or Ono Jiroemon Tadaaki was a Japanese
samurai
were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They h ...
of the early
Edo period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...
, 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
was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was one of the three "Great Unifiers" of Japan, along with his former lord Oda Nobunaga and fellow ...
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 a ...
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
Further reading
*
*
{{Authority control
Samurai
Japanese swordfighters
People from Chiba Prefecture