Yamada Jirōkichi [山田次朗吉]

Yamada Jirōkichi (山田次朗吉, 1863–1930) was an important figure both in the rise and development of kendō and in the preservation of Jikishinkage-ryū as the successor of Sakakibara Kenkichi (榊原鍵吉). Sakakibara died in 1894, when Yamada was thirty-one; Ishigaki and Iwasa Minoru record that Yamada afterwards studied the upper-level kata in the Fujikawa-ha, under Saitō Akinobu (斎藤鑑信), between 1909 and 1911. The siddham pair written with the shinmyōken gokui varies by lineage, sometimes a-un (阿吽) and sometimes kan-man (カンマン). (Ishigaki Yasuzō (石垣安造) 2001)

Sakakibara, who was bodyguard of the last Tokugawa shogun and keeper of Edo castle, was a famous kenshi and deserving of much praise for his efforts to maintain a practice of swordsmanship relevant to Japanese society as it modernized.

Yamada Jirōkichi was a great teacher, practitioner and scholar of kendō. His books on the history of Japanese swordsmanship, both older styles and kendō, seem monumental in their scope. He wanted to increase the martial vigor of kendō instruction as it spread, and through his efforts and those of others the foundational kata of Jikishinkage-ryū were introduced to several kendō clubs.

With Sakakibara’s dōjō, Yamada inherited his tie to the imperial house. At the battle of Ueno in 1868 Sakakibara had carried Prince Rinnōji-no-miya, later Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa, to safety on his back, and he taught the prince’s sons Naruhisa and Teruhisa; when Yamada took over the dōjō at Kurumazaka in Shitaya, he became their instructor too. In 1895, when Prince Yoshihisa led the Imperial Guards to Taiwan, Yamada set out to raise a drawn-sword unit (拔刀隊) to guard him, “to repay the favour shown to two generations, teacher and pupil.” The government would not permit it, and when the prince died in the field that October, Yamada wept through the night. He gave up his post with the Kitashirakawa house the following April. (Ko-Yamada Shihan Kinen Jigyōkai 1931)

He looked after Sakakibara’s household as well. Sakakibara left no son, and his widow, a second wife, fell out with the adopted heir; for some thirty years, until her death in 1927, Yamada supported her and the family through hardship and quarrels. (Ko-Yamada Shihan Kinen Jigyōkai 1931)

From 1917 Yamada led his pupils to Kashima Jingū every summer to offer kata before the god, and kept the custom almost without a break until 1929. In July 1928, after that year’s offering with the Tokyo University of Commerce kendō club, he stayed on with Ōnishi Hidetaka to search for the grave of the school’s founder, bathing each night in the Mitarashi pond. In the house of a family named Matsumoto in Daidō village they found a death register naming 松本備前守紀政元, “childhood name Naokatsu,” who died in Tenbun 3 (1534). The discovery was reported as far away as Taiwan, in the Nichinichi shinpō. (Ko-Yamada Shihan Kinen Jigyōkai 1931)

On 8 January 1930, after the closing session of the Hōjō practice at Hitotsubashi, Yamada went to pay his New Year call at Ōnishi’s home in Ginza, was taken ill there, and died the following evening. He was buried in his home village of Tomioka in Kazusa. (Ko-Yamada Shihan Kinen Jigyōkai 1931)

His disciples raised a memorial stele to him in 1931 beside the Mitarashi pond at Kashima Jingū, where he led them each midsummer to purify themselves in the water. Its text, composed by the sinologist Shionoya On, is transcribed and translated from photographs of the stone in Memorial Steles of Jikishinkage-ryū (opens in a new tab).