A Genroku grappling master
Shibukawa-ryū (渋川流) is a school of classical Japanese jūjutsu opened by Shibukawa Bangorō Yoshikata (渋川伴五郎義方, 1652–1704), one of the celebrated grappling teachers of Genroku-era Edo. The school descends from the Sekiguchi-ryū tradition of yawara, and Bangorō's teaching made him famous enough in his own lifetime that his name passed into Edo popular storytelling as a byword for a strongman-grappler, a rare kind of celebrity for a jūjutsu teacher in Japan.
What the school contains
At its core Shibukawa-ryū is an unarmed art of throws, joint locks, pins and escapes. Depending on the branch, however, the school is broader than empty hands alone: several lines transmit iai, sword work and other weapon methods alongside the grappling, reflecting the Edo-period expectation that a jūjutsu tradition should prepare its students for armed as well as unarmed encounters.
Yielding as method: a small art of joints and balance that let the weaker party decide the outcome.
From Hiroshima to Ōsaka
The school spread from Edo along several teacher lines during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The line that proved most durable was carried into the Hiroshima domain by Morishima Kyūma Katsutoyo, a student of the third-generation Shibukawa Bangorō, and was widely taught there to the domain's retainers. That transmission did not remain in Hiroshima: in the Meiji era the domain's last instructor, Ōyama Zentarō, moved to Kunijima in Ōsaka and opened the Seishinkan dōjō, and it is in Ōsaka that this Morishima line has been carried by an unbroken succession of teachers to the present day, still presented at classical martial arts events in modern Japan as a living inheritance of Bangorō's Edo teaching.
One point of frequent confusion deserves a plain statement. Shibukawa Ichi-ryū, a separate jūjutsu tradition founded by Shutō Kuranoshin that blends Shibukawa material with other lines, is still practised in Hiroshima prefecture; it is a different school, and its presence there is not a survival of the Morishima-line Shibukawa-ryū, which lives in Ōsaka.