What I find compelling about Shindō Munen-ryū is that it is one of the few old sword schools whose fame rests on a single, almost blunt, quality: power. Most traditions advertise subtlety, a secret principle, a clever way of meeting an attack. This one was famous, in its own time and to its own rivals, for hitting hard. There is something refreshingly honest in that, and it tells you a good deal about what swordsmanship had become by the last century of the samurai.
I should be careful with the founder, because his story is where the legend lives. Fukui Hyōemon is a real enough figure, a provincial swordsman who trained in an older school and then set out on his own, but the heart of the founding tale, the fifty days of seclusion at a mountain shrine and the flash of enlightenment on the final night, belongs to the world of religious legend rather than history. I do not raise this to mock it. Sudden-awakening stories are common in the founding of Japanese arts, and they express something true about how these men understood their own breakthroughs. But a reader deserves to know which part of the account is documented and which part is devotional, and with Fukui the dramatic part is the latter.
The history I trust begins later, and it is unusually well lit. By the time the school reaches Saitō Yakurō it is no longer a matter of legend but of named men, dated dōjō, and a city full of witnesses. Saitō interests me because he is a self-made figure, a poor man from the provinces who built one of the most important schools in Edo through ability alone, and because the school he ran is so vividly remembered. The old saying that ranked the three great dōjō, dignity at one, technique at another, power at his, is the kind of contemporary judgement a historian rarely gets, and it places Shindō Munen-ryū exactly: not the most elegant school, but the strongest.
What I keep returning to is the company the Renpeikan kept. To train there in the 1850s and 1860s was to stand close to the men who would pull down the Tokugawa order. Katsura Kogorō, who became Kido Takayoshi and helped steer the new Meiji state, was a senior student in that hall. It is easy to romanticise this, and I try not to: a dōjō is not a political movement, and most of those who trained were not revolutionaries. But it is genuinely striking that a school built around forceful, practical swordsmanship should have gathered, at the very end of the sword's age, so many of the people who ended it.
I am also drawn to the way the school trained, because it points forward rather than back. The Renpeikan was one of the halls that took up the bamboo shinai and the padded armour and let students strike each other at full speed. You can see in that the seed of modern kendō, and you can see why a full-contact school would value power over finesse: when the blows are real, the strong swordsman wins more arguments than the clever one. There is a directness to that approach that I find easier to respect than the mystique some schools cultivate.
What moves me most, in the end, is the thread that runs from the Renpeikan through the Meiji collapse to the modern age. When the sword lost its purpose and most schools closed, it took a single dedicated teacher, Negishi Shingorō, opening a new dōjō and teaching the police, to keep the line alive, and through his Yushinkan the school touched Nakayama Hakudō, one of the architects of modern budō. That is how these traditions actually survive: not by unbroken destiny but by one stubborn person standing in the right place at the right moment. Shindō Munen-ryū is still practised today, and when I read about it I am aware that its survival was never guaranteed, and that the power it was famous for was, in the end, a kind of persistence.