Over at Ellis Amdur's excellent Kogen Budo blog, there was a guest post about what it was like to visit other dojo back in the classical period and how should one conduct oneself when visiting today?. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.
VISITING OTHER RYŪHA: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the Edo period, unless one were a dignitary of a feudal domain,
there were few reasons for a practitioner of a ryūha to visit another
ryūha other than to make a challenge. Once safety equipment had been
developed, this was not necessarily a hostile action, but it was, as I
have described elsewhere, always potentially so. If one intended to
‘cross-train,’ this usually followed a match—the loser trained with the
victor. Perhaps the most likely exception to this was if a young man
became acquainted with a venerable warrior. An example of that is
recorded in the internal records of Takenouchi-ryū.
. . . , the family lost its castle to an alliance of Oda Nobunaga and the Hashiba clan.[2]
They fled to an adjacent valley in Owari in 1571, . . . . The
Takenouchi were welcomed by the Shimizu lord, Shinmen Iga no Kami.
Takenouchi Hisamori, the founder the ryū, then a seventy-eight-year-old
man, became the guest of a thirty-one-year-old warrior, Shinmen Munisai
Taketo. Takenouchi-ryū records state, “They did not see each other as
competitors or enemies but instead paid each other respect as teacher
and student.” Hisamori taught him kogusoku—in his school, close-combat,
particularly incorporating the use of a dagger in grappling. Munisai was
described as a diligent student. [Amdur, Old School, p. 174].
This, however, was not the norm. The idea of visiting another ryūha
to observe their practice, with no intention of requesting an
opportunity to enroll in the school, is a modern one. This is true even
among dōjōs of the same ryūha. Were a student of a ryūha to travel: be
it across town or to the next domain and request to train, it would very
likely be viewed as an attempt to shame the ‘host school,’ to show that
the visiting student, an exemplar of his teacher, was learning things
better than what the host school had to offer.
That we are able to visit other schools in modern times, even being
invited to practice for a day to experience the character of the school
indicates a remarkable change in the nature of traditional schools. For
the most part, we do not regard each other as enemies, even rivals. On
the one hand, this is positive: knowledge shared can be for the benefit
of all, and this is a phenomenon most likely in peaceful times. On the
other hand, we run the danger of dulling the sharp edge of distinction,
that which makes each school unique as a fighting art, an edge that is
honed by adversity rather than amity.
VISITING FAMILY
Historically speaking, ryūha exclusively headed by sōke, lineal
headmasters who managed a single dōjō, was a rather unusual phenomenon.
Instead, most koryū-bugei certified various individuals as licensed
instructors. In this system, once one was certified, one left to set up
one’s own school, no more beholden to one’s teacher than a PhD graduate
is beholden to his or her graduate school advisor. They were
independent, and they would establish schools in various locations under
the same name, with no reference or communication back to a
headquarters. The idea of shibu-dōjō (支部道場, ‘branch schools’) under the
aegis of a central authority was quite uncommon until modern times.
This is true even in modern martial arts. The Aikikai, the mainstream
organization of Ueshiba Morihei’s aikidō, allowed the opening of its
first branch dōjō, the Kuwamori Dōjō, (where certified instructors of
the headquarters were dispatched to teach) in 1951.
As I have discussed elsewhere, when one became the student of a
teacher, one was bound by strict, universally understood rules, grounded
in feudal culture. In such a culture, the idea of visiting other
schools of the same ryūha, led by other teachers, either junior or
senior to one’s own, would have been a fraught subject, even if done so
bearing a letter of introduction from one’s own instructor. It might
have been interpreted as an implicit message that the student found his
own teacher lacking, and either the teacher was trying to get rid of him
or wanted him humbled or, conceivably, that they were visiting as a
kind of challenge, to throw down a gauntlet, so to speak, demonstrating
that what they learned from their own instructor was superior. It should
also be remembered that travel was not a simple matter in the Edo
period; one needed official permission to leave one’s domain, so the
idea of casually visiting another faction of one’s own school
to augment one’s understanding of what one received from one’s own
teacher was unlikely. In other words, a visit was always meaningful.
To be sure, in the late Edo and early Meiji period, when the bulk of
training involved forms of freestyle competition, be it armored fencing
with split bamboo sword replicas or jūjutsu matches, people frequently
visited other schools, be they other ryūha or one’s own. Then, the
challenge was explicit, but not always hostile. One might also stay and
train, sometimes for long periods of time, because, for the most part,
people were studying increasingly generic methods of martial arts
practice. Competitive practice, which eventually became kendō and jūdō,
began to create universal martial arts, quite different from sectarian,
hermetic ryūha.
Withal, the old ryūha still survive, and they do so by maintaining an
old, even archaic, perspective. With that in mind, how should one visit
another dōjō within one’s own ryūha?
