Gekiken Exhibitions and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai: How Swordsmanship Survived the Sword Ban

The Abolition Edict Takes Away Swordsmen's Livelihoods

The Abolition of the Sword Edict of 1876 (Meiji 9) legally eliminated the privilege of wearing swords, long held by the samurai class. But the reality this edict imposed was not limited to that alone. The local martial arts dojos, which had numbered in the hundreds throughout the Edo period, lost their clientele of sword-practicing samurai and many practitioners lost their means of livelihood. It was an era in which, in a society where wearing swords had been separated from everyday life, there was an atmosphere in which kenjutsu itself as an art form was being treated as something "unnecessary."

In the same year, Meiji 9, the stipends paid to the samurai class were also cut off through the Shizoku Shobun pension reform, and the dire circumstances of the former samurai class, which lost both the right to wear swords and their economic foundation simultaneously, represented a crisis of such scale as to threaten the very survival of kenjutsu as an art form. It is not difficult to imagine that those practitioners who held positions as teachers supporting disciples faced the greatest challenges in maintaining their dojos.

Amid this crisis, there was a person who conceived of opening kenjutsu to the public as a spectacle and creating a system to generate revenue for its practitioners. He was Sakakibara Kenkichi, who served as the last chief instructor of the Shogun's Military Academy.

Gekken Exhibitions—Sword Technique as Spectacle Saves the Dojos

In April of 1873 (Meiji 6), Sakakibara Kenkichi organized a "gekken match" at Saemon Kawagibi outside Asakusa Mitsuke. The idea of displaying sword matches with bamboo swords and armor to paying spectators was unprecedented in the traditional practice of kenjutsu. However, the inaugural ten-day event was enormously popular, and unemployed sword practitioners began organizing gekken matches one after another. It is reported that there were 37 such venues in Tokyo alone, and the practice spread to provincial areas as well.

There is also a tale that after the edict, Sakakibara invented a wooden sword called the "Yamato staff" to replace the katana, and a wooden fan called the "stubborn fan" to replace the wakizashi. This reflects the ingenuity of a single swordsman who, even though wearing swords was forbidden, refused to abandon the techniques he had mastered.

At gekken exhibition venues, matches between sword practitioners of different schools using bamboo swords and armor were presented to the public. Techniques that had once been transmitted as closely guarded secrets between master and student or within the same school were now opened to the general public as a spectacle viewable by anyone willing to pay admission. This format is considered to be one of the origins that would lead to the later development of kendo as a culture of competing through formal matches.

There was criticism even at the time that gekken exhibitions "degraded martial arts into a money-making spectacle." Yet as a result, these exhibitions supported the livelihoods of struggling practitioners and served as a bridge allowing kenjutsu techniques and dojo culture to pass undisrupted to the next generation.

The All-Japan Martial Virtue Society—Birth of a National Organization Transcending Schools

While kenjutsu as spectacle continued to survive in the private sector, it was in the late Meiji period that a national momentum for promoting martial arts grew. Against the backdrop of commemorations of the 1100th anniversary of the Heian capital's founding and victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the All-Japan Martial Virtue Society was established in Kyoto in April of 1895 (Meiji 28). The first chairman was Prince Akahito of Komatsumiya, and the president was Watanabe Chiaki, governor of Kyoto Prefecture.

What was revolutionary was that the All-Japan Martial Virtue Society functioned as an integrated organization that did not belong to any particular school.

• Held annual Butoken Festival Grand Demonstrations (the predecessor of today's All-Japan Kendo Demonstration Tournament) and awarded certificates of excellence to outstanding practitioners

• Established branches in each prefecture and built dedicated training halls called Butokuden throughout the country

• Established a martial arts teacher training institute (later the Martial Arts Specialist School) to systematically cultivate instructors

• Defined titles such as Hanshi, Kyoshi, and Renshi and established judging rules for competitions, laying the foundation for the ranking system that continues to this day

In 1919 (Taisho 8), the names "kenjutsu" and "jujutsu" were changed to "kendo" and "judo," respectively, making clear in institutional terms the shift from martial skills focused on technique to "do"—paths aimed at moral character development. Here we can see the process by which what had been merely a spectacle in the era of gekken exhibitions—a venue where individual practitioners competed—was reorganized under the All-Japan Martial Virtue Society into an educational system equipped with nationally standardized ranking and examination systems.

Post-War Discontinuity and Restarting as a Competitive Sport

After World War II, the All-Japan Martial Virtue Society was ordered to disband under the occupation, and kendo was temporarily prohibited in school education. This was because martial arts were regarded as military-nationalist training. Here, kenjutsu and kendo disappeared for a time from the public sphere.

However, the techniques themselves were not lost. Practitioners continued their training under the name "shina competitions," and later the All-Japan Kendo Federation was formed and kendo restarted as a competitive sport. The path by which gekken exhibitions overcame the crisis under the abolition edict and the path to post-war restart seem like a repetition of the same wisdom: "changing form to preserve technique," though occurring in different eras.

As a Perspective for Appreciating Named Swords

The artistic value of the sword itself and the history of kenjutsu as a method of wielding it are often discussed separately, but fundamentally they are the two wheels of one culture. When appreciating swords, learning how the kenjutsu culture of the era in which the blade was actually wielded has been passed down to the present day through various crises adds greater depth to the context of each individual blade. When we expand our perspective beyond just the form and fittings of the blade to include the historical circumstances in which the practitioners who wielded it lived, the story embedded in each individual sword becomes even more three-dimensional. Understanding is further deepened when we read about these peripheral histories of sword culture together with the historical development of iaido.