Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

592 Swordsmanship, Japanese
holding a sword while on horseback. An examination of picture scrolls further
indicates that until the late Kamakura period the sword was held in
the right hand only, since the design of the handle (tsuka) kept the handle
short, the material hard, and the profile narrow, thus making it difficult to
grip. By the Nanbokuchô period (fourteenth century) the design of the
sword changed to allow a better hold, making the sword more practical in
battle. Descriptions of sword fights, as recorded in the Taiheiki, and examination
of remaining swords from that period attest to their superior
quality and to their increasing importance on the battlefield, though
mounted archery seems to have maintained its primacy.
From the mid-fifteenth century, following the Ônin War, Japanese
swordsmanship entered an important period that lasted a century and a
half. During this time, sword techniques were developed by warriors who
focused their martial training on swordsmanship. The Ônin War between
the Yamana and Hosokawa clans on one side and Shiba and Hatakeyama
clans on the other was only the beginning of almost a century of civil war,
starting in Kyoto and its neighboring provinces, and later spreading countrywide.
Continuous and intensive warfare, the need to keep a constant
state of military readiness, and above all, the necessity of maintaining a
technological advantage and a level of fighting skills higher than those of
neighboring armies prompted a significant change in the approach to military
training, taking it to a higher, more sophisticated, and systematic level.
Continuous civil strife brought two developments that were consequential
for the formation of early schools of swordsmanship. First was the
interest of the daimyo (provincial lord) in protecting his military prowess
by having efficient fighting methods developed for and acquired by his
army. To protect the integrity of his army, the daimyo was interested in
keeping these fighting skills unique to his domain, thus being able to maintain
a leverage of surprise over his enemies. Second, guarded borders and
limited mobility made the intermixing of military knowledge less likely
(though not impossible), as teachers of swordsmanship were now more
clearly identified with and served under a single daimyo. Though distinct
schools of swordsmanship, each with an identifiable skillful and charismatic
founder, did not develop until the late sixteenth century, the factors
mentioned above set the stage for this development in the 1500s.
Battlefield swordsmanship reached its highest level and produced a
number of schools of swordsmanship during the last three decades of the
sixteenth century, when civil war intensified dramatically in what is known
as the Sengoku period (late sixteenth century), a period in which Japan was
in a state of gekokujô (those below overthrow those above). Though expert
swordsmen had been assigned to teach swordsmanship since the late Heian
period, and some fourteenth-century swordsmen even formed what may be