The branch takes its name from Odani Seiichirō Nobutomo (男谷精一郎信友), thirteenth-generation head of the line, who proposed the Kōbusho and opened it as its tōdori. Two of his senior men are treated separately here: Shimada Toranosuke, who entered in 1838, held the shihan license within about a year and served as Odani’s shihan-dai — ranked with Odani and Ōishi Susumu as one of the “three swords of the Tenpō era” and remembered as Katsu Kaishū’s sword teacher — and Honme Yarijirō, shihan-dai at Odani’s Honjo Kamezawa-chō (本所亀沢町) dōjō and one of the few men to hold posts on both the kenjutsu and the sōjutsu sides of the institute. Also of that circle is Amano Shōshō, the Odani-line Kōbusho fencing instructor whom Sakakibara — his fellow disciple — bested at Nijō Castle. The branch also reached the provinces: the Ibaraki teacher Hakomori Yosaburō belonged to a documented Odani-ha house in Hitachi — the line the 1915 Ibaraki biographical dictionary records under the regional name 眞影流, carried in by the Odani-gate man Yokogawa Shichirō Hiroharu (横川七郎広治) — and ran his own dōjō at Sekidate before founding the Genbukan at Shimotsuma in 1904.
Sakakibara Kenkichi entered the Azabu Mamiana (麻布狸穴) dōjō in Tenpō 13 (1842) and is reckoned the fourteenth head. Shimada, the senior figure of the earlier cohort, died in 1852 and so predeceased the Kōbusho era entirely; the line passed instead through Sakakibara, and after him to Yamada.
For the Odani-ha, Yamada Jirōkichi is regarded as the 15th-generation head, and carried the art onward into modern kendō. The Odani-ha is also the branch the literature credits with re-centering the school on the seigan stance for shinai matches and flourishing during the bakumatsu.
Yamada lost his Jikishinkage-ryū densho in the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. His line holds that there is currently no sōke of Jiki Shinkage-ryū kenjutsu. After him his students Katō Kanji, Ōnishi Hidetaka, and Ōmori Sōgen taught the Hōjō kata in various places.
The contemporary Hyakuren-kai did not view Kawashima Takashi as the 16th generation head, but instead maintained that the art’s transmission ended with the death of Yamada. They maintain it was later revived by Ōnishi Hidetaka, and then passed into their own lineage.
Iwasa Masaru continued practice under the name Hyakuren-kai after the death of Ōnishi and was recognized by the Nihon Kobudo Shinkokai. His line, however, split into multiple factions after his death.
The line through Namiki Yasushi was generally regarded as the Seitō-ha, although it did not use that name itself. Namiki and Itō were recognized by Kashima Shrine as a lineal succession of the art.
Several memorial stele (grave markers) were erected to memorialize the art and its teachers in the 1950s and 1960s from these competing factions.
In 1999, Namiki was succeeded by Itō Masayuki. That line then split with the death of Itō in 2001. Namiki Yasushi’s sons founded their own group called the Ku’unkai, while Yoshida Hajime (吉田基) continued the Tokyo dōjō of Namiki (opens in a new tab).
