A comprehensive art of Kōzuke
Kiraku-ryū (気楽流) is a comprehensive school of Japanese martial arts centred on jūjutsu, long associated with the province of Kōzuke, now Gunma Prefecture in Japan. Alongside its grappling it preserves the sword, iai drawing, the staff, the chain-and-sickle, the weighted chain and other weapons, together with a tradition of bone-setting. It descends from the Tomita line, and its founding is credited in the tradition to more than one figure, so that no single founder can be named with confidence.
Reorganised by Iizuka Garyūsai
The school took its present shape in the early nineteenth century, when Iizuka Garyūsai Okiyoshi, remembered as its great systematiser, drew together the strands it had inherited into the form now known as Kiraku-ryū. It flourished in the late Edo period across Kōzuke and the neighbouring provinces, carried above all among the villagers and travellers of the Kantō plain rather than as the sword school of a single domain.
A whole province's fighting knowledge gathered into one comprehensive art.
A living Gunma tradition
Kiraku-ryū survives today in Gunma Prefecture, where lines of the school are preserved as classical martial arts and recognised among the region's cultural traditions. Its rare grappling and weapon forms make it one of the more complete of the surviving provincial koryū.