Tatsumi-ryu Heiho
立身流兵法A samurai school from the early sixteenth century where sword, spear, and staff share one curriculum, and in paired forms the sword always wins.
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 Tatsumi-ryu Heiho
Tatsumi-ryū Heihō is a Japanese school of koryū bujutsu founded by Tatsumi Sankyō. Sources place its origin between 1504 and 1521, that is, in the Eishō era, and the sources themselves call the dating approximate; the catalog previously listed the year 1500 and has corrected it to 1504, still treated as approximate. The curriculum is remarkable for how it is organized. Alongside swordsmanship (kenjutsu) and sword-drawing (iai), it includes sōjutsu, spear fighting, and yawara, unarmed combat, which the school deliberately does not call jūjutsu. The long staff (rokushaku bō), the short staff (hanbō), and the naginata are not treated as separate disciplines but are classified under swordsmanship — the school regards them as ways of applying the same sword work while holding a different weapon. Yawara also includes kappō, resuscitation techniques, and rope binding; some scrolls are devoted to reconnaissance and stratagems. In the paired forms, a rule applies that says a great deal about the school: whatever the opponent is holding, the sword always wins. This is not a claim that the sword is superior as a weapon, but a training intent, so that the student learns the way to close in against each of them. The school is still transmitted today; its twenty-second headmaster is Katō Hiroshi, born in 1944, and its seat is Sakura, in Chiba prefecture, territory that historically belonged to the Hotta clan. Outside Japan, the school is transmitted in only a few places, among them Australia, France, and Spain.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.