I keep coming back to Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu (無双直伝英信流) because it refuses to behave like the tidy little museum object people want it to be. I know the temptation. I know the glossy fantasy. A sword, a kneeling figure, a clean cut through imaginary danger, a photograph with just enough shadow to make everyone feel terribly profound. Lovely. Also slightly ridiculous. I do not study Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu because I want to cosplay an antique ghost with polished manners and questionable dental care. I study it because it is one of those traditions that stares back at me and asks whether I am actually awake, whether my hand knows what my mouth claims, whether my posture is discipline or theatre, and whether I can tell the difference before something sharp does the editing for me.
I always write the name as Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu (無双直伝英信流), not only in kanji and not only in Roman letters, because both matter. The kanji carries the weight; the Roman letters let English readers enter the room without crawling through a dictionary with a torch between their teeth. Muso (無双) suggests “without equal” or “peerless,” Jikiden (直伝) means direct transmission, Eishin (英信) carries the name of Hasegawa Eishin, and Ryu (流) is the stream, the school, the current. I like that word “current.” A ryu is not a dead object sealed behind glass. A stream moves. It carries silt, stones, dead leaves, fish, memory, argument, ego, devotion, and occasionally the sort of historical confusion that makes modern people shout on the internet as if caps lock were a form of scholarship. I find that oddly comforting.
When I dig into the Japanese sources, the history becomes more interesting than the mythology, which is inconvenient for anyone trying to sell a simple legend. I am leaning here on real Japanese references, not pub smoke and sword-shop poetry: Zen Nihon Iaido Renmei Shikoku Chiku Renmei (全日本居合道連盟四国地区連盟) and its page “Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu ni tsuite” (無双直伝英信流について), Nihon Kobudo Kyokai (日本古武道協会) and its entry “Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu Iai-jutsu” (無雙直傳英信流居合術), Seito Seiryu Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu Iaido Kokusai Renmei (正統正流無雙直傳英信流居合道国際連盟), Nihon Iaido Renmei Hyogo Shibu (日本居合道連盟兵庫支部), the Kochi City piece “Itagaki Taisuke to Eishin Ryu” (板垣退助と英信流), Nakai Kenji’s 2020 study “Iaido no keifu to fukyu ni kansuru ichi-kosatsu” (居合道の系譜と普及に関する一考察), and Ogura Kazuhiro’s 2017 paper “Tosa Eishin Ryu-kei Iai ni miru Shinkage Ryu no eikyo” (土佐英信流系居合に見る新陰流の影響). I mention them because romance is cheap, but responsibility costs a little more. Usually the price is reading.
The first thing I refuse to flatten is the founder question. It is too easy to say, “Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚助重信) founded it,” and then walk away feeling historically nourished. I do not buy that neatness. The Japanese material itself is more careful. Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu is remembered as iai no shiso (居合の始祖), the origin figure or founder of iai as a broad tradition. But Hasegawa Chikara-no-suke Eishin (長谷川主税助英信) is treated by key Japanese sources as ryuso (流祖), the founder of the specific line that becomes Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu. That distinction matters. It is not pedantry. It is the difference between saying “this river begins in the mountains” and saying “this particular channel was cut here, by these hands, through this soil.” Both can be true. Only a lazy mind needs one to devour the other.
I like that the school carries a double ancestry, because people do too. Hayashizaki gives the deep mythic root of iai, the sudden necessity of drawing and cutting in the same breath. Hasegawa Eishin gives the named form of this transmission, the identity that later generations would recognise as Eishin Ryu. Then the Tosa story takes over, and Tosa is where this tradition becomes beautifully stubborn. Japanese sources describe the transmission into Tosa through Hayashi Rokudayu (林六太夫), often placed in Enpo 2 (延宝二年), 1674, and the school’s protection there as an otome-ryu (御留流), a domain-restricted tradition. I love that phrase, not because I want to romanticise feudal privilege - heaven forbid, we have enough aristocratic nonsense in Britain to last several apocalypses - but because it reminds me that martial traditions survive through particular places, particular obligations, and particular people who care enough to be irritating about continuity.
And yes, I know the famous story: Hasegawa Eishin supposedly transformed iai by drawing from the sword worn edge-up, adapting to the uchigatana (打刀). It is a tidy story. It sounds right. It has that seductive “one genius changed everything” flavour that modern audiences adore because it resembles a film trailer. But the Shikoku federation source is cautious, and I respect that caution more than I respect dramatic fog. It states that this popular explanation is not confirmed in older densho (伝書), the transmission documents, and appears clearly only much later, in the Showa period. That does not make it worthless. It makes it a tradition narrative, not a fact I can throw around like a brick. I prefer that. A living tradition should be strong enough to survive honest doubt. If it cannot, perhaps it was not a tradition. Perhaps it was just a costume with an inferiority complex.
