A student of many gunnery schools
Morishige-ryū (森重流) is a school of hōjutsu, Japanese classical gunnery, founded by Morishige Subeyoshi (森重都由) of Suetake in Suō province, in present-day Kudamatsu, Yamaguchi prefecture. The school's own record describes a founder who left home at eighteen and travelled Japan studying under several established gunnery traditions, among them the Yasumori, Nakajima, Ongoku and Kinden schools, together with military science in the Kōshū and Echigo traditions and naval tactics in the Mishima line.
From naval warfare to the gun alone
Out of that training Subeyoshi wrote a twenty-eight volume treatise on naval combat and established a combined school of ship warfare, the Gōbu Santō-ryū; the gunnery portion of that system came in time to be known separately as Morishige-ryū. The curriculum treats the matchlock not as a crude tool but as a discipline of its own, with formal drill covering loading, match handling, firing postures and volley coordination, preserved in the manner of any other classical Japanese weapon school.
The gun as a discipline, not a shortcut: loading, aiming and firing refined into etiquette and drill.
A gunnery school that still fires
Morishige-ryū is unusual among the old gunnery traditions in surviving with live practice. Its modern practitioners maintain the school at shooting ranges in eastern Japan, overlap with the muzzle-loading sport-shooting community, and perform at battle-anniversary festivals and at classical martial arts demonstrations. That continuity of actual firing, rather than demonstration alone, is the school's distinguishing modern claim.