Newsgroup: it.sport.arti-marziali
Titolo: Aikido e Kashima Shin Ryu

Mariusz
Historia jest dosc prosta ale i skomplikowana....
Tissier sie troche tam nauczyl tego od Yamaguchi sensei, ten z kolei od 
Inaba sensei.....
tu masz dokladnie wyjasnienia, ale nie mam czasu tlumaczyc na polski:
Originally posted by Ulf Lehmann
Some dojo in Europe train the KSR Kenjutsu of Inaba sensei (Kyoto). Most 
of 
the dojoleaders was Aikido-students of him and learned swordmanship on 
this 
way.
Who knows the real connections between Inaba sensei and the Kashima 
"headquarter"?
There are different opinions here - some people say, Inaba sensei teaches 
only a kind of Kenjutsu influenced by the KSR; some people say, he 
teaches 
the true, old technics; some people call his style the Inaba ha Kashima 
shin ryu...
I don´t know if he teaches all KSR traditions or only Kenjutsu (maybe, 
also 
Battojutsu?) as a part of his Aikido-training.
Do you have some informations?
This is not really an issue that reduces to opinion; the facts could not 
be 
clearer. There are currently only two places in Europe (one group in 
Helsinki and one in Frankfurt) where KSR is taught under authorization by 
the current (or past) KSR headmasters.
The swordwork taught at various Aikido schools in England and France that 
Ulf refers to derives from Kashima-Shinryu, via Inaba Minoru, the head 
Aikido instructor at the Meiji Grand Shrine in Tokyo. It is NOT, however, 
Kashima-Shinryu--in either a formal or a practical sense.
Inaba has worked a bit of Kashima-Shinryu kenjutsu and some other weapon 
training into his aikido curriculum at the Meiji Grand Shrine. Neither he 
nor his teacher, Tanaka Shigeo, however, has any formal connections with 
the current Kashima-Shinryu soke or shihanke, and neither has any 
Kashima-Shinryu license or credentials from either Kunii Zen'ya (the 
previous soke/shihanke) or Seki Humitake (the current shihanke).
The Inaba connection with KSR began when Tanaka wished to learn Kashima 
Shinryu from Kunii, because he was teaching Aikido at the University of 
Tokyo, and his students were becoming discouraged by their inability to 
hold their own in friendly matches with the karate club students, who 
practiced at the same time. Determining that what his students needed was 
some weapons training, he went to Kunii to learn kenjutsu. But, as he was 
already 40 at the time, he found he was not learning well, and so he 
brought one of his senior students, Inaba, at the time an undergraduate 
university student, to study with Kunii as well.
Inaba studied KSR for less than a year, and never received any diploma 
from 
Kunii Zen'ya, from Seki, or from the Kashima-Shinryu Federation of 
Martial 
Sciences. Sometime after Kunii's death in 1966, however, one of Inaba's 
supervisors asked Kunii Zen'ya's widow for permission for him to teach 
Kashima-Shinryu to the shrine attendants, arguing that Shinto authorities 
did not recognize Aikido as proper martial training for shrine 
attendants, 
because it lacks any form of *harai* (exorcism). Under the circumstances, 
it was determined that this request could not be refused.
Nevertheless, because his period of training was far too short to learn 
and 
understand the arcana of Kashima-Shinryu, the permission granted Inaba 
extends only to the teaching of fundamental kenjutsu techniques (but NOT 
other weapons; he had never actually trained at any KSR weapons other 
than 
the sword), at the dojo of the Meiji Grand Shrine. He has no authority to 
issue Kashima-Shinryu diplomas, nor does he have any right to use the 
name 
Kashima-Shinryu or to allow any of his students to use it.
Thus Inaba's formal status within Kashima-Shinryu is that of teaching 
basic 
sword techniques within the framework of Aikido instruction at the Meiji 
Grand Shrine dojo. His students and the students of his students have no 
formal relationship whatsoever to KSR.
Perhaps even more importantly, what Mr. Inaba practices is not KSR in any 
practical sense, either. This is an issue that goes way beyond any 
possible 
objections that statements about formal legitimacy may involve 
hair-splitting or bias, or that they may be irrelevant to students who 
simply want "to learn the art."
Aikido and Kashima-Shinryu have elements in common, but they are really 
fundamentally different in strategy, philosophy and patterns of movement. 
(A rough analogy might be the differences and similarities between Islam 
and Christianity.)
If one tries to teach Aikido and KSR techniques at the same time one will 
NOT (cannot) perform the KSR techniques correctly (in so far as 
"correctness" is defined by members of KSR). The sword techniques and 
kata 
taught might share some similarities to KSR, but the key elements (i.e., 
the very elements that give KSR its unique identity) will either be 
corrupted or missing altogether. At that point, they no longer are KSR 
techniques.
This is emphatically the case with the kenjutsu kata that Mr. Inaba and 
his 
students practice. Inaba's interpretation of KSR kata is heavily flavored 
by Aikido and thoroughly reshaped by minimal initial exposure to the real 
thing compounded by 3 decades of practicing in isolation. Many of the 
kata 
are unrecognizable to students of orthodox Kashima-Shinryu; most of the 
basic patterns and rhythms of movement and application of power are.
One easy way to see this is to compare the movements and form of Mr. 
Inaba 
and his students with that of Kunii Zen'ya and his students in the 1960s, 
and with that of Seki Humitake and his students today (footage of Kunii, 
Seki and their students can be seen in the 11 volume video series 
produced 
a couple of years back by Gaisei International, in Japan; still photos, 
taken from the video series, can be seen in the May 1999 issue of *Hiden* 
magazine).
The differences between the postures and application of energy of Inaba 
(and his students) today and those of Kunii Zen'ya are also strikingly 
clear in the photographs that appear in the recent *Aiki News* articles 
(issue #s 123 & 124) on Inaba; the photo of Inaba performing kesa-giri in 
1967 looks pretty much like what a student of KSR today with a year or 
so's 
training would look like; the photos of Inaba and his students from the 
1970s and later look VERY different, and very much like Aikido.
In sum, it behooves no one, least of all Mr. Inaba and his students, to 
label the kenjutsu they practice as "Kashima-Shinryu." What it is in 
fact, 
is a style of sword work *derived from* KSR. Inaba has found his own path 
in Aikido and his own insights about swordsmanship. His kenjutsu deserves 
to be seen and evaluated in that light, and in terms of its contribution 
to 
Aikido, and not confused by its remote origins in a fundamentally 
different 
art, learned from a teacher (Kunii Zen'ya) who was publicly contemptuous 
of 
Aikido.
__________________
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
  Szczepan Janczuk
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