Toda-ha Buko-ryu Naginatajutsu
戸田派武甲流薙刀術A Japanese classical naginata school with the hooked kagitsuki glaive; today a Dane heads it and an American is among its teachers.
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About Toda-ha Buko-ryu Naginatajutsu
Toda-ha Buko-ryu is a Japanese classical school of the naginata, the glaive. Its originator is taken to be Toda Seigen (1519-1590), a swordsman of the Warring States period who came out of Chujo-ryu and also stood at the beginning of Toda-ryu. The school received its present shape and its name only from the thirteenth headmaster, Suneya Ryosuke (1795-1877), who named it after Mount Buko in the Chichibu region, where the Suneya family held the line for ten generations. The sources give no exact year of foundation and this page therefore states none. Around 1908 the main line moved to Tokyo under Komatsuzaki Koto. The technical peculiarity of the school is the kagitsuki naginata, a glaive with a hook below the blade with which the opponent's weapon can be caught and pulled aside; the curriculum further covers work against the sword, the spear and other weapons and is built on paired kata rather than on free bouting. The key figure of the twentieth century is Nitta Suzuo (1923-2008): practically every instructor teaching today passed through training in that line. The school's story has an unusual ending. After the death of Nakamura Yoichi the role of acting headmaster was taken by the Dane Kent Sorensen, and the American Ellis Amdur is among the senior teachers, so a classical Japanese tradition is now transmitted outside Japan as well. The school appears today under the name Tenshin Buko-ryu heiho.
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