Outside the Curriculum — The Creation and Evolution of Bangai no Bu in MJER

As one of the topics for our recent iaido seminar with Suino Sensei and the JMAC assistant instructors, I had requested for our in-house instructor cadre an introduction to the Bangai no Bu waza (techniques). We hadn’t seen these techniques previously and found the waza to be both fascinating and particularly challenging. I knew only a very superficial history of this set so, after the weekend, I directed my AI research assistant to prepare a more thorough overview.

Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū (無雙直傳英信流), “the peerless, directly transmitted school of Eishin,” is among the most widely practiced classical traditions of Japanese swordsmanship. Its lineage is customarily traced to Hayashizaki Jinsuke Minamoto no Shigenobu in the late sixteenth century and, more immediately, to the seventh-generation master Hasegawa Chikaranosuke Eishin, whose adaptations of earlier tachi methods to the katana gave the school its distinctive name. By the nineteenth century the art had taken root in the Tosa domain as Tosa Eishin-ryū and had already divided, after the death of the eleventh headmaster, into the Tanimura-ha and Shimomura-ha lines. The set of techniques known as Bangai no Bu (番外之部)—literally “the extra section,” or techniques “outside the numbered curriculum”—does not belong to that older koryū inheritance. It is a modern creation of the seventeenth headmaster, Ōe Masamichi (大江正路, also read Masaji; 1852–1927), and its later growth across rival branches is one of the clearest windows onto how a classical school remade itself for the Meiji and Taishō worlds.

Tosa Iai at the End of the Samurai Age
Ōe was born in Asahi, Tosa, in 1852, on the eve of the Tokugawa collapse. He studied Kokuri-ryū and Ōishi Shinkage-ryū kenjutsu as well as both the Shimomura-ha and Tanimura-ha transmissions of Eishin-ryū, receiving instruction from Gotō Magobei Masasuke, sixteenth head of the Tanimura line. Tradition holds that as a youth he saw action in the wars of the Restoration—accounts mention the Hamaguri Gate incident and the Battle of Toba–Fushimi—and he later served as an instructor associated with the last Tosa daimyō. He became a leading figure in the Kōchi branch of the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, taught both kendō and iai, and in 1924 was the second person after Nakayama Hakudō to receive the title of hanshi in iaidō from that organization.

The Tosa inheritance Ōe received was rich and unwieldy. Practitioners of the period speak of something on the order of 160 waza, together with associated arts of etiquette, yawarajutsu, and bōjutsu. Instruction had long been closed to outsiders and personal. After 1868 the sword lost its legal and social function; if the school were to survive, it had to become teachable to a broader public without dissolving into mere athletic display. Ōe’s answer, formulated from the late Meiji years through the Taishō era, was a thorough reorganization. He reduced the solo curriculum to a graded sequence—Seiza no Bu (Shoden), drawn from Ōmori-ryū; Tatehiza no Bu (Chūden), drawn from Hasegawa Eishin’s half-kneeling methods; and the Okuden seated and standing sets associated with the Hayashizaki tradition—and he formally restored the name of the reorganized school as Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū. He retained paired kenjutsu sets (Tachi Uchi no Kurai and Tsume Ai no Kurai) and added a composite practice, Hayanuki (and its one-handed variant, Katate Hayanuki), in which the entire Chūden series is performed as a continuous exercise. Into this new architecture he inserted a short standing set that stood outside the three official grades: Bangai no Bu.

The Original Bangai Sanbon
The core Bangai set, often called Bangai Sanbon (“three extra forms”), consists of three standing tachiwaza: Hayanami (速浪 or 速波, “swift waves”), Raiden (雷電, “thunder and lightning”), and Jinrai (迅雷, “sudden thunder”; also written Jinrei). They are not survivals of Tosa Iai’s older numbered lists. Contemporary teachers and historical notes agree that Ōe composed them himself, drawing on oral teachings of the school, on principles already present in the Okuden suwariwaza and tachiwaza, and on his own experience of combat. Because they stand outside the shoden–chūden–okuden ladder, they have never been treated as koryū in the strict sense. Their names, all images of sudden natural force, announce the quality Ōe sought: compressed, multi-directional action rather than the more measured geometry of the graded sets.

