Suio-ryu Iai Kenpo
水鴎流居合剣法A sword-drawing school from the end of the Sengoku period. To its sixty-four techniques it adds the staff, the naginata, and the sickle-and-chain.
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About Suio-ryu Iai Kenpo
Suiō-ryū Iai Kenpō is a Japanese school whose core is iaijutsu, the drawing of the sword combined with the first cut. It was founded by Mima Yoichizaemon Kagenobu, who lived from 1577 to 1665, at the end of the Sengoku period; the sources do not give an exact year, and the catalog therefore treats the dating as approximate. The school's name means water gull and refers to a tradition the school hands down itself: Yoichizaemon, it is said, after twenty years of training saw gulls resting on the water's surface without visible effort and without hesitation, and understood that the same could be applied in swordsmanship. From that came the sixty-four techniques that form the core of the tradition. This is a tradition, not documented history, and it is presented as such. Besides sword-drawing, the school teaches jōjutsu, fighting with a staff, naginatajutsu, and kusarigamajutsu, fighting with a sickle on a chain, as well as kenpō, which here does not mean unarmed striking but swordsmanship conducted as on the battlefield. That breadth is not decoration: drawing the sword from stillness and fighting with a longer or flexible weapon answer the same question, namely how to master distance before the opponent does. The school is still transmitted today, in its fifteenth generation; its seat is Hekiunkan, the Hall of Blue Clouds, in the city of Shizuoka. That its current head holds teaching ranks not only in iaidō but also in kendō and jōdō matches how the curriculum itself is built.
Similar styles
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