Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

metallurgyhelp t1_jd9oudy wrote

Was it fairly common to have a female master teaching either naginatajutsu (naginata polearm) or kyudo/kyujutsu (bow) to fellow women during the Meiji era and pre-WWII? Or did men teach this to women back then too, in a dojo setting? Or did only their husbands/father teach them?

I've noticed a common trend that these arts tend to have mostly women practitioners nowadays, but how about as far back as over a century ago?

1

Doctor_Impossible_ t1_jdbu77q wrote

>Or did men teach this to women back then too, in a dojo setting?

The system has been relatively stable for a long time. The teachers, up until fairly recently, were overwhelmingly male. Naginatajutsu/kyujutsu would have been a subset of the curriculum of a kobudo, and the teachers would have been expected to know and teach across the curriculum, not just sections of it that women were expected to know. There would have been plenty of female practitioners and experienced students, but female teachers would be unusual, and much more so the higher in the hierarchy you went.

1

Tsunominohataraki t1_jdlr9ph wrote

> Naginatajutsu/kyujutsu would have been a subset of the curriculum of a kobudo,

Kyujutsu has typically (and if I’m not mistaken, indeed exclusively) been taught in specialised ryuha.

1