warding positions such as being sword instructors in the service of a
daimyo. Thus, self-training and perfection of techniques became essential,
and they were achieved by embarking on a musha shugyô(warrior train-
ing), an increasingly popular practice since the Sengoku period. The second
reason was social and political reconstruction following the erection of cas-
tle towns as domain headquarters. The large population of warriors, now
removed from the countryside and relocated in these towns, was fertile
ground for the sword master, who could target a large number of potential
disciples without having to travel. Furthermore, sword teachers hired by
the daimyo were given a residence, a place to teach, and a stipend. The
benefits of becoming a teacher included prestige and a stable income,
which were especially valuable later in the Tokugawa period when many
samurai had lost their stipends.
The Tokugawa period (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries), during
which Japan enjoyed countrywide peace and a single warrior government,
had a dual effect on swordsmanship, making swordsmanship a more refined
and complex martial discipline while detaching it from its battlefield con-
text. As a result, it was transformed into a martial discipline for small-scale
combat. Under new military and social conditions created by the Tokugawa
shogunate, samurai were required to carry two swords, but mounted war-
fare or even fighting in full armor was for the most part completely aban-
doned. Warriors began wearing long and short swords tucked in their sashes
in a tight and stable fashion as a status marker, which separated samurai
from the rest of the population. Carrying swords for the purpose of engag-
ing in battle was no longer common among Tokugawa samurai.
In addition, formation of a rigid samurai class, removal of the samu-
rai from the countryside and placing them in urban centers or domain
headquarters, and changing their function to administrators significantly
reduced the need to acquire high skills in any form of fighting. Neverthe-
less, though many samurai became administrators, others became part of a
police and inspection force. They did not abandon their martial training.
Instead, they had to develop methods and techniques to solve new prob-
lems and challenges. As a result, schools of swordsmanship had to adjust
existing fighting techniques and develop new ones, such as fast drawing, to
accommodate much greater maneuverability on one hand and violent en-
counters associated with urban life on the other.
The consequences were far-reaching, as swordsmanship was no longer
simply one martial discipline among others used in warfare for the sole
practical purpose of survival. Tokugawa swordsmanship took on multiple
forms to fit within the Tokugawa social and military context. One form of
swordsmanship focused on predetermined codified sets of movements
against an imaginary opponent (kata) and developed into modern iaidô.594 Swordsmanship, Japanese