Register record
Identity & authority
- Reliability
- Core dates and the successor role are well attested; the manner of the transmission is not. Iwasa Minoru records the menkyo kaiden as stamped by Sakakibara's widow after Sakakibara's death, and Ishigaki notes the densho closes with the siddham kanman used in the Fujikawa line rather than the A-Un of the Odani-ha Sakakibara belonged to. Second-teacher accounts also conflict: Shimada Hiroshi (1931) gives a "Yamada Hachirō" (山田八郎) where Ishigaki names Saitō Akinobu. Named sources are cited in the prose but the entry carries no source manifest.
- Attestation
- corroboration: internal · contested
Names
| type | kanji | romaji | reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| myoji | 山田 | Yamada | やまだ |
| tsusho | 次朗吉 | Jirōkichi | じろきち |
| go · gago | 一徳斎 | Ittokusai |
Dates
- Born
- (1863)
- Died
- (1929)
Origin & status
- Offices
- head of the Hyakurenkan (百錬館) dōjō
- kendō instructor at Hitotsubashi (一橋) and elsewhere
Lineage & parentage
- Teacher
- Sakakibara Kenkichi (榊原鍵吉)
- Rank
- menkyo kaiden — see the reliability note on how it was conferred
- Generation
- 15th of the main line, as Sakakibara's designated successor
- Attestation
- external
- Teacher
- Saitō Akinobu (斎藤鑑信), contested
- Attestation
- internal
Relations
Students
Output & material record
- Works
- Nihon Kendō Shi (日本剣道史, 1925)
- Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū (鹿島神傳直心影流, 1927)
Yamada Jirōkichi (1863–1929) was an important figure both in the rise and development of kendō and the preservation of aspects of Jikishinkage-ryū as Sakakibara’s successor. It is said by Ishigaki and Iwasa that Yamada Jirōkichi had to go to another line, the Fujikawa-ha, to learn the upper-level kata after Sakakibara’s passing – Sakakibara died when Yamada was only 31 years of age. So, some of what is done in what is called the mainline or standard line of Kashima-shinden Jikishinkage-ryū practice today might be drawn from that Fujikawa-ha kata practice and possibly not Sakakibara’s complete transmission of the Odani-ha.
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. A peculiarity of the historical record is while there are stories maintained of Sakakibara providing Yamada an upper-level license in the form of a densho his teacher had provided him, Yamada’s menkyo-kaiden in Jikishinkage-ryū according to Iwasa Minoru was stamped by Sakakibara’s widow after Sakakibara died.
According to Ishigaki, Yamada’s document has siddham characters towards its end reading kanman – a reference to intuition and fudoshin – used in the Fujiwara line instead of the siddham characters for A-Un used in the Odani-ha Sakakibara was part of. So, Yamada potentially copied from a Fujikawa example he found or paid quiet homage to where he completed his training under Saito Akinobu between 1909 and 1911, after Sakakibara’s passing.
It is unclear why both Iwasa and Ishigaki would focus on those irregularities in their writing. 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 associated to his efforts and those of others, practice of the foundational kata of Jikishinkage-ryū was introduced to several kendō clubs.