The school also split, shifted, and reorganised, because human beings were involved and human beings can complicate a cup of tea. The Tosa line later produced what came to be called Tanimura-ha (谷村派) and Shimomura-ha (下村派). Those names themselves are later labels, and I try not to pretend they fell from heaven engraved on lacquered tablets. The Tanimura line feeds directly into the Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu that most people recognise today, while the Shimomura line matters deeply for Muso Shinden Ryu (夢想神伝流), especially through Nakayama Hakudo (中山博道), who studied across related lines and helped shape a different modern current. So when someone says “the real line” with too much confidence and too little bibliography, I get the same expression I reserve for airport sushi. Concerned. Polite. Ready for consequences.
The Meiji period is where the romance gets bruised in a useful way. The old samurai order collapses, sword culture changes, modern institutions arrive, and suddenly a tradition that once lived inside domain structures has to survive in a different world. Kochi City’s account of “Itagaki Taisuke to Eishin Ryu” (板垣退助と英信流) points to Itagaki Taisuke (板垣退助), the Tosa-born political figure, noticing the decline of the ryu when he returned home in 1893 and helping its revival. I find that moment deeply human. Not grand. Not cinematic. Just a tradition fraying at the edges, and someone with enough memory and influence deciding that it should not simply rot away because the new age had no patience for old forms. Every tradition that survives modernity has a moment like that, I think: the moment when someone chooses preservation over convenience. That is not always glamorous. Sometimes it is paperwork, persuasion, rooms with bad lighting, and elderly men arguing over details with the intensity of theologians debating soup.
Then comes Oe Masamichi (大江正路), and I cannot speak about modern Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu without him. I do not see him as a museum guard. I see him as a dangerous kind of preserver, the sort who saves something by changing its frame. Japanese sources credit Oe with sorting, reorganising, renaming, and consolidating older material into the structure that became the modern public curriculum. That is a provocative thing to admit, because some people want “tradition” to mean untouched, unfiltered, pure, and preferably wrapped in a silk cloth nobody has breathed on since 1650. But that is not how survival works. Survival is selection. Survival is compression. Survival is deciding what can still be taught, what can still be transmitted, what must be named clearly enough that students with modern lives and modern knees - poor doomed knees - can enter the stream without drowning in inherited chaos.
The modern curriculum most people meet is already a codified body. I encounter Dai Nihon Battoho (大日本抜刀法), the “Great Japan Drawing Sword Method,” as a modern introductory and foundational set. I encounter Seiza no Bu (正座之部), the seated forms, with names such as Mae (前), Migi (右), Hidari (左), Ushiro (後), Yaegaki (八重垣), Ukenagashi (受流), Kaishaku (介錯), Tsukekomi (附込), Tsukikage (月影), Oikaze (追風), and Nukiuchi (抜打). I encounter Tatehiza no Bu (立膝之部), the raised-knee forms of the older Eishin material, with Yokogumo (横雲), Tora Issoku (虎一足), Inazuma (稲妻), Ukigumo (浮雲), Oroshi (颪), Iwanami (岩波), Uroko Gaeshi (鱗返), Nami Gaeshi (波返), Taki Otoshi (瀧落), and Makko (真向). I encounter Oku-iai (奥居合), the inner or advanced forms, divided in many modern lines into seated and standing sections, with names that sound almost poetic until I remember they are not there to make me feel artistic. Kasumi (霞), Sune Kakoi (脛囲), Tozume (戸詰), Towaki (戸脇), Shihogiri (四方切), Tanashita (棚下), Ryozume (両詰), Torabashiri (虎走), Yukizure (行連), Rentatsu (連達), Somakuri (惣捲), Sodome (惣留), Shinobu (信夫), Yukichigai (行違), Sode Surigaeshi (袖摺返), Moniri (門入), Kabezoe (壁添), and the Itomagoi (暇乞) forms - farewells, exits, last moments - all of them remind me that kata names are doors, not decorations.
