What first drew me to Toda-ha Bukō-ryū was the weapon, because I had never seen anything quite like it. A naginata is already a demanding tool, long and double-ended and awkward to use well, and this school takes that and adds a hook below the blade, a cross-piece meant for catching and turning an opponent's weapon. The first time you understand what the hook is for, a good deal about the school falls into place: this is a tradition built not around a single clean cut but around the messy, intimate business of binding another weapon and controlling it. That is a harder and, to my mind, a more honest picture of a fight than the one most sword schools like to paint.
I am drawn, too, to the kind of training the school keeps. Almost everything is done in pairs, and the pairs are not gentle. The naginata is set against the spear, against the chain-and-sickle, against the sword, and each of those opponents asks a different question of the person holding the glaive. I like that the school refused to narrow itself to a single matchup. It would have been easier to drill naginata against naginata and leave it there, but the breadth of the curriculum tells me that the people who shaped it were thinking about a real and various fight rather than a tidy one.
I have to be careful, though, about the school's deep past, because its admirers are not always careful for me. The link to an older Toda-ryū, and the famous name of Toda Seigen, is the kind of thing that sounds like history and is really tradition: a claim to prestige rather than a documented line. I do not hold that against the school. Almost every koryū carries some version of this haze around its origins, and the honest thing is simply to name it as haze, rather than either repeating it as fact or sneering at it. The mountain in the name, Bukō in Chichibu, is a lovely detail, and I am content to enjoy it without pretending it tells me exactly who founded the school or when.
What genuinely moves me is the recent history, which is the part you can actually hold onto. This is a tradition that, in the twentieth century, was carried largely by women, and whose best-known modern headmaster, Nitta Suzuyo, taught it in Tōkyō and handed it on. There is something quietly remarkable in a battlefield weapon art surviving into the modern age in the hands of women teachers, and surviving with its hard, paired forms intact rather than softened into a sport. I find that more impressive than any legend the school could offer about a medieval swordsman.
I am struck, finally, by the school's openness. Koryū are famously closed, and many guard their transmission jealously; this one chose to license teachers from outside Japan, and as a result a person like me can know it exists, can read serious accounts of it, and can see it practised far from where it began. I try not to romanticise that, because openness brings its own risks of dilution, but I think it has served this particular school well. A tradition this small could easily have vanished, and part of the reason it has not is that it was willing to be seen.
So I will not pretend to know who holds the school today, or to settle a question of headship I cannot verify. What I can say is that the hooked naginata is still being swung, the paired forms against spear and sickle and sword are still being practised, and a strange and specific piece of martial knowledge has been kept whole. For a weapon that left the battlefield centuries ago, that is no small thing, and it is the part of Toda-ha Bukō-ryū that I find easiest to honour.