What draws me to Sekiguchi-ryū is that it is remembered for something quiet. Most schools are sold on what they can do to an opponent: the decisive cut, the unstoppable throw, the lock that cannot be escaped. Sekiguchi-ryū is remembered, fairly or not, for teaching a person how to fall. There is something appealing in a grappling tradition whose signature claim is about survival rather than dominance, about the moment after the throw rather than the throw itself.
I have to be careful with that claim, because it is the part of the story most often told as fact and least often examined. The tradition says that the founder watched a cat thrown into the air, saw it twist and land softly, and drew from it the art of the breakfall. It is a lovely image, and I can see why it has lasted. But it has the exact shape of a koryū founding anecdote, the flash of insight from an everyday scene, and that shape should make a careful reader slow down. Breakfalling is older and more widely shared than any one man's biography, and I do not think it can honestly be handed to Sekiguchi Jūshin as an invention. What I am willing to say is that the school has long paid close attention to falling safely, and that this is a sensible thing for an art built on throws to care about.
The founder himself is harder to hold than the story about him. Sekiguchi Jūshin is a name with traditional dates and a family pedigree attached, and beyond that the record thins quickly, as it does for so many figures of his generation. I find I am most confident not about the man but about what came after him: a system of yawara that carried his name, took root under the Kishū Tokugawa at Wakayama, and survived. That, to me, is the solid history, and it is enough. A school does not need its founder to be a documented hero in order to be worth studying; it needs a curriculum that people kept practising, and Sekiguchi-ryū has that.
The thing I keep returning to is that this was never only a grappling school. It taught the sword too, the drawing cut of iai sitting beside the throws and locks, and I think that combination tells you what kind of art it was meant to be. It belongs to a world in which a warrior might find himself empty-handed one moment and reaching for a blade the next, and in which the line between those situations was thin. A tradition that teaches both, and teaches you to fall while it does so, is teaching a whole posture toward danger rather than a single trick.
I also like that Sekiguchi-ryū did not stay in one place under one head. It spread from Wakayama into other domains and came down as a family of regional lines. That is messier than a single inherited succession, and it makes the history harder to summarise neatly, but I have come to prefer it. A school that survives as several lines has been tested against the choices of many teachers in many places, and what persists through all of them is more likely to be the real centre of the art than what any one lineage declares it to be.
So I value Sekiguchi-ryū as a reminder that the most memorable thing about a martial tradition need not be its most aggressive technique. Here the lasting reputation is about absorbing a fall and standing up again, and even if the cat in the story is more legend than record, the emphasis behind it is real and humane. I would rather a school be honest that its founder is half in shadow and its best anecdote is a tradition, and let the worth of the thing rest on the curriculum that people actually kept alive. On that test Sekiguchi-ryū holds up: an early jūjutsu that taught the hands and the sword together, and taught, first of all, how to meet the ground.