A federation is founded
Atarashii Naginata, "new Naginata", usually written simply as Naginata, is the modern competitive discipline of the Japanese glaive, created when the classical naginata schools were integrated into a single standardised budō under the All Japan Naginata Federation, established in the postwar reconstruction of Japanese martial arts in 1955. Like kendō and jūdō before it, it took a family of old fighting traditions and refashioned them into a modern discipline with a common curriculum, gradings and refereed competition.
What was standardised
The discipline has two faces. In shiai, competitors in protective armour score strikes with a bamboo-and-oak practice naginata against defined targets, including the shin target distinctive to the weapon. In engi, pairs perform prescribed forms judged on precision and spirit. The technical material was distilled principally from the great surviving koryū of the naginata, above all Tendō-ryū and Jikishinkage-ryū, whose senior teachers shaped the standard forms; both parent schools continue to be practised independently beside the modern discipline rather than having been absorbed by it.
Integration without erasure: one modern discipline built from many classical schools, which continue beside it.
The women's budō and beyond
Naginata carries a distinctive social history within Japanese budō: through the twentieth century it became the martial art most strongly associated with women's education, and its modern practice remains majority-female, though men compete as well. Under the federation and its international counterpart the discipline is now practised in dozens of countries, administered from Japan, with world championships held regularly. The archive treats it as the naginata arts' modern, federated form, in the same relation to its koryū sources as kendō stands to the old sword schools.