Kashima-Shin-ryū (鹿島神流) is a comprehensive classical martial tradition centred on the sword, but taking in the spear, the glaive, the short sword and unarmed grappling as well. It traces its descent to the martial culture of the Kashima Shrine, one of the oldest centres of swordsmanship in Japan, and it is unusual among koryū in having been made the subject of a careful academic history.
The Kashima tradition
The great shrine of Kashima, in what is now Ibaraki, was for centuries associated with the god of war and with a tradition of swordsmanship known as the Kashima no Tachi. Out of this setting the school traces itself to Matsumoto Bizen-no-kami Ki no Masamoto, a senior shrine official and warrior of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who is regarded within the tradition as the founder who gathered the older Kashima methods into a coherent art. The Kashima tradition genuinely is old, and Matsumoto is a historical figure; but the detailed lineage that connects the medieval shrine to the school as it now exists is, in its earliest stretches, more a matter of tradition than of record, and a careful account keeps the two apart.
An old tradition held to a high standard of honesty: genuine antiquity that does not need its legendary parts exaggerated.
A family inheritance
For much of its later history Kashima-Shin-ryū was carried as a hereditary art by the Kunii family, who held the headship for many generations. The best known of them is Kunii Zen'ya (1894–1966), the family's eighteenth head and one of the most renowned swordsmen of the twentieth century. A great deal is told of his skill, and some of the more dramatic stories that gathered around him are better treated as legend than as fact; what is clear is that he was a formidable exponent who carried the tradition through the upheavals of the early twentieth century and the years after the war.
From family art to martial science
On Kunii Zen'ya's death the leadership of the tradition passed outside the family to Seki Humitake, a university scientist and senior student, who organised the school into a federation and set about transmitting it in a more open and systematic way. Under his direction Kashima-Shin-ryū became one of the few classical schools to be studied and documented by a professional historian: the American scholar Karl Friday, who trained in the school and holds a teaching licence, wrote a full academic history of it. This combination of a living tradition and a critical written study is rare, and it makes Kashima-Shin-ryū unusually well understood.
The art
The heart of the school is its swordsmanship, taught in paired forms in which a defined body method, footwork and timing are used to occupy the line and answer an attack. Around this core the tradition preserves a wider curriculum of spear, glaive, short sword and unarmed techniques, so that the sword forms are understood as one expression of a single strategic method rather than as an isolated skill. Much of the teaching is concerned less with particular techniques than with the underlying principles of distance, posture and the control of an engagement before it is joined.
History and legend
What sets Kashima-Shin-ryū apart for a reference of this kind is its own awareness of the difference between history and legend. The tradition carries, as nearly all koryū do, a founding story that reaches back into a partly legendary past; but through the work done on it in modern times the documented and the traditional parts of that story can be told separately and honestly. The result is a school whose genuine antiquity does not have to be exaggerated, and whose history can be respected precisely because it has been examined.