The long shinai of the Yanagawa domain
Ōishi Shinkage-ryū (大石神影流) is a school of Japanese swordsmanship founded by Ōishi Tanetsugu, better known as Ōishi Susumu, a swordsman of the Yanagawa domain in Chikugo, in what is now Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan. It became famous in the late Edo period for its exceptionally long bamboo practice sword and a powerful left-handed thrust, with which Ōishi is said to have startled the established dōjō of Edo.
An innovator of Bakumatsu fencing
Ōishi developed his method during the flowering of armoured shinai practice in the nineteenth century. Contemporary accounts describe his matches in Edo, where his reach and unfamiliar techniques unsettled experienced opponents and prompted others to lengthen their own practice swords in response. The episode is often cited in histories of the shift towards competitive fencing that fed into modern kendō.
Reach and the thrust turned into a whole method of the sword.
A surviving tradition
Ōishi Shinkage-ryū did not disappear with the samurai. It is transmitted today in the Ōmuta and Yanagawa districts of Fukuoka Prefecture, where it is preserved as a classical koryū that keeps its distinctive long sword and thrusting techniques.