Ittosai’s Test: Part 2
By Dave Lowry
Editor’s Note: This is the second
in a two part article entitled "Ittosai’s Test" which
is an excerpt from Dave Lowry’s new book, “Clouds In The
West.” It is about the eccentric but brilliant swordsman Ito Ittosai
Kagehisa, the founder of the sword tradition of Itto ryu, and his efforts
to find a successor. Part 1
Zenki was a commoner working a ferry that Kagehisa took across the Yodo
River, in the southern part of Japan’s main island. Legend has
it that Zenki, even though not of samurai status, had longed all his
life to be a swordsman. To achieve his goal, he made a habit of looking
over the passengers on his ferry. If any looked as if they might be proficient
in the art, his approach would be abrupt and to the point: “Wanna
fight?” He would challenge them to a duel on the spot. It was a
risky way to learn. Some samurai or others skilled in using a sword would
have laughed him off; others might have politely declined. But his method
was not all that different than walking into a dark and smoky biker bar
today, sizing up the occupants, then sticking one’s face into that
of the toughest-looking among them and saying “Let’s dance.” You
can learn a lot about combat doing that. You also risk gathering some
impressive scars. Zenki used an auxiliary oar as a substitute bokken
when he did get takers willing to duel with him, which gives an even
clearer picture of the man’s intent. Here’s a guy so desperate
to learn swordsmanship that he’s using a spare oar against a live
blade. How much he’d managed to learn by the time Kagehisa came
on board his ferry we can’t know. But it was not enough. Kagehisa
took Zenki up on his challenge once the ferry had reached the far shore,
and beat him convincingly. Zenki was intelligent enough to realize he
was in the company of an extraordinary warrior. He fell to his knees
and begged Kagehisa to take him on as a disciple. Kagehisa accepted.
The other of Kagehisa’s direct students was Migogami Tenzen, a
lower-ranked samurai of the Satomi clan, from Awa Province. Migogami
was there to answer the ad Kagehisa posted while passing through a town,
notifying any and all that he was seeking competition. He wished to test
his Itto ryu against all comers. Tenzen was happy to oblige. And when
he met the same fate as Zenki, he, too, asked to be taken on by Kagehisa
to learn the secrets of the one-sword strike. The trio traveled together
constantly. There is no record of Kagehisa ever establishing a headquarters
or working permanently for a clan. Zenki and Tenzen learned a great deal
more besides technique in this way. They had to adapt to constantly changing
conditions. They were often hungry, always seen as strangers. They were
susceptible to attacks from bandits who roamed most of the roads in Japan
in those days, as well as from those who would have liked nothing better
than to say they had killed the famous Kagehisa. Almost as trying would
have been living with Kagehisa himself, who, by all accounts, was a cold
fish, arrogant and inscrutable in his ways.
By 1588, Kagehisa was already well over fifty years old. He felt the
time had come for him to choose a successor, the leader of the next generation
of his Itto ryu. Several students had trained with him. Many of them
were from other ryu and had gone on to incorporate principles of the
Itto ryu into their systems. It was, even in its first generation, an
enormously influential school of fencing. Still, of all these students,
only Zenki and Tenzen were of the caliber Kagehisa considered worthy
of inheriting the headmastery of his tradition. He also knew that the
two were so evenly matched in their skills that the technical differences
between them were slight, inconsequential. And so he devised another
standard, a test for determining which of them would succeed him. It
could not have come as a surprise to either that his test was a bizarre
one.
The three were in Sahara. (No, not the desert in Africa—although
that would make for an engaging story, wouldn’t it?) No, Sahara
was a small town in Shimofusa Province, where Kagehisa laid out the details
of the test he proposed. “Since you are so evenly matched in your
abilities, there is no way for me to make a judgment that would have
any validity. Therefore,” he said, “you will have to make
the decision for me.”
Tenzen and Zenki could have had no idea what it was their teacher proposed.
Kagehisa explained it. “You will fight to decide who inherits the
ryu,” he said. “Whatever rules there are, you two come up
with them between yourselves.”
The two must have been incredulous. Even accustomed as they were to
Kagehisa’s eccentricities, this was extreme. They were fully aware
that in a battle of the sort Kagehisa was proposing, there would only
be one real way of determining a victor. The one who survived would be
the winner. Tenzen and Zenki agreed to the use of shinken, or live, metal
swords. The duel was to take place at dawn on the following day.
The site of the duel was a rolling meadow called Koganegahara that is
still there, and still looks about the same as it must have on that early
spring morning. There are copses of oaks on three sides. Their brown,
withered leaves were still clinging to the branches. The sun would have
been just striking the ground, sparkling the frozen dew, when the three
arrived at the meadow, their footsteps crunching. Without a word, Kagehisa
walked to the far edge of the field and sat on a rock. In front of him,
he placed a warrior’s uchiwa, a fan made of lacquered elm and tough,
leathery paper. On top of the fan he placed one of his most treasured
possessions, a sword he’d nicknamed “Ogre Slayer.” Beside
the sword he put a scroll with the full transmission of the ryu written
on it. Possession of the scroll was proof the owner was the rightful
heir of the ryu.
Kagehisa folded his arms, waited. Zenki and Tenzen bowed in their teacher’s
direction. Nobody was taking notes for us to read centuries later, but
we can imagine the scene. Zenki taking off a heavy overcoat haori and
placing it carefully on the ground. Tenzen tying up the sleeves of his
kimono with a strip of twisted paper string. When they had finished the
rituals surrounding a duel, they took up their weapons and bowed to one
another. Since Tenzen was junior to Zenki, having been accepted into
Kagehisa’s tutelage later, he may have bowed a bit lower. Zenki,
perhaps misinterpreting this as a sign of emotional weakness on Tenzen’s
part, immediately raised his sword above his head. Tenzen, more cautious,
kept his weapon low, the tip pointed directly at Zenki’s throat.
