The chain and sickle of Isshin-ryū
Isshin-ryū kusarigamajutsu (一心流鎖鎌術) is a Japanese school devoted to the kusarigama, the weapon that joins a short sickle to a weighted chain. It is one of the classical traditions of this difficult arm, in which the chain is whirled to entangle or strike at a distance before the blade is brought to bear. The school survives as one of the auxiliary arts carried within Shintō Musō-ryū.
A disputed beginning
The origins of Isshin-ryū are genuinely disputed. Some accounts reach back to the fourteenth century and the swordsman Nen Ami Jion, but the techniques as they are now practised were drawn together no later than the seventeenth century by Harayuki Uemon Ujisada, whose act of unification gives the school its name. Ryūpedia treats the earlier claims as tradition and follows the documented record from the seventeenth-century compilation onward.
One weapon of two natures: the chain to bind at range, the blade to finish.
Preserved within Shintō Musō-ryū
Isshin-ryū kusarigamajutsu is preserved today as one of the associated arts of Shintō Musō-ryū, the great school of the short staff, alongside its companion traditions of the truncheon, the rope and the sword. Carried in this way, the chain-and-sickle art remains a living part of the classical curriculum rather than a museum piece.