Of all the schools I have written about, Kitō-ryū is the one whose importance is most out of proportion to its present size. It is, in its own right, a nearly vanished tradition; and yet it is one of the two roots of Judo, a discipline practised by millions and contested at the Olympic Games. There is something fitting about that, and something that I think the history of the martial arts shows again and again: that the traditions which matter most in the long run are not always the ones that survive in their original form, but sometimes the ones that are absorbed and carried forward inside something larger.
I find the school's central idea genuinely beautiful. The notion of rising and falling, of lifting an opponent's balance before bringing it down, is the seed of the whole principle of yielding that runs through Japanese grappling, and it is the principle that Kanō Jigorō made the philosophical core of Judo. When you watch a good Judo throw, or perform the koshiki-no-kata, you are watching an idea that is several centuries old, dressed in modern clothes but unchanged in essence.
I am careful, though, about the school's origin story. The tale that all of jūjutsu came from a single Chinese teacher is one of those tidy founding myths that the martial arts are so fond of, and it does not survive close examination. Kanō himself, who had more reason than anyone to romanticise the school he had studied, was sceptical of it, and I think that scepticism is the right inheritance to take from him. The honest account is less neat: a native grappling tradition, of uncertain beginnings, that became one of the best-documented arts of its age.
What moves me most is the afterlife. It is a strange and rather moving thing that a school which has almost disappeared should be performed, in essence, by every serious Judo student in the world. The koshiki-no-kata is a kind of living fossil, a direct transmission of how people threw one another four hundred years ago, kept whole inside a modern Olympic sport. When I think about what it means for a tradition to survive, Kitō-ryū is the example I return to, because it shows that survival can take forms no one would expect.