student to move on to the next level of training. The principal criteria for
promotion are aptitude (including, but not limited to, skills and knowledge
mastered) and moral fitness to be allowed to share in the teachings of the
school at a higher and deeper level, and to be trusted with more of its secrets.
Koryû, in fact, tend to be far smaller, more closed, and more private
organizations than those associated with the modern cognate martial arts.
The membership of most numbers in the dozens or less. Many are, or were
until a generation or two ago, restricted family traditions. Most are taught
in only a single location, under the direct supervision of the headmaster
and/or instructors (shihan) operating under him or her.
Traditionally, koryû teachers have been extremely careful about ad-
mitting students to instruction and have usually demanded long commit-
ments and considerable control over students’ behavior during their terms
of apprenticeship. Many still follow elaborate procedures for screening
new students, requiring letters of recommendation and even investigations
into the backgrounds of applicants. Those who pass such screenings are
initiated into their ryûha as though into a brotherhood or secret society.
Some koryû hold entrance ceremonies ranging from the very simple to the
very ornate. Most collect initiation gifts and fees. And nearly all require
students to sign written pledges, or kishômon, in which they promise to
abide by the school’s rules and keep its secrets. In the past—and sometimes
even today—these pledges were often sealed with the students’ own blood,
pressed onto the paper next to their signatures or ciphers.
What most definitively distinguishes koryû bugei from modern cog-
nate martial arts, however, is not the age or the organizational structure of
the schools, but the holistic and cabalistic manner in which they view the
educational process. The essence of the koryû bugei experience is one of so-
cialization to the ryûha, the complete subordination of the individual to the
system—a course that promises that those who stay with it long enough
will emerge, paradoxically, with a more fully developed sense of individu-
alism. This idea derives from basic Confucian principles of education that
predate their application to bugei training in Japan by centuries. The
process centers on wholehearted devotion to the mastery of detail.
The koryû bugei are extraordinarily complex arts. At their most fun-
damental levels as methodologies of combat and war, they are largely col-
lections of particulars, expressed in dozens of individual techniques and
strategies, described in a profoundly unsystematized, sometimes opaque,
and often overlapping argot of terms. Much of this apparent chaos is in-
tentional, for—at least until modern times—martial art schools, as com-
petitive organizations training warriors for deadly combat, deliberately
sought to keep outsiders from grasping what they taught.
And yet each ryûha does have an essence, a conceptual core around304 Koryû Bugei, Japanese