The bō of the Chinen house
Yamanni-ryū (山根流), also called Yamanni Chinen-ryū, is an Okinawan school of the bō, the six-foot staff. It is set apart from other kobudō lines by its wide, whipping strikes and its use of the whole body to drive the staff, and it is often named among the main streams of Okinawan weaponry alongside the Taira and Matayoshi lines.
The Chinen lineage
The school is associated with the Chinen family of Shuri, and its systematisation is credited to Chinen Masami (知念眞三, 1898–1976), who drew the family's bō methods into the form taught today. Older accounts trace the line back through earlier Chinen teachers and, beyond them, to the eighteenth-century figure Sakugawa and to Chinese roots; Ryūpedia treats these earlier links as tradition rather than firmly established history.
To drive the staff with the whole body, not the arms alone.
Carried into the present
In the later twentieth century the art was transmitted by Kishaba Chōgi and carried abroad by his student Toshihiro Ōshiro, through whom Yamanni-ryū became known outside Okinawa. It survives today as a living staff tradition, though the detail of its pre-modern lineage remains only partly documented.