How did Kempo come to be as it is today?
Many Kempo masters agreed that the continued existence of their arts as formal ryuha (schools) after the Meiji Restoration (1868) was inappropriate. Most of Kempo today consists of fragments of traditions that, if they ever were organised ryuha (and many were not, even during the feudal period), were disbanded as such long ago. Furthermore, the past of the crafts that we now call Kempo was not altogether free of shame, and during the feudal period Kempo always had a cross-training type of attitude because of its strong Chinese connection, so Kempo does not fit neatly into the modern Japanese conception of formal, highly organised martial arts schools. Kempo has always had an attitude similar to the modern idea of “absorb what is useful”, only qualified with “once you have mastered it “. Thus in Kempo to reject a method as useless one must first master it, then reject it, not just reject it because it doesn’t seem to work at first. In general Kempo has huge numbers of methods already, s