Functionally, the three forms serve as a synthesis. Teachers who preserve older commentary describe them as gathering into a few standing sequences ideas that the Okuden otherwise distributes across kneeling and standing waza—changes of direction, responses to more than one opponent, and the linking of draw, cut, and movement under pressure. In that respect Bangai no Bu is the counterpart of Hayanuki: where Hayanuki concatenates an existing set into a single flow, Bangai condenses principles that had lived partly as kuden (oral transmission) into visible kata. Ōe’s larger project was pedagogical as well as technical. By naming techniques clearly, grouping them by strategy (heihō), and placing a short “extra” set after the official curriculum, he gave later instructors a compact vehicle for advanced work without reopening the swollen pre-Meiji catalogue.

Transmission after Ōe and the Multiplication of Bangai
Ōe died in 1927 without designating a single successor. He had issued menkyo kaiden or Kongen no Maki to a large group of senior students—estimates range from eight to seventeen—and those licensees became the trunks of the modern branches: among them Hokiyama Namio, Fukui Harumasa, Masaoka Katsutane (Kazumi), Yamauchi Toyotake, Yamamoto Harusuke, Mori Shigeki, and others. Because Bangai no Bu was Ōe’s own composition rather than a sealed koryū inheritance, each line felt free to keep, vary, or enlarge it. The result is that “Bangai” today names a family of practices, not a single fixed list.

The three Ōe forms remain the common core. Many lines also practice variations of Hayanami and Raiden, which already appear in early-twentieth-century teaching as alternative readings rather than new inventions. Yamamoto Harusuke (1892–1978), a direct student of Ōe, added a fourth standing form, Shihōgiri, also known as Akuma Barai (“demon-clearing”), a four-direction cutting sequence that some organizations of the Masaoka line, including the former Jikishin-kai / Kokusai Nippon Budō Kai, still list as Bangai. In the Yamauchi-ha, later organized around Komei-juku, a further group of five kata—Mae, Aranami, Kesaguruma, Takiguruma, and Tatsumaki—is practiced in addition to Ōe’s three. Spanish and Japanese lineage notes associate a comparable five-form compilation, Tōryū Bangai or Bangai Gohon, with Kono Kanemitsu of the Yamauchi/Tokyo line, who, like Ōe before him, sought to gather older ideas into a new extra series. These later additions are not claimed as Ōe’s work; they are acknowledged as twentieth-century compositions in the same spirit: extra, standing, and intended to concentrate principles rather than to restore a lost feudal catalogue.

Performance itself has never been uniform. Film and demonstration records of mid-century masters—among them Iwata Norikazu and Ōmori Masao—already show differences in the timing and shape of Jinrai and Raiden. Those discrepancies are not failures of transmission so much as evidence that Bangai, born as a master’s synthesis, was received as a living teaching rather than as a fossilized text. The same pattern marks Ōe’s other late inventions. His shortened Tachi Uchi no Kurai of seven kata exists alongside an older ten-form koryū version; Hayanuki is taught in some dojo and omitted in others. Bangai no Bu simply makes the pattern most visible, because everyone agrees the set is extra.

What Bangai Reveals about a Living Ryu
The history of Bangai no Bu is therefore not a footnote to the “real” curriculum. It is one of the principal documents of how Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū became a modern school. Ōe did not invent iai; he inherited a domain art already split by class and geography and already burdened with more forms than a public pedagogy could carry. His reduction of the syllabus, his renaming of sets, his official adoption of the title Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū, and his creation of Bangai and Hayanuki belong to a single act of conservation-through-reform. By placing certain ideas outside the numbered grades, he protected both the integrity of the older waza and the possibility of further synthesis.

Later generations treated that permission as part of the transmission. The addition of Akuma Barai, the Komei-juku five, and Tōryū Bangai Gohon are not corruptions of Ōe’s three forms; they are the same method applied again, each time by a licensed teacher facing new students and a new public culture of budō. What has remained stable is the status of the set. Bangai is still taught after the Okuden, still performed from a standing position, still understood as extra. In a tradition that prides itself on jikiden—direct transmission—the extra section is the place where direct transmission is allowed to be creative. That is the paradox Ōe built into the school, and it is why a set that is, by definition, not koryū has become one of the most characteristic practices of Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū as it is actually taught.