It is very difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of men like
this, to feel the tension they must have felt. In samurai movies, such
one-on-one encounters are usually depicted as a kind of deadly ballet.
Flashing swords, acrobatic movement, the slither and clang of metal struck.
The reality was that in most battles of this nature, about 90 percent
of the “action” was carried on in the minds of the participants.
Movement was kept to an absolute minimum. The difference between living
and dying was going to be measured by fractions of a second in timing
or distancing. This would have been especially true in the case of these
two swordsmen. The defining strategy of the Itto ryu, of course, was
to wait for an opponent to make a move and then counter—or to force
him, through posture or “attitude,” to make the first move.
Such a gambit, however, did not mean an opponent’s initial move
had to come in the form of an all-out attack. Often, all the Itto ryu
swordsman needed or wanted was a slight shift in balance on the part
of his opponent, a mere flickering of his sword’s tip. A movement
that might not, to an observer, look like much more than a twitch would
provide the opening. Tenzen and Zenki were experts at discerning these.
Their duel must have been carried on so subtly that to anyone unschooled
in martial art, the temptation to start admiring the countryside, plan
the evening’s meal, or even to doze while waiting for something,
anything, to happen, would have been significant. Those unfamiliar with
the reality of this kind of close, personal combat, would likely be oblivious
to the energy that was being expended before them.
The sun rose fully, drained of the dawn’s angry red, taking on
a bright yellow cast, a promise of the spring that was on its way. Dry,
dead leaves rustled. The dew shimmered and vanished. And from the two
contestants, nothing. Oh, maybe Zenki’s forward foot would slide
forward a few inches. Tenzen would pull his back an equal distance. A
shifting from side to side, mirrored by the opponent. But there were
no blows, no shouts, no slack between them.
Again, few of us can know what goes on in a man’s mind in that
kind of situation. So it is nothing but speculation to guess what it
was that caused Zenki to do what he did next. Maybe he’d overestimated
his own prowess. Maybe his impoverished background led him to be tempted,
distracted even for a second or two, by the thought of all the fame that
would come with the position of headmaster of such a renowned ryu. Maybe,
way down deep inside him, there was a stray vein of fear that the contest
had exposed. Whatever it was, Zenki broke. He leaped away from Tenzen,
scrambling toward the edge of the field where Kagehisa sat watching.
He ran directly for the scroll in front of Kagehisa, grabbed it, and
turned, breaking in a sprint for the road.
Tenzen was after him, running to catch up, his sword still in his fist.
He gained on Zenki, caught him at the edge of the field. Zenki, sensing
the pursuit, whipped around, putting the scroll between his teeth to
free both hands. But he did not try to fight; he dropped his sword and
snatched for the trunk of a sapling, pulling it over to put the limb
between himself and Tenzen. Tenzen never paused. He raised his blade,
then cut. The sword passed through the sapling as easily as it cut into
muscle and bone. Zenki died on the spot, the scroll still in his mouth.
What happened after the duel between Tenzen and Zenki is well known
in martial arts circles. Tenzen took a new name. He became Ono Taadaki
and assumed the status of the second headmaster of the Itto ryu. He served
as a fencing instructor to the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, and taught
a number of swordsmen, some of whom went on to found their own martial
ryu. As for Kagehisa, we know very little about him after he walked off
the field at Koganegahara that frosty, late winter morning. There is
a document that seems to indicate he took the tonsure and became a Buddhist
monk. Another source reputes, however, that Kagehisa died not long after
the duel between Zenki and Tenzen. Records from Shimofusa Province (now
Chiba and Ibaraki Prefectures) note that someone with the same name died
at the age of ninety-four there, though whether this is the same Kagehisa
is unclear.
The mysterious end of Kagehisa’s life is fitting, in a way. He
was enigmatic, to say the least. He discovered a fundamental principle
of swordsmanship but was able to pass it on to only two others, one of
whom killed the other—at his instigation. He was a master, arguably
without peer, in matters of technique. Yet he never seemed to penetrate,
as so many other great swordsmen did, into the realms of the spiritual.
Whether this was from a disinterest or a dispositional limitation on
his part, we can never know. Was he satisfied, watching his two best
students try to kill one another? Did he consider his life to be a success?
Other sword masters have left their reflections in written form. Even
the half-feral Musashi left a book that gives us some hints that he perceived
a philosophical path to be the real destination of swordsmanship. But
Kagehisa? His life might best be exemplified by that young man, standing
in the dark in the middle of the temple grounds, a dead man at his feet,
a bloody sword in his hand, and not the slightest idea of how it all
happened or what it all meant.
Excerpted from Clouds in the West © 2004 by Dave Lowry with permission
from The Lyons Press, Guilford, CT 06437.
The book, Clouds in the West is available in the FightingArts.com
Estore
About the Author:
Dave Lowry is a writer and historian specializing in Japan and traditional
Japanese culture. He has been a student of the modern and classical martial
disciplines of Japan since 1968 - including karate, aikido, the bo and
kenjitsu. His columns have appeared for years in a variety of martial
arts magazines and he is also an accomplished calligrapher. His books
include "Sword and Brush - The Spirit of the Martial Arts", "Autumn
Lightning: The Education of an American Samurai" and his new book “Clouds
in the West” published by The Lyons Press.
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