Tennen Rishin-ryū is a case study in the gap between a martial school's fame and its actual nature, and that gap is exactly what I find interesting about it. Almost everyone who has heard of the school has heard of it through the Shinsengumi, and through them through a century of novels, films and television in which the Kyōto swordsmen are by turns heroes, villains and tragic anti-heroes. The school that lies underneath all of that is a much quieter thing: a practical country art from the farming villages west of Edo, trained with a thick wooden sword by villagers and minor samurai who mostly never became famous at all.
I think it is worth being careful about which Tennen Rishin-ryū one is talking about. The Shinsengumi period is genuinely well documented, far better than the early history of most koryū, because the corps was a public body operating in a literate age and was written about exhaustively at the time. So when I say that Kondō Isami and several of his companions really did practise this school, I am on solid ground. The difficulty is not a lack of evidence but a surplus of dramatisation: the figures have been retold so many times that the historical men are now half-buried under their fictional versions, and a reference has to keep brushing the fiction away.
The founder and the early generations are the opposite problem, the ordinary one. Kondō Kuranosuke is a real figure, but his school's first decades are documented in the modest way that a rural tradition usually is, through licences, enrolment oaths and family papers rather than through chronicles. There is nothing suspicious in that; it is simply what the survival of a country art looks like. I would rather say plainly that the early history is thinly recorded than dress it up to match the glamour of the later chapter.
What I find most appealing is the character of the art itself, which is so at odds with its swashbuckling reputation. The thick training sword, the emphasis on a heavy committed cut, the spread of the school among farmers rather than the urban elite: all of this speaks of a plain, functional tradition meant to work, not to impress. There is something honest in a school that was built for use by people who were not professional warriors, and I think that ordinariness is more admirable, in its way, than the violent celebrity that later attached to it.
The end of the story is genuinely tragic, and I try not to let the romance of it carry me away. Kondō Isami was executed, Okita Sōji died young, and the corps was annihilated for backing a doomed cause. But the school survived, not through its martyrs in Kyōto but through the unglamorous lines back home in Tama who had never left. That, in the end, is the part I most want a reader to take away: that the tradition outlived its legend, and that the quiet country art was the thing that actually endured.