A root school of Japanese jūjutsu
Ryōi Shintō-ryū (良移心当流) is an early school of Japanese jūjutsu, or yawara, founded by Fukuno Shichirōemon Masakatsu. Born in Ōsaka and once a retainer of the Kyōgoku house of Ōmi, Fukuno studied the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū of the sword under Yagyū Sekishūsai and Yagyū Munenori before establishing his own grappling tradition in 1622. He stands among the formative figures of Japanese jūjutsu, and his name recurs in the early history of the unarmed arts.
Grappling in the age of Fukuno
Ryōi Shintō-ryū belonged to the first flowering of systematic jūjutsu in the early Edo period, when swordsmen turned their attention to methods of seizing and throwing. Fukuno's teaching is associated in the tradition with the wider exchange of grappling knowledge in seventeenth-century Japan, including the circle around the Chinese scholar Chen Yuanbin, and it fed into the schools that followed.
A swordsman's turn to the empty-handed art of yielding and control.
Legacy in later jūjutsu
Ryōi Shintō-ryū does not survive as an independent modern line, but its importance lies in what grew from it. Through Fukuno and his contemporaries the early jūjutsu traditions passed their principles to the Kitō-ryū and other schools, and so into the broad current of Japanese grappling that runs down to the present.