OUR TOYAMA RYU HERITAGE
Founding at Toyama > Yamaguchi Yuuki > Munetoshi Tsuyoshi Inoue > Claudio Artusi > Jim Mc Coy
As always, thanks to Darrell Craig who has given so much to our dojo
David Goldberg of Gold Mountain Forge who really taught me to cut
Itani Toshiyuki Shihan of Yakumaru Jigen Ryu who also influenced all that we do.
Dana Abbott

Toyama-ryu was created perhaps as early as 1925 at the Rikugun Toyama Gakko, or "Toyama Military Academy". Today Toyama-ryu is primarily located in Kanto Region. It does not have a single headmaster. By the 1970s, three separate organizations represented Toyama-ryu iaido: in Hokkaido, the late Yamaguchi Yuuki Sensei's Greater Japan Toyama Ryu Iaido Federation; in Kansai (Kyoto-Osaka area), the late Morinaga Kiyoshi Sensei's Greater Japan Toyama Ryu Iaido Association; and, Nakamura Sensei's All Japan Toyama Ryu Iaido Federation. Each organization was autonomous and retained its own set of forms; the Hokkaido branch even included sword versus bayonet exercises.

The army iai-batto kata differ from many koryu sword schools, in that all techniques are practised from a standing position. At the heart of the ryu is the tameshigiri or test-cutting.

As a result of a somewhat limited series of movements and the relative speed at which a student may begin cutting targets with a sharp sword, Toyama-ryu has become widespread in the United States where it is easy to acquire swords. The history of the style has been strangely sugar coated from the standpoint of Imperial Japanese war atrocities. It is widely believed that the academy stressed tameshigiri training in order to build the cutting skills needed to execute prisoners of war.

Although popular literature for the schools that teach Toyama-ryu often cite the style as a type of kenjutsu, the flat footed cutting of targets calls to mind the tied up and defeated nature of the intended targets of the Toyama-ryu. It is believed that the cutting method of Toyama Ryu was devised for the execution of prisoners.