So you want to research traditional ryuha?

“I am doing some research on Iroha ryu and I am wondering if anyone can recommend any good books or websites….” Anyone who has spent some time on the various forums and mailing lists involved in traditional Japanese martial arts has seen comments such as these. Such requests are not surprising given the fact that traditional Japanese martial arts come from an outside culture where we have often little to no point of reference on which to base our initial assumptions (let’s not get into the whole Hollywood movie argument now). The desire to learn more about the activity we are putting so much time and effort into is natural and of course I would encourage all practitioners to find out as much as they can, especially concerning the ryu in which they are actively involved. One thing we can never have too much of is knowledge after all.

With that said, I do find myself questioning the use of the word “research” in many of these situations. The word is used rather casually these days, but I often wonder if many of these people really understands what goes into actually doing “research”. More often than not many of these people are simply looking for books and websites written in English on the tradition in question. This is for sure a good thing, but is it really research? A much more serious level of practitioner might spend some time getting some Japanese under their belt and ordering books on the subject in Japanese available through various websites. Many of them take trips to, or have even moved to Japan to further immerse themselves and deepen their knowledge. Sometimes these people might even write papers or articles for websites, magazines, etc. This is much closer to real “research”, but more often than not I feel what many of these people are doing still misses the mark (and I am one of these people so I am speaking from experience here).

Don’t get me wrong. This work is vital to people’s personal study, the furthering of availability of correct information about our arts and useful for deepening our understanding of what the “real deal” is in traditional arts. However more often than not what these people are doing is simply reporting on their personal experiences and summarizing other people’s research into English (or whatever their native language is). Both of these are welcome additions to the collected pool of knowledge available to everyone, but more often than not there is not anything really new brought to the table on top of the source material. More over, since often much of the source material used by these people is in the form of publications available in the popular media, much of which is written by generalists on the topic, or practitioners of varying degrees of ability and much of which feeds off of each other as reference material, problems in one piece can become compounded as it is repeated elsewhere. As a general source of information these works are fine, but for fine details and proper “research” much of it leaves much to be desired and often the same mistakes can get passed on from work to work. Let me give an example from my own person experience.

Soon after I first moved to Japan I began practicing Hoki-ryu iai. As there was very little information on this ryu in English at the time, I was encouraged by my teacher to write something about it to be put on the web as well as a website I was running at the time talking about my experiences fresh off the plane in Japan. Very little information was easily available, but I managed to get a copy of the famous Bugei Ryuha Daijiten, as well as a number of books on general iai history with some short entries on the ryu in them and a couple of in-house publications by older sensei. I then sat down and spent hours fighting through the Japanese, comparing the pieces and wrote my paper, which for better or worse can still be found on the net to this day. It was hard work and I learned a lot writing that little article (it sure felt like research at the time) and I’m happy to say that much of what was written still stands as “correct”. With that said there were a few mistakes that rather quickly became clear only after I really started doing real research on the ryu in the following years. Again to provide an example, the biggest issue that came up in the piece I wrote revolves around the often made claim that the founder of Hoki-ryu, Katayama Hisayasu, was a student of the famous Hayashizaki Jinsuke. This claim has been repeated in almost every popular book and article on the history of iai and its various ryuha in Japanese for the last 50 years if not longer. Even many of modern in-house books published by modern teachers of the ryu make this claim (most iai practitioners and teachers are not historians and generally go to the same general sources we do for information). The fact that Katayama Hisayasu was a student of Hayashizaki Jinsuke is simply a given fact in the iai world today, everyone repeated this fact, so I accepted it and used this to frame the presentation I made of the ryu in the article I wrote. Needless to say I was surprised when I later found out that Hayashizaki Jinsuke’s name appears not once in any of the Katayama related source material from with in the tradition and all of the people I have discussed the issue with who have actually done any real research on the history of the ryu completely disregard the notion that Hoki-ryu has anything to do with Hayashizaki Jinsuke at all (in the interest of fairness though, some teachers of the art still insist there must be a connection, if only because everyone says there is). In order to learn this, I had to step away from the “usual sources”.

While useful as general source material and a jumping off point, the majority of what you find available in the popular media really not all that useful for real research and one has to eventually make the (usually painful) jump to source materials. As much as some people hate to hear it, to do this more often than not you will have to be in Japan and you will most definitely need some solid language skills and cultural awareness. Let’s take a look at some of the more basic things you’ll need to do to begin doing actual “research”.

