What draws me to Tamiya-ryū is how close it sits to the beginning of iai. Most schools I find myself reading about are branches some distance down the tree, but this one stands near the root, attributed to a man who learned in the first or second generation of the whole tradition of drawing the sword. There is something appealing about an art that is, in a sense, only one or two steps removed from the moment the idea of iai was first set down, and that has nonetheless kept going for four centuries.
I have to be honest, though, about how thin that beginning really is. The figure at the source of it all, Hayashizaki Jinsuke, is barely a documented person. He is a name attached to a shrine and to a cluster of stories, the founder to whom almost every iai school traces itself, and the very universality of that claim is part of what makes me cautious about it. When everyone names the same distant ancestor, the ancestor starts to look less like a man and more like a founding symbol. That does not make the art any less real; the schools and their techniques are solidly historical. It only means that the first link in the chain, the one the tradition is proudest of, is the one I trust least.
Tamiya Heibei himself is a little firmer than that, but only a little. His dates are uncertain, the accounts of how exactly he learned from Hayashizaki vary, and what survives of him is mostly the school that carries his name. I do not say this to diminish him. I say it because a reference ought to be clear about where tradition ends and record begins, and with Tamiya-ryū that line falls, as it so often does, between the founder and the generations that followed.
Where the school becomes solid history, for me, is in its long service to the Tokugawa. That is the part I trust, and it is also the part that explains why the school still exists. An iai tradition does not survive four hundred years on the strength of a founding legend; it survives because someone keeps paying for it to be taught. The Owari and Kishū houses gave Tamiya-ryū exactly that, a place in the world, and the centuries of quiet, patronised practice that followed are far more responsible for the school reaching me than any duel its founder may or may not have fought.
The practice itself is an unusual thing to value, and I understand why some people struggle with it. Iai is done mostly alone, against opponents who are not there, turning over the same handful of movements until the draw, the cut and the resheathing are clean. There is no sparring and no contest, only repetition and attention. I used to think that sounded bloodless, and I have come round to the opposite view. The discipline is in the detail, in the refusal to let a familiar movement go slack, and a school remembered for large, composed drawing is asking for exactly that kind of patience.
What I will not do is pretend the school comes down to me whole. Tamiya-ryū survives as several lines, not one, and the part they all share, the early lineage back through Hayashizaki, is the part none of them can fully prove. I find that I do not mind. I would rather have an honest old school with a foggy beginning and a documented middle than a tidy invented one, and Tamiya-ryū, taken on those terms, is exactly the kind of tradition I think is worth keeping.