The Gogyo no Kata

東京高師五行之形

How a 1908 school set of kata helped shape the Imperial Kendo Kata — and who still keeps it alive.

If you practice Nihon Kendō Kata, you already know a distant cousin of this set. Tokyo Kōshi Gogyō no Kata — the “Five-Element Forms of the Tokyo Higher Normal School” — is a compact paired kata created for future schoolteachers, not for a single classical ryūha. It is one of the clearest surviving links between late-Edo Ittō-ryū and the national kata ratified in 1912 as the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata.

Creation: from Nakanishi-ha Ittō-ryū to a teachers’ college
The root is older than the school. In the late Edo period, Nakanishi Chūbei Kosei (中西忠兵衛子正), fourth head of Nakanishi-ha Ittō-ryū, composed a Gogyō no Kata — five paired long-sword forms that distilled the school’s highest technical ideas. Those forms were practiced inside the ryū as a kind of capstone: large, rounded cuts, unhurried footwork, and a deliberate use of blade-to-blade contact that, with a live blade, required turning the wrists so the shinogi (ridge) rather than the edge took the shock.

Takano Sasaburō (高野佐三郎, 1862–1950) came from that line. His grandfather, Takano Sakichirō, had been a leading student of Nakanishi Kosei and fencing instructor to the Shinshū domain. Takano himself became one of the two great public faces of educational kendo in the early twentieth century — “Takano of the East, Naitō of the West,” paired with Naitō Takaharu of the Butokukai’s Bujutsu Senmon Gakkō in Kyoto.

In 1908 (Meiji 41) Takano was appointed lecturer in gekiken at Tokyo Higher Normal School (Tōkyō Kōtō Shihan Gakkō, or Tōkyō Kōshi) — the nation’s flagship college for secondary-school teachers. The principal at the time was Kanō Jigorō. The problem Takano faced was pedagogical, not romantic: how to teach large groups of future instructors a sword art that had always been transmitted one-to-one inside a ryū. He adapted Nakanishi’s five tachi forms for wooden swords and classroom use and later added three kodachi (short-sword) forms. The kodachi set appears to have been introduced well after 1908 — recollections of Suzuki Ikuo and Satō Ukichi place regular teaching of the three short-sword pieces around Shōwa 7 (1932). Takano himself was reportedly never fully satisfied with those later additions.

What the kata is
The finished school set is eight forms: five tachi versus tachi, three tachi versus kodachi. The name Gogyō invokes yin-yang five-phase thought — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — mapped onto stances and lines (jōdan as fire, chūdan as earth, gedan as water, and so on), and onto the older three-talents idea of heaven, earth, and man. In performance the set is usually described as more flowing and less percussive than Nihon Kendō Kata: ki is meant to move from a relaxed body on a natural breath; loud kiai is not the point. Footwork is free rather than rigidly prescribed, because the training goal is relationship with the partner — maai, timing, and the habit of finishing a cut with the weight settled on the rear supporting leg.

Nakanishi-ha teachers still distinguish “their” Gogyō (often performed with habiki (unsharpened blades), very slowly, with large circular paths) from the Tokyo Kōshi version (bokutō-oriented, with the added kodachi). They are sibling forms, not identical ones. When either is demonstrated, practitioners are expected to name which lineage they are showing.

Dissemination
Tokyo Kōshi was not an ordinary dōjō. It trained the people who would staff Japan’s middle schools just as gekiken/kendō was being admitted into the official curriculum (permitted as an elective in 1911). Takano also invented group-command teaching methods — everyone moving on the same count — published in his influential book Kendō (1915), later presented to the Taishō emperor. Graduates carried both the school kata and those mass-instruction methods into classrooms across the country.

Takano taught far beyond one campus: Waseda University, the Japan Physical Education School, the Army Toyama School and Military Academy, the Naval Engineering School, the Metropolitan Police, and his own Meishinkan / Shūdō Gakuin network. A 1966 public demonstration at the Nippon Budōkan (uchidachi Nakano Yasoshi, shidachi Yunō Masanori) shows that the Kōshi set was still considered presentable on a national stage two generations after its creation.

Influence on the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata
In 1906 the Butokukai had already tried a three-form national set (ten–chi–jin). It failed to win the schools. After the Ministry of Education authorized swordsmanship in secondary education, a new committee was formed. Five chief investigators were named: Negishi Shingorō (Shintō Munen-ryū), Tsuji Shinpei (Jikishinkage / Shingyōtō line), Monna Tadashi and Naitō Takaharu (Hokushin Ittō-ryū), and Takano Sasaburō (Ono-ha / Nakanishi-ha Ittō-ryū), representing Tokyo Kōshi.

They worked through 1912 at Myōdenji in Kyoto. Unifying rival ryūha was brutal; later anecdote has Takano attending with a tantō (dagger) in his robe, ready to die if his technical points were discarded. On 16 October 1912 the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendō Kata was promulgated: seven tachi forms and three kodachi forms — the same 7+3 architecture that survives today as Nihon Kendō Kata.

Direct one-to-one mapping of each Kōshi form onto each Imperial form is not how the committee worked. What passed from Takano’s desk into the national set was more structural: Ittō-ryū cutting logic, the five classical kamae later nicknamed gogyō no kamae (jōdan, chūdan, gedan, hassō, waki), the teacher/student roles of uchidachi and shidachi, and the conviction that a short, shared kata could correct sloppy shinai habits and give every school in the empire one common grammar. Historical notes remark that Nakanishi-ha and Hokushin Ittō-ryū Gogyō material sits unusually close to the finished Nihon Kendō Kata. Takano received a letter of thanks and the calligraphy “Kendō Tōitsu” (Unification of Kendo) from Butokukai president Ōura Kanetake. In 1913 he was awarded hanshi — exceptionally, before the usual age.

Who practices it today
The living home of Tokyo Kōshi Gogyō no Kata is the kendo faculty of the University of Tsukuba School of Health and Physical Education — the institutional heir of Tokyo Higher Normal School and Tokyo University of Education. Instructors there still treat the set as part of the school’s teaching inheritance from Takano, alongside a kihon-first pedagogy that Tsukuba coaches still cite when they talk about “correct kendo” rather than only shiai kendo.

Outside Tsukuba the form is scarce. Nakanishi-ha Ittō-ryū dōjō continue the older five-tachi Gogyō (without Takano’s three kodachi). A few police veterans in the mid-twentieth century knew the Kōshi kodachi pieces, suggesting a side channel through Takano’s police teaching. Abroad, practice is exceptional; one documented line reached Finland through ZNKR teacher Tōru Takahashi. In the United States, the kata have been transmitted by Rodney and Mitsuko Uhler, licensed senior students of the late Okabayashi Shōgen of the Ono-ha Ittō-ryū (Sōkaku-den), and are used at Itten Dojo. Public film of the full set exists (notably a long explanatory recording and the 1966 Budōkan demonstration), which is how most kendōka now encounter it.

These are not All Japan Kendo Federation grading kata. Nobody needs these for dan promotion. That is precisely why these kata matter. The forms are a school tradition that still shows how modern kendo was assembled: a classical Ittō-ryū distillation, rewritten for teachers, then fed into a national committee that produced the kata millions of people now bow into every week.