The most obvious starting point is old densho and makimono from within the tradition itself. Easy to say, but it is not exactly the easiest thing to do to get your hands on them. You will have to go to those who have them and while sometimes they might be in public hands, quite often the good stuff is in private possession. How will you find out what museums these documents are located in? How will you find out who owns them? Since most of our language skills are not up to the point where we can just sit down and read them and take notes on classical Japanese materials, how to you intend on getting regular access to the documents? Just how effective your access to such documents is will often depend greatly on your personal relationships with those who either have access to the source materials or can introduce you to those who do. The degree of trust and respect they have for you and what you are doing can greatly improve (or hinder) your search and more often than not, a great deal of time and money must be spent going to far off places, getting to know people and gaining their trust. The owners of these documents often have great insight into them and spending quality time with them to gain these insights often also requires developing a good relationship. Japan is very much a networking culture and the good news is that once the ball is rolling, having good connections can lead to situations you could never have thought possible (my favorite personal example in this regard involved a museum saying that I could actually take some densho that were a few hundred years old home with me for a few days if I wanted, or if I just wanted to use their photocopier that was OK too, but I would have to pay for the paper!). Once you actually get the documents, then you have to start dealing with the whole issue of classical Japanese, not the funnest way to spend a weekend (or much much longer).

After you get your hands on your inner ryu documents, you’ll probably want to take a look for documents about the ryu you are researching from outside sources. Even in the Edo period there were a number of catalogs and guides to martial ryuha (much like there are today) and these can be very useful sources of information. Luckily some of the more famous ones have been reprinted in modern type over the years, but there are many more out there. Outside of these you might want to look at domain records (if available) for the family or families involved in the ryu you are researching. These could range from family registries to records of employment, promotion, etc. In many cases you may come up dry in this area, but you have to look.

In addition to using your network to gain access to these materials, you will probably want to start regularly scanning used bookstores, websites, auctions, etc on the off chance that new materials might suddenly come up for sale. Often these can be expensive so you will want to start saving up a document purchase fund if something suddenly appears (I have had to let a number of very desirable one of a kind items go over the years simply because I did not have the money).

Traditional ryuha, being living entities in and of themselves, have an added advantage for your research that more traditional “historical research” often lacks. That is a continuing transmission of knowledge. One has to be aware that there will always be some drift leading up to today, not to mention some serious potential for bias, but the ryu itself should obviously be a fantastic resource on itself and can help provide the correct “viewing angle” for working out your inner-ryu documents, among any number of other useful insights. Interviewing senior members is not only useful, but probably required. Researching traditional ryuha is in some ways quite similar to becoming a member of a ryuha itself and more often than not the later may actually be required to do the former effectively (and let’s be honest here the bulk of the people really doing serious research are usually researching ryu they are members of anyway) and as was mentioned before, your success on this endeavor depends almost entirely on the relationships you make and the effort you put into it.

In addition most ryuha have developed out of and branched off into other semi or fully independent ryuha themselves and research into those can be fruitful work. Looking at how the source ryu views the tradition you are researching, and what ryu that have formed out of that tradition have to say about its source can give new insights, provide different points of view and give you access to more information and pieces to the puzzle than you other might have had otherwise (repeats all steps for gaining access to inner and outer ryu sources and developing relationships here).

As should be obvious by now, there is a tremendous amount of work involved in doing proper research. There is also a tremendous amount of rewards not only in knowledge, but other areas ranging from skill (if you are actively practicing) to new and rewarding friendships and relations made, not to mention all that can be learned simply by going through the process. Interestingly many people who had done serious research often comment that while the beginnings are quite difficult, often there are times when things just “come together”. Serious researchers or practitioners are often overjoyed to meet others intensely interested in the same area they are involved in and you can often end up with a huge amount of information just being suddenly dumped in your lap. There also seems to be eerie cases of “dumb luck” of which I hear reports of far more frequently than random chance should account for. One of my own recent personal examples happened when buying an unrelated item in an auction in Japan, I asked entirely at random if the seller happened to have any materials relating to Hoki-ryu or the Katayama family. Given the odds against a positive answer, I was shocked when the individual not only ended up having a fairly decent collection of previously unseen materials that he was willing to send me copies of (he eventually even sold me some of the originals) but he was also a practitioners of an offshoot of the ryu previously assumed to be dead and gave me some new information on that branch which shed some new light on both the information available (some of it incorrect) in the “usual sources” and on the founder himself. Such “jackpots” probably are not going to happen if you are not involved in Japan and are just reading a few readily available books and some websites.

Ideally research should involve far more work than just reading a few books and writing an article or paper on them. While such pieces can be and often are valuable pieces of information, real research involves considerably more effort and often years of time in traveling, collecting, interviewing, building relationships, and the like. Much like studying a ryu, many years of serious effort, confusion and frustration are required, but the results are worth it and often the real value of the endeavor has as much to do with going through the process as the end results.