I like Shintō Musō-ryū because it is the art of the underdog weapon. Almost every famous tradition of Japanese arms is organised around the sword, the symbol of the warrior class, or around the spear, the weapon that actually won battles. This school is built around a plain wooden stick, and its entire purpose is to show how that stick, in the right hands, can beat a sword. There is something I find very appealing in a martial art whose founding premise is that the humbler tool, used with more intelligence, wins.
The founding story is of course a legend, and I want to be plain about that. The tale of Musō Gonnosuke losing to Miyamoto Musashi, retreating to a mountain shrine, receiving enlightenment in a dream and then returning to become the only man ever to defeat Musashi is a wonderful story, and almost none of it can be checked. Musashi is a real and well-documented figure; Gonnosuke is barely attested outside his own school. A reference should not pretend that a dramatic rematch with the most famous swordsman in history is a settled fact when it rests on a single tradition. What I can say is that the weapon and the method are real, whatever the truth of the man.
And the method is genuinely ingenious, which is the part I think deserves more attention than the duel. The jō is just a length of wood, but because it has no edge and no fixed point, both ends are live, and the wielder can switch in an instant between thrusting, striking and sweeping. In effect one weapon impersonates three. Practising entirely against the sword, the school becomes a sustained argument about distance and timing: how to stay at the one range from which a staff can both reach the swordsman and stay out of the sword's own best measure. That is a subtle problem, and watching it solved well is one of the quiet pleasures of the classical arts.
The history I find most telling is the part after the legend. A domain art kept by the Kuroda for two centuries could easily have died with the feudal order, as so many did. That it did not is largely down to one man, Shimizu Takaji, who brought it to the capital and, crucially, taught it to the police. There is a neat irony there: a weapon devised, in legend, to defeat a master swordsman ended up as the everyday tool of officers who needed to subdue without killing. The non-lethal quality of the staff, the very thing that makes it humble, is what gave it a second life in the modern world.
I also value the school as an example of how much can travel inside a single koryū. Shintō Musō-ryū did not carry only the jō; it gathered up a small arsenal of associated arts and transmitted them together, so that to study it properly is to inherit a whole cluster of older techniques that might otherwise have been lost. That habit of preservation, of keeping the lesser arts alive by attaching them to a stronger one, is one of the ways the classical traditions have survived at all.
In the end what stays with me about Shintō Musō-ryū is the modesty of its central idea. It takes the least glamorous weapon imaginable and asks what can be done with it against the most glamorous, and the answer, worked out over four centuries, is: a great deal. The legend of the dream and the duel is the part everyone repeats, but the real achievement is the patient, unromantic skill of making a stick enough.