 Suijutsu
Suijutsu, also written suieijutsu, is the Japanese art of combat swimming. The name means literally water skills, and the discipline belongs to the bugei juhappan, the eighteen basic combat techniques every samurai was expected to master. This was not swimming in today's sporting sense. The most demanding part of the training, taught by a good number of schools, was swimming in armor, known as katchu gozen oyogi. Armor does not float, and a swimmer wearing it cannot use his arms in the usual way, so movement had to be driven mainly by the legs, with the body held upright. This is exactly what underlies the second characteristic group of techniques: treading water steadily enough to shoot a bow or fire a matchlock without wetting the weapon. Individual schools differed in focus. Iwakura-ryu concentrated on unusual situations in the water, including how to eat while swimming; Shinden-ryu taught methods of long-distance swimming; Kankai-ryu specialized in swimming in the sea. Suijutsu is thus one of the few martial disciplines whose aim is not to defeat an opponent but to reach, with full equipment, places others cannot. Its place among the eighteen basic techniques shows how much weight samurai training gave it: it was not a side skill but one ranked alongside swordsmanship, archery, or horsemanship.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.