But if I only memorise names, I have achieved the spiritual depth of a menu. Technique in Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu is not “draw sword, look severe, cut air, return sword, receive applause from ghosts.” I wish it were that easy. My ego would enjoy the holiday. The technique begins before the sword leaves the saya (鞘). It begins in how I sit, how I stand, how I place my breath, how I understand maai (間合い), distance and interval, how I sense sen (先), initiative and timing. The Japanese teaching material from the Seito Seiryu Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu Iaido Kokusai Renmei warns that without understanding sen - sen no sen (先の先), tai no sen (対の先), go no sen (後の先) - practice becomes katana no odori (刀の踊り), a sword dance. That phrase is a slap with a smile. It says exactly what I need to hear. A pretty cut is still empty if it has no opponent, no timing, no decision, no pressure, no life behind it. I can move beautifully and still be lying. The sword is rude enough to notice.
Nukitsuke (抜付), the first draw and cut, is where I meet my own impatience. Kirioroshi (切下ろし), the decisive downward cut, is where I meet my fantasy of decisiveness. Chiburi (血振り), the symbolic clearing of the blade, is where I meet the theatre of completion. Noto (納刀), returning the sword to the saya, is where I meet the truth that nothing is finished just because I want to look composed. People love the cut. Of course they do. The cut photographs well. Noto does not get enough applause. Noto is humble, precise, dangerous in its own quiet way, and absolutely intolerant of carelessness. In that sense, noto is terribly British: understated, severe, and likely to punish you for assuming everything is fine.
I also refuse to reduce Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu to solo forms. Yes, modern practice often centres on solo iai. Yes, many students will spend years inside kata against an imagined opponent. But Japanese sources such as the Nihon Iaido Renmei Hyogo Shibu remind me that the older curriculum was broader. It included Omori Ryu (大森流), Eishin Ryu Omote (英信流表), Eishin Ryu Oku (英信流奥), and paired work like Tachiuchi no Kurai (太刀打之位). Older associated material also points toward Tsumeai (詰合), Daisho-zume (大小詰), Daisho-tachizume (大小立詰), and even broader arts such as kenjutsu (剣術), wajutsu (和術), and bojutsu (棒術), though some of these are now partially transmitted, reconstructed in particular lines, or considered lost. That matters. It means the tradition was never merely about a lone person performing elegant violence into empty space. The emptiness is pedagogical, not philosophical. The opponent is absent so that I have no excuse. I must supply presence myself.
The paired forms interest me because they remove a certain kind of fantasy. Alone, I can imagine my timing is excellent. With another person, my timing develops a sudden passion for public embarrassment. Tachiuchi no Kurai (太刀打之位), in the modern Oe-shaped form often remembered through seven paired kata such as Deai (出会), Kobushitori (拳取), Zetsumyoken (絶妙剣), Dokumyoken (独妙剣), Tsubadome (鍔留), Ukenagashi (受流), and Makata (真方), forces me to confront maai, pressure, line, and the living inconvenience of another will. Other Japanese lineages preserve or discuss older ten-form arrangements and additional paired teachings. I am not interested in pretending every branch is identical. That would be tidy, and tidy is often where truth goes to be embalmed. The variations are part of the evidence. They show me a tradition moving through teachers, places, losses, restorations, and arguments. Good. Let it argue. Dead things do not argue.
Philosophically, the sentence I cannot escape is Kono Hyakuren’s (河野百錬) “Ken wa kokoro nari” (剣は心なり), “the sword is the heart.” I know, I know. It sounds like the sort of phrase that could be printed on a mug and sold to someone who owns more swords than books. But inside the tradition it is not sentimental. It is an accusation. If the sword is the heart, then my technique reveals my evasions. My grip reveals my fear. My posture reveals my vanity. My rushed noto reveals my hunger to be finished. My overdramatic chiburi reveals that I have watched too many films and not enough teachers. Kono’s instruction, preserved in Japanese line sources, also warns against private alterations and careless personal additions to the transmitted forms. That can sound conservative in the dull sense, as if the point were to become a photocopier in a hakama. I do not read it that way. I read it as discipline against narcissism. The form existed before my mood, and it will outlive my cleverness. That is healthy. My cleverness is not always the national treasure it imagines itself to be.
Tradition in Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu is not blind obedience, though some people would like it to be because obedience is easier to manage than understanding. The Tosa Jikiden Eishin Ryu (土佐直伝英信流) material speaks about older entry through kisho-mon (起請文), written vows, and about transmission as something that includes kokoro (心), shiso (思想), and ningen kankei (人間関係) - heart, thought, and human relationship. That is important. A ryu is not a download. I cannot acquire it by hoarding PDFs, watching slow-motion videos, and correcting strangers online with the solemnity of a damp magistrate. Transmission happens through bodies, corrections, repetition, trust, irritation, humility, and time. Especially irritation. Anyone who has trained long enough knows that irritation is a surprisingly reliable spiritual instrument.
