koryû by virtually ending perceptions of practical military value in the arts
of sword, spear, bow, glaive, and grappling. Participation in the classical
bugei flagged rapidly as the new Meiji government closed many urban mar-
tial art academies and encouraged instead the development of a new mili-
tary system based on European models. When public and government in-
terest in traditional martial arts began to revive, from the 1890s onward, it
was directed not to the koryû, but to new, synthesized forms of fencing and
grappling promulgated as means of physical and moral education for the
general public. By the 1930s, the study of these modern cognate arts had
become compulsory in Japanese middle schools, where the emphasis was
on developing aggression, speed, and a self-sacrificing “martial spirit” ap-
propriate to the imperial armed forces. Consequently, the martial arts be-
came closely identified with militarism, “feudalism,” and the war effort, re-
sulting, under the postwar Allied Occupation, in a ban on most forms of
bugei training that lasted until 1952, when the Ministry of Education per-
mitted the reintroduction of fencing to high schools, provided that it be
taught as physical education and not as a martial art.
A great many koryû died out during the Meiji transformation or the
upheavals of the postwar era. Nevertheless, many survived and several
dozen thrive today. A few are even practiced overseas.
While modern enthusiasts tend to view the koryû as corporate entities
existing across time, this perception is anachronistic. Until the very end of
the medieval period, most ryûha had no institutional structure at all, and
those that did derived it from familial or territorially based relationships
between teachers and students. Medieval bugei masters often traveled
about, instructing students as and where they found them. Some students
followed their teachers from place to place; others trained under them for
short periods while the teacher was in the area. In either case, during this
era a ryûha had little practical existence beyond the man who taught it.
Bugei ryûha can often be clearly identified only in retrospect. Teacher-
student relationships can be traced backward through time to establish the
continuity of lineages, but few martial art adepts prior to modern times be-
longed exclusively to a single lineage, and few had only a single successor.
Unlike many schools of tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy, and
other traditional Japanese arts, in the premodern era most bugei ryûha did
not develop articulated organizational structures whereby senior disciples
were licensed to open branch schools that remained under the authority of
the ryûha headmaster. Instead, martial art teachers tended to practice total
transmission, in which all students certified as having mastered the school’s
arts were given complete possession of them—effectively graduated from
the school with full rights to propagate or modify what they had been
taught as they saw fit. Such students normally left their masters to open302 Koryû Bugei, Japanese