Mutōdori: The Day Kamiizumi Took a Sword With Empty Hands

Around 1565, when Kamiizumi Nobutsuna was on itinerant training and visited Yamato Yagyū-no-shō, the already widely-known swordsman Yagyū Munetoshi (later Sekishūsai) requested a match. Munetoshi lost three matches in succession. In the third, Kamiizumi is said to have taken Munetoshi's blade with his bare hand. It is one of the earliest recorded instances of the technique known as mutōdori.

What Mutōdori Is

Mutōdori is the technique of taking the opponent's sword with one's bare hand. Physically it demands extreme reflex and judgment. The motion is to catch the descending blade — aiming for the unsharpened back of the blade or the hilt — in an instantaneous movement, and to wrest the sword from the opponent while collapsing the opponent's posture. If the technique fails, the operator's own hand is taken off. Theoretically possible, it is regarded as practical-in-combat only at the highest reaches of mastery.

The Three Matches Between Kamiizumi and Munetoshi

The course of the three matches between Kamiizumi and Munetoshi is described in detail in later swordsmanship hero literature. In the first match Kamiizumi defeated Munetoshi with conventional technique. In the second Munetoshi tried another approach and again lost. In the third, Munetoshi attacked with the intent of one prepared to die, and Kamiizumi caught the blade with his bare hand and took it away. After the match, Munetoshi asked to become Kamiizumi's student, and entered the path of inheriting the Shinkage-ryū. This is the founding moment of the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū.

Mutōdori Within the Shinkage-ryū

Within the Shinkage-ryū system Kamiizumi shaped, mutōdori was positioned as the highest of techniques. In the Shinkage-ryū Heihō Mokuroku the 'no-sword' is treated not as a merely physical technique but as the state reached at the final stage of sword training. The point is not the taking of the sword as such but the technique as a physical embodiment of the thought of 'the sword that does not need a sword.' Yagyū Munenori's later katsujinken thought lies on the theoretical extension of Kamiizumi's mutōdori.

Continuity Through the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū

Within the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū carried from Yagyū Munetoshi to Yagyū Munenori, mutōdori was transmitted as the school's highest inner teaching. In the Edo-period Yagyū Shinkage-ryū dōjō, mutōdori was held as a teaching of the final stage and was not easily taught. When Tokugawa Hidetada received the mutōdori transmission from Yagyū Munenori, Munenori is said to have taught it only after confirming the shogun's resolve. The continuous transmission of a single technique across four and a half centuries is itself rare.

"To control the sword without holding the sword — this is the inner teaching of the Shinkage."