Wú Shū (吳殳, 1611–1695) was a Ming–Qing transition military scholar and martial artist. His major work, 《手臂錄》(Shǒubì Lù), contains a third volume called 《單刀圖說》(Dāndāo Túshuō, “Illustrated Discussion of the Single Sabre”), with a preface dated renyin year 1662 (Kangxi 1). The opening of that preface:
唐有陌刀，戰陣稱猛，其法不傳。今倭國單刀，中華間有得其法者，而終不及倭人之精。
In the Tang [era] there was the mojidao [a Tang-period broad sabre], renowned for ferocity on the battlefield, but its methods are no longer transmitted. Today, the Wō-country (Japanese) single sabre — within China there are those who have obtained its methods, but ultimately none reach the refinement of the Wō-people.
Note the construction is 「得 + [skill/method/technique]」 — “to obtain [the methods].” Wu Shu’s 得其法 (“obtained its methods”) and the Jikishinkage-ryū densho’s 得妙術 (“obtained the marvelous techniques”) are the same Sino-Japanese idiom, applied to cross-strait martial transmission.
What makes this important is the direction of the documented flow in Wu Shu’s preface. Wu Shu is describing transmission from Japan to China, not China to Japan. He continues:
斫削粘桿，余本得之漁陽老人之劍術，單刀未有言者，移之為刀實自余始。安得良倭一親炙之。
Hewing, shaving and adhering to the spear-shaft — I originally obtained these from the swordsmanship of the Old Man of Yuyang; no one had spoken of them in single-sabre [literature]; I was the first to transpose them to the sabre. If only I could meet a true Wō [Japanese] master and study under him directly.
The documented seventeenth-century reality is:
- Japanese sword arts entered Chinese discourse through the wakō coastal raids of the sixteenth century.
- Cheng Zongyou (程沖斗) wrote 《單刀法選》(Dāndāo Fǎxuǎn, 1621) explicitly crediting Japanese origins: “its techniques excelled in the wakō” (其技擅自倭奴).
- Wu Shu in 1662 built on Cheng’s work and on the Yuyang Laoren swordsmanship to compose his eighteen sabre postures.
- Throughout the early Qing, 倭刀法 (Japanese sabre methods) is a recognized technical category in Chinese saber literature, with a stock vocabulary around 「得其法」 — “obtaining the methods.”
The 1800 Jikishinkage-ryū densho claim — 入唐更得妙術還 (“entering Tang [China] and further obtaining marvelous techniques, then returning”) — is then doing something quite specific. It uses the same Sino-Japanese vocabulary that appears in Chinese saber literature, but inverts the direction of prestige:
- Wu Shu (1662, China): Japanese methods are superior; Chinese practitioners can only partially “obtain” them.
- Jikishinkage-ryū densho (1800, Japan): A Japanese master crosses to China and “obtains” methods from the Chinese.
There are several possibilities. Either the Sino-Japanese martial vocabulary was genuinely shared in this period, and the densho is using standard idiom appropriate to a real (if undocumented) Ogasawara journey. Or, whoever drafted the lineage section in the Naganuma circle was familiar with Chinese saber discourse — Wu Shu and Cheng Zongyou were widely known and reproduced through the Edo period via imported Chinese books — and consciously or unconsciously used the 得妙術 phrase, while flipping the directional flow to credit Japanese mastery with Chinese provenance. Or, there was some level of common vocabulary between China and Japan for phrases relating attainment of skill at arms.
The ‘cribbing’ hypothesis is most likely, as by 1800, Edo-period Japanese intellectuals had access to Wu Shu’s writings through the imports cataloged in Tosen Mochiwatari-sho (唐船持渡書) — Chinese books arriving via Nagasaki — and the Bubishi tradition derived from Mao Yuanyi’s 《武備志》 was actively circulating in martial circles.
The timeline of Ogawara’s travel strongly suggests the Bunroku–Keichō Korean invasions (1592–1598) as the historical context: an Ogasawara retainer serving in Toyotomi’s Korean campaigns would have had plausible (if unusual) opportunity to cross from Korea into Ming China. It is believed by some lines of Jikishinkage-ryū that Ogasawara changed sides one too many times during the late Sengoku period, and angered Tokugawa — thus waiting some time before his return. This document seems to maintain he was instead not allowed to leave China.
The nittō (入唐; travel to China to receive knowledge) description — that Genshinsai personally trained in China — is the most contested element of the Jikishinkage-ryū origin story in modern scholarship. The marginal note is interesting precisely because it tries to make the literal-journey version more plausible by supplying details (route, duration, reason for delayed return). Whether the literal journey occurred or not, the marginal note represents the school’s effort to make the claim historically concrete by 1800. [3-5]
Nittō (入唐) literally means “entering Tang” — the verb 入 (nyū, “to enter”) plus 唐 (tō, “Tang”). In Japanese usage it’s the standard idiom for traveling to China, regardless of what dynasty was actually in power at the time. The dynastic anchor is the Tang (618–907) because that was the formative period of large-scale, formalized Japanese contact with China — the kentōshi (遣唐使, “embassies to the Tang”) sent between 630 and 894, which carried Buddhist monks, scholars and officials to study at the Chinese capital and bring teachings back. The institutional memory of those embassies fossilized Tō (唐) as the generic name for China in Japanese. By Ogasawara Genshinsai’s time, the actual dynasty he would have encountered was Ming (明, 1368–1644), but a Japanese narrative would still call the journey nittō. By the 1800 densho’s writing, the dynasty in power was the Qing (清, 1644–1912), but the term nittō persists unchanged.
The use of the word nittō implicitly aligns Genshinsai’s journey with the kentōshi tradition of going to China to acquire foundational learning and return with it to Japan. That’s a deliberate echo. The densho isn’t just saying “he went to China”; it’s saying “he made a nittō-style journey of acquisition” — placing his martial study in the same cultural category as Saichō, Kūkai or Ennin returning from the Tang with Buddhist transmissions. This is part of why the nittō claim functions as a prestige assertion regardless of whether the literal journey occurred. In 1800, knowledge from China is still considered important, or at the very least, exotic.
Whether or not Ogasawara personally crossed to China, the way the claim is articulated in the 1800 densho is recognizably part of a real seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sino-Japanese discourse on martial transmission. the canonical text of Wu Shu’s preface is most easily accessed in 《泽古斋丛抄》本《手臂錄》 (Zegu Zhai Congchao edition) or the 山西科学技术出版社 2006 reprint(Wú Shū (吳殳) 2006).
The text 《手臂錄》卷三《單刀圖說·自序》is a relevant phrase in either edition.
References
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