I do not worship the past. Worship makes people stupid, and the past has quite enough crimes without my incense. But I respect continuity. There is a difference. To worship the past is to lie for it. To respect it is to listen carefully, including when it contradicts the bedtime story. The Japanese sources are honest enough to show rupture as well as continuity. After Oe Masamichi, the modern succession moves through figures such as Hokiyama Namio (穂岐山波雄), Fukui Harumasa (福井春政), Kono Hyakuren (河野百錬), Fukui Seizan (福井聖山), and Ikeda Seiko (池田聖昂) in one major line, but there are other legitimate currents, including Yamanouchi-ha (山内派) connected with Yamanouchi Toyotake (山内豊健), and Tosa Jikiden Eishin Ryu lines connected with Fukui Harumasa and Takeshima Toshio (竹嶋壽雄). The Nihon Kobudo Kyokai recognises a Yamanouchi-related public line; Chikenkai (知剣会) preserves its own detailed Yamanouchi-ha genealogy and menkyo culture; national and regional iai organisations tell their own line stories. This is not a scandal. It is history doing what history does when no one can force it to sit still.
That is why I am suspicious of people who throw generation numbers around without naming the line. “The twentieth soke,” “the twenty-first head,” “the true inheritor” - fine, but which counting, which branch, which documents, which organisation, which teacher, which transmission? Without that, it is just a number wearing perfume. The Japanese research by Nakai Kenji on the genealogy and spread of iaido is useful here because it notes how the soke system remained strong up to Kono Hyakuren and became more diffuse afterwards. I find that believable, not because it is convenient, but because it matches the visible landscape: multiple organisations, multiple claims, multiple teaching lines, and a tradition that became national, then international, while still trying to remember that it was once rooted deeply in Tosa soil. Expansion is never innocent. It saves things and distorts them. Rather like fame, or British colonial administration, though with better trousers.
The philosophy of the school, as I feel it, is not peace in the soft decorative sense. It is not scented candles with a sword rack. It is controlled violence transformed into self-knowledge, which is far less comfortable. Iai begins in a terrible assumption: danger has already entered the room. The sword is still sheathed, which means the situation is not yet obvious to everyone, but the moment has already tightened. I must move before panic becomes clumsiness. I must cut without hatred, finish without gloating, return without collapsing, and remain aware after the visible action ends. That is not pacifist theatre. That is ethical severity. It asks whether I can hold power without intoxication. Most people cannot hold a mildly flattering compliment without becoming unbearable, so the question is not small.
Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu teaches me that readiness is not aggression. This distinction matters in a world that constantly mistakes noise for strength. Readiness is quiet. Aggression is usually insecure and badly dressed. When I sit in seiza (正座), I am not pretending the floor is comfortable. It is not. The floor is a sadist with excellent posture. When I rise from tatehiza (立膝), I am not performing ancient exoticism for an audience. I am learning how difficult it is to move cleanly from constraint. When I practise oku-iai (奥居合), I am not collecting secret techniques like little trophies for the ego cabinet. I am being reminded that “advanced” often means “less excuse.” The deeper I go, the fewer decorative explanations remain. The form becomes cleaner. The responsibility becomes heavier. Charming arrangement, really. Like being handed a beautiful cup and discovering it is full of consequences.
What I admire most is that the school does not need to shout. Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu does not ask me to believe in magic. It asks me to stand correctly. It does not ask me to become a samurai. It asks me to stop being sloppy. It does not ask me to worship the sword. It asks me to understand what the sword exposes. There is a rebellion in that. Not the childish rebellion of breaking rules because rules bruise my little self-image, but the adult rebellion of refusing the modern addiction to speed, spectacle, and constant reinvention. In a culture that wants everything optimised, branded, shortened, monetised, and explained in seven seconds by someone pointing at subtitles, I find it quietly subversive to repeat Mae (前) until my body stops lying. I find it almost indecently radical to accept correction. I find it revolutionary to admit that my opinion is not yet understanding.
