Tendo-ryu Naginatajutsu
天道流薙刀術A classical Japanese naginata school from 1582. By tradition its founder established it after a hundred days of prayer; modern atarashii naginata derives from it.
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About Tendo-ryu Naginatajutsu
Tendō-ryū is a Japanese classical school whose principal weapon is the naginata, a long shaft with a curved blade. It was founded in 1582 by Saitō Hangan Denkibō Katsuhide. Its founding story is unusual in resting not on a duel but on prayer. In 1581 Denkibō shut himself away for a hundred days at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū shrine in Kamakura — the same place where four centuries earlier Minamoto no Yoritomo had dedicated yabusame to the shrine. After a hundred days of contemplation he received, by tradition, the insight he had been seeking, and founded a school he called Ten-ryū, the "School of Heaven". The later form of the name is Tendō-ryū. The naginata is not the only weapon in the syllabus, but it is the one by which the school is known. Alongside it are taught the long and the short sword, paired swords, two kinds of dagger, the staff, and the kusarigama, the sickle on a chain. That range fits the fact that Tendō-ryū arose while a fighting school was still expected to cover the whole span of weapons rather than to specialise in one. The school's significance reaches to the present. Together with Jikishinkage-ryū, Tendō-ryū is one of the two classical naginatajutsu traditions from which modern sporting atarashii naginata derives — the form in which the naginata is practised around the world. The seventeenth head of the school is Kimura Yasuko.
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