With regards to the types of protective armour used in kenjutsu, Shimokawa states in Kendō no Hattatsu that “in the Jikishinkage-ryū, Yamada Heizaemon Mitsunori (1639-1716) lamented the lack of spirit in many practitioners who concentrated only on kata training. He then started to devise a system of training that would allow practitioners to strike with full force without any danger of suffering or causing injury. His third son, Naganuma Shirozaemon Kunisato (1688-1767), completed the task between 1711-1716." I will use Shimokawa’s theory as a base as I outline the evolution of kenjutsu bōgu.
According to the Heihō Denki Chūkai, a Jikishinkage-ryū manuscript, Yamada Heizaemon suffered a serious injury at the tender age of eighteen in a match conducted with bokutō. He stopped practising kenjutsu until the age of thirty-two, when he was exposed to the teachings of Takahashi Danjozaemon’s school where “a face mask and protective gauntlets were donned, thus enabling one to engage in combat training without the risk of injury.” He wasted no time in becoming a student of this school, and it is recorded that by the time he was forty-six, he was awarded a license to teach (menkyo).
This was 1684, but it is obvious that Takahashi Danjozaemon’s school had been using bōgu for a number of years already. Nevertheless, the armour in question only consisted of a facemask and gauntlets, with nothing resembling a dō. The Sagawa Shinkage-ryū, an associated school in the far north, used facemasks and gauntlets in their training, indicating that many of the Shinkage-ryū stream schools were making use of fukuro-shinai (prototype of modern shinai) as well as men and kote. In Diagram 5 taken from Suzuki Shōzō’s Sendai Fūzoku-shi (1927) there is an illustration of a Shinkage-ryū adept using only a fukuro-shinai, men and kote. Thus, it states “as the trunk was protected only by the thin material of the kimono that one was wearing, one learned the meaning of pain upon being hit in this rather vulnerable spot during keiko!”
Diagram 5
Takahashi Danjozaemon’s teacher Kamiya Denshinsai decreed that, “when engaging in contest combat with other schools, always use a bokutō. The use of shinai is strictly prohibited.” He was a unyielding kata advocate, and it wasn’t until the era of Takahashi Danjozaemon that bōgu came to be the norm rather than the exception.
In Yamada Heizaemon’s text Heihō Zakki, he writes “in order to really reach an understanding of mortal combat it is necessary for both adepts to don men, kote, and other pieces of protective equipment and forge oneself through the confusion encountered by engaging in daring unrestricted training.” This particular passage is referring to uchikomi-geiko, or training by actually striking with the shinai, something evidently promoted by Heizaemon in his latter years. Heizaemon died in 1716, the period that corresponds with Shimokawa’s assertion that bōgu was “perfected”.
In addition, the inscription on the gravestone of Yamada Heizaemon’s third son Naganuma Shirōzaemon Kunisato (1688-1767), the heir of the Jikishinkage-ryū tradition, states that his exploits included improving the bokutō and shinai, and refining the armour by adding a metal grill to the men and thick cotton protective covering to the kote. Kunisato inherited the tradition from his father Heizaemon in 1708, and the two of them worked hard together to improve the bōgu until Heizaemon’s death.
Given these records, it is probably safe to conclude that the improvements of men and kote used in the Shinkage-ryū line of schools, and the addition of dō to protect the body were the innovations of Yamada Heizemon and his son Naganuma Kunisato, particularly in the period 1711-1716.
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