or Ono Jiroemon Tadaaki was a Japanese

samurai The samurai () were members of the warrior class in Japan. They were originally provincial warriors who came from wealthy landowning families who could afford to train their men to be mounted archers. In the 8th century AD, the imperial court d ...

of the early

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

, who was renowned as a swordsman. He founded the Ono-ha Ittō-ryū style of swordsmanship after his teacher made him head master of the Ittō-ryū. He was one of two official sword masters for

Tokugawa Ieyasu Tokugawa Ieyasu (born Matsudaira Takechiyo; 31 January 1543 – 1 June 1616) was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, which ruled from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was the third of the three "Gr ...

and his style, along with

Yagyū Shinkage-ryū is one of the oldest Japanese schools of swordsmanship (''kenjutsu''). Its primary founder was Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, who called the school Shinkage-ryū. In 1565, Nobutsuna bequeathed the school to his greatest student, Yagyū Munetoshi, who ...

became one of the official ryūha of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Tenzen (典膳), meaning assistant cupbearer (for the Emperor) seems to have been a court title under Ritsuryō system, Tadaaki got as an honorific from the Bakufu. In Eiji Yoshikawa's book ''Musashi'', Tadaaki appears as an aging samurai, instructor to the Shogun. He faces Sasaki Kojiro and gives up when realizing that he is now too old to fight people as skilled as Kojiro. He then withdraws from public life and goes to live as an hermit.

References

#Kendo: Elements, Rules and Philosophy Copyright(c) Jinichi Tokeshi

References

Further reading