Originally posted by Ulf Lehmann
Some dojo in Europe train the KSR Kenjutsu of Inaba sensei (Kyoto). Most of the dojoleaders was Aikido-students of him and learned swordmanship on this way.
Who knows the real connections between Inaba sensei and the Kashima "headquarter"?
There are different opinions here - some people say, Inaba sensei teaches only a kind of Kenjutsu influenced by the KSR; some people say, he teaches the true, old technics; some people call his style the Inaba ha Kashima shin ryu...
I donīt know if he teaches all KSR traditions or only Kenjutsu (maybe, also Battojutsu?) as a part of his Aikido-training.
Do you have some informations?
This is not really an issue that reduces to opinion; the facts could not be clearer. There are currently only two places in Europe (one group in Helsinki and one in Frankfurt) where KSR is taught under authorization by the current (or past) KSR headmasters.
The swordwork taught at various Aikido schools in England and France that Ulf refers to derives from Kashima-Shinryu, via Inaba Minoru, the head Aikido instructor at the Meiji Grand Shrine in Tokyo. It is NOT, however, Kashima-Shinryu--in either a formal or a practical sense.
Inaba has worked a bit of Kashima-Shinryu kenjutsu and some other weapon training into his aikido curriculum at the Meiji Grand Shrine. Neither he nor his teacher, Tanaka Shigeo, however, has any formal connections with the current Kashima-Shinryu soke or shihanke, and neither has any Kashima-Shinryu license or credentials from either Kunii Zen'ya (the previous soke/shihanke) or Seki Humitake (the current shihanke).
The Inaba connection with KSR began when Tanaka wished to learn Kashima Shinryu from Kunii, because he was teaching Aikido at the University of Tokyo, and his students were becoming discouraged by their inability to hold their own in friendly matches with the karate club students, who practiced at the same time. Determining that what his students needed was some weapons training, he went to Kunii to learn kenjutsu. But, as he was already 40 at the time, he found he was not learning well, and so he brought one of his senior students, Inaba, at the time an undergraduate university student, to study with Kunii as well.
Inaba studied KSR for less than a year, and never received any diploma from Kunii Zen'ya, from Seki, or from the Kashima-Shinryu Federation of Martial Sciences. Sometime after Kunii's death in 1966, however, one of Inaba's supervisors asked Kunii Zen'ya's widow for permission for him to teach Kashima-Shinryu to the shrine attendants, arguing that Shinto authorities did not recognize Aikido as proper martial training for shrine attendants, because it lacks any form of *harai* (exorcism). Under the circumstances, it was determined that this request could not be refused.
Nevertheless, because his period of training was far too short to learn and understand the arcana of Kashima-Shinryu, the permission granted Inaba extends only to the teaching of fundamental kenjutsu techniques (but NOT other weapons; he had never actually trained at any KSR weapons other than the sword), at the dojo of the Meiji Grand Shrine. He has no authority to issue Kashima-Shinryu diplomas, nor does he have any right to use the name Kashima-Shinryu or to allow any of his students to use it.
Thus Inaba's formal status within Kashima-Shinryu is that of teaching basic sword techniques within the framework of Aikido instruction at the Meiji Grand Shrine dojo. His students and the students of his students have no formal relationship whatsoever to KSR.
Perhaps even more importantly, what Mr. Inaba practices is not KSR in any practical sense, either. This is an issue that goes way beyond any possible objections that statements about formal legitimacy may involve hair-splitting or bias, or that they may be irrelevant to students who simply want "to learn the art."
Aikido and Kashima-Shinryu have elements in common, but they are really fundamentally different in strategy, philosophy and patterns of movement. (A rough analogy might be the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity.)
If one tries to teach Aikido and KSR techniques at the same time one will NOT (cannot) perform the KSR techniques correctly (in so far as "correctness" is defined by members of KSR). The sword techniques and kata taught might share some similarities to KSR, but the key elements (i.e., the very elements that give KSR its unique identity) will either be corrupted or missing altogether. At that point, they no longer are KSR techniques.
This is emphatically the case with the kenjutsu kata that Mr. Inaba and his students practice. Inaba's interpretation of KSR kata is heavily flavored by Aikido and thoroughly reshaped by minimal initial exposure to the real thing compounded by 3 decades of practicing in isolation. Many of the kata are unrecognizable to students of orthodox Kashima-Shinryu; most of the basic patterns and rhythms of movement and application of power are.
One easy way to see this is to compare the movements and form of Mr. Inaba and his students with that of Kunii Zen'ya and his students in the 1960s, and with that of Seki Humitake and his students today (footage of Kunii, Seki and their students can be seen in the 11 volume video series produced a couple of years back by Gaisei International, in Japan; still photos, taken from the video series, can be seen in the May 1999 issue of *Hiden* magazine).
The differences between the postures and application of energy of Inaba (and his students) today and those of Kunii Zen'ya are also strikingly clear in the photographs that appear in the recent *Aiki News* articles (issue #s 123 & 124) on Inaba; the photo of Inaba performing kesa-giri in 1967 looks pretty much like what a student of KSR today with a year or so's training would look like; the photos of Inaba and his students from the 1970s and later look VERY different, and very much like Aikido.
In sum, it behooves no one, least of all Mr. Inaba and his students, to label the kenjutsu they practice as "Kashima-Shinryu." What it is in fact, is a style of sword work *derived from* KSR. Inaba has found his own path in Aikido and his own insights about swordsmanship. His kenjutsu deserves to be seen and evaluated in that light, and in terms of its contribution to Aikido, and not confused by its remote origins in a fundamentally different art, learned from a teacher (Kunii Zen'ya) who was publicly contemptuous of Aikido.
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602