This morning I wandered down to the beautiful Sumiyoshi-Taisha, next to Eikenkai’s base dojo of Sumiyoshi Budokan, to watch a small kobudo embukai.
The schools that were demonstrating were Ogasawara-ryu (kyujutsu/yabusame), Yagyu shinkage-ryu (kenjutsu), Hozoin-ryu (spearmanship), and Jigen-ryu (kenjutsu). As there were only four schools demonstrating, the whole thing only took a couple of hours. Three of the schools I’ve seen multiple times, so the highlight for me was watching Jigen-ryu.
Jigen-ryu is famed for it’s piercing screams, distinctive kata, and emphasis in ending a confrontation with a single decisive blow. You don’t want to come face to face with a jigen-ryu swordsman in a dark alley:
I took a bunch of pictures at todays event and, rather than simply save my snaps to my external hard drive and forget about them, I thought I’d share a handful of them with my lovely kenshi 24/7 readers… I hope you enjoy them!
Sumiyoshi Kobudo Embukai
All pics were taken on Saturday the 29th of August 2015.
Bonus gallery
Here is another gallery of random koryu pictures that have been uploaded to this site over the years. I’ve literally 10s of thousands of more pictures like this that have yet to see the light of day… maybe a project for the future! In the meantime, enjoy:
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