This is where the “direct transmission” of Jikiden (直伝) becomes uncomfortable. Direct does not mean easy. Direct does not mean democratic in the shallow sense of “I watched it once and now I have thoughts.” Direct means from teacher to student, body to body, correction to correction. It means I inherit not only shapes, but standards. And standards are offensive to the lazy. I include myself in that accusation, because I am not above wanting shortcuts. I would love a mystical certificate delivered by owl. Sadly, Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu appears to prefer sweat, repetition, and the slow assassination of self-importance. Very inconsiderate of it.
I also like that the school’s history contains loss. That may sound bleak, but I am British; bleakness is practically a seasoning. The older broader curriculum did not survive everywhere in full. Some paired forms were changed, some teachings reduced, some arts lost, some revived in specific lines, some preserved through documents like densho (伝書), makimono (巻物), and menkyo (免許), and some remain partly inaccessible to the public. The National Institute of Japanese Literature’s Kokubunken database entry for “Hasegawa Ryu Kongen no Maki Kuyo Kamae no Zu” (長谷川流根元之巻九要構之図), the National Diet Library records for modern Eishin Ryu books, and private Japanese source presentations such as Bujutsu Shiryo Shui (武術史料拾遺) all remind me that paper survives differently from bodies. A document can prove a name, a phrase, a diagram, a memory. It cannot swing the sword for me. It cannot correct my hips. It cannot tell me whether my cut has life or merely ambition. For that, I still need practice. Horrifying, I know.
So when I say I love Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu, I do not mean I love a fantasy of clean violence wrapped in old silk. I mean I love a tradition complicated enough to resist stupidity. I love that its sources distinguish Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu from Hasegawa Eishin. I love that its Tosa identity matters. I love that the Itagaki revival story places survival in the messy Meiji world rather than in mythic mist. I love that Oe Masamichi’s codification forces me to think about preservation as an active, even dangerous act. I love that Kono Hyakuren’s “Ken wa kokoro nari” refuses to let technique hide from character. I love that the curriculum has names that sound poetic and actions that punish poetry when poetry gets lazy. I love that the school contains both seiza and tatehiza, stillness and eruption, etiquette and violence, solitude and paired pressure, formality and a strange wildness underneath.
And I love, perhaps most of all, that it cuts through the modern performance of identity. The sword does not care what I call myself. The kata does not care how dramatic I feel. The lineage does not bend because I want to be special by Thursday. When I bow, I am not shrinking myself. I am placing myself in relation to something larger than my appetite. When I draw, I am not expressing myself in the childish sense. I am testing whether myself is worth expressing at all. When I cut, I am not celebrating harm. I am studying decision. When I return the blade, I am studying restraint. When I repeat the same form again after failing in some tiny humiliating way, I am studying honesty. Tiny humiliations are underrated teachers. They charge no tuition, only pride.
Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu is not tame. It only looks composed from a distance. Up close, it is full of arguments: founder and reformer, old Tosa and modern federation, solo kata and paired combat, preservation and reorganisation, written license and dan grade, myth and source, poetry and biomechanics, heart and blade. I do not want those arguments erased. I want to train inside them. That is where the life is. A tradition without tension is usually either dead or lying, and I have limited patience for both. Give me the ryu that survived because people fought for it, argued over it, organised it, transmitted it, lost parts of it, restored parts of it, and still bowed before training because manners, inconveniently, are part of strength.
So I will keep saying Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu (無双直伝英信流) in full. I will keep naming Hayashizaki Jinsuke Shigenobu (林崎甚助重信) as the great origin figure of iai and Hasegawa Chikara-no-suke Eishin (長谷川主税助英信) as the founder of the specific Eishin current. I will keep remembering Tosa (土佐), Hayashi Rokudayu (林六太夫), Itagaki Taisuke (板垣退助), Oe Masamichi (大江正路), Hokiyama Namio (穂岐山波雄), Fukui Harumasa (福井春政), Kono Hyakuren (河野百錬), and the later branches that refuse to fit neatly into one lazy sentence. I will keep practising the forms not as relics, not as choreography, not as cultural wallpaper, but as questions. Can I move without flinching? Can I be precise without becoming rigid? Can I honour the form without turning into a fossil? Can I be fierce without becoming vulgar? Can I return the sword with the same sincerity with which I drew it?
I do not have final answers, and I distrust people who claim they do. What I have is the work. The bow. The floor. The breath. The saya. The blade. The failure. The correction. The old names, readable in English and heavy in kanji. The Japanese sources, stubborn and imperfect and necessary. The dry amusement of discovering, again and again, that the enemy in iai is never only the imaginary person in front of me. Very inconvenient. Very traditional. Very much alive.