Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu
戸隠流忍術The best known ninja school, covered today by the Bujinkan. No independent source attests it before Toshitsugu Takamatsu — the eight-hundred-year line is unproven.
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About Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu
Togakure-ryu is the best known of the so-called ninja schools and at the same time the most disputed. Tradition traces it to Daisuke Togakure, said to have founded it in the twelfth century after fleeing as a defeated warrior into the mountains of Iga; the teaching is then said to have passed through families for thirty-two generations to Toshitsugu Takamatsu (1889–1972) and from him to Masaaki Hatsumi, who covers it today in the Bujinkan. The school is famous for what it teaches: movement in terrain and at night, concealment, reconnaissance, fighting with special tools such as the shuko, kusarigama and shuriken, and the short straight ninjato sword. It is precisely this repertoire that made Togakure-ryu the template for the cinematic idea of the ninja. The problem is documentation, and it deserves to be named. Before Takamatsu there is no independent source attesting the school — every genealogy comes from him or from his students. Japanese scholars of koryu, among them Kiyoshi Watatani, have questioned its continuity, and historians now regard it as unproven. That changes nothing about what is practised in it; it does change the claim of eight hundred unbroken years. The teaching derived from Takamatsu is today covered by three organisations — the Bujinkan, the Genbukan and the Jinenkan — which differ in their approach to form and to the documentation of the lineages.
Similar styles
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