Lost Swordsmen into Swordsmen as Performers

A woodblock print of a geki-ken kai.

Tsukioka, Y. Geki-ken kai. MFA.org, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

1) Lost Swordsmen: a case study of Sakakibara Kenkichi

            During the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, the new government established a series of edicts abolishing the samurai class. First among these were the Haitōrei edicts of 1870-1876, which prohibited dressing in the image of a samurai, the wearing of swords by samurai, and eventually the general public carrying of swords[1]. In 1871, the Meiji government abolished the domainal system and established the ken (“prefecture”) system, stripping daimyo of their formal titles as rulers and thereby disbanding the samurai class[2]. Among these disenfranchised samurai was Sakakibara Kenkichi, a sword instructor at the Kobusho, a martial arts school run by the bakufu[3]. In a fit of economic desperation, Sakakibara helped establish the practice of gekiken, a public display of kenjutsu and other classical weapon arts, and helped revive the practice of kenjutsu in the face of the abolishment of the samurai class[4]. In this section, I hope to examine the life of Sakakibara and other disenfranchised samurai like him, in order to provide a perspective on the lives of the practitioners of kenjutsu following the Haitōrei edicts.

2) Swordsman as Performer: Gekiken and the preservation of traditional kenjutsu

Gekiken became a medium through which the public could be exposed to traditional martial arts that had previously been the specialty of samurai and a select group of well-to-do commoners. The image depicted here, a triptych woodblock print created by the famous ukiyo-e artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, is of an early gekikenkai, or swordfighting exhibition[5]. Notable in this image is a man without armor, holding a fan, crouching between two combatants in the bottom of the central panel. Here, we can see the beginnings of the formalization of kenjutsu as a sport – the use of judges to start a match indicates the beginnings of the transformation of the military discipline into the martial art. Gekiken, then, already begins to differ from kenjutsu in its formal goal – while kenjutsu trains a warrior for combat and for death, gekiken trains a swordsman as a performer. Another point of interest in this image is the woman wielding the naginata, or halberd, positioned without a helmet and in combat with a kenjutsu practitioner, straddling the fold between the middle and right panels. The fact that both a woman and non-kenjutsu practitioner is included in the event suggests perhaps that the abolishment of the samurai class caused changes in martial disciplines outside of kenjutsu: practitioners of naginata-jutsu, traditionally considered a women’s martial style, perhaps also felt the need to engage in the gekikenkai to ensure that their traditions were communicated to the public, as well.