Written and translated by Motobu Naoki
The following text appears in Kimura Tatsuo's "Transparent Power" (1995).
Around 1940 or 1941, Yoshida Kōtarō, who lived at Udagawa Kaikan, 27 Ōtsuka Sakashita, Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo, visited Sagawa Yukiyoshi at his home in Higashi-Nakano, Tokyo, and asked, "I heard that a man named Okuyama Ryūhō is doing Daitō-ryū and calling himself Hakkō-ryū, as if he made it himself. Mr. Sagawa, punish him." Sagawa replied, "Then why don't you go to Okuyama's dōjō yourself?" Yoshida replied, "No, I am too old. I have no choice but to ask Mr. Sagawa to punish him."
So one day, they set a date and went to Okuyama Ryūhō's dōjō together. However, Okuyama was not there. They left, saying that they had no choice but to come back again (p. 23).
Also, Takahashi Ken, "Sagawa Yukiyoshi Lineage: The Truth of Daitō-ryū Aiki" (2007), has the following text.
It was after the outbreak of World War II. Suddenly, Shihan Yoshida visited Sagawa Sensei and begged him to do the following: "B of a certain school (=Hakkō-ryū) says that he has established his own school, hiding the fact that he was influenced by Daitō-ryū. Please punish him for his insult to Takeda Sensei." Sagawa Sensei decided that this insult could not be left unresolved, so he immediately visited the dōjō of a certain school, only to find that it was already empty.
Soon after, B's teacher, Shihan Matsuda Toshimi, rushed to him and said, "B is my student. I apologize for his rudeness on this occasion, and I ask that you forgive him" (p. 135).
As mentioned in the previous article, Okuyama Ryūhō, the founder of Hakkō-ryū, concealed the fact that he had studied Daitō-ryū Aiki Jūjutsu, and after the war fraudulently claimed that it was his own creation or a martial art founded by Minamoto no Yoshimitsu (1045-1127). However, it seems that he had been making such fraudulent claims even before the war.
This fact was known and resented by direct disciples of Takeda Sōkaku, such as Yoshida Kōtarō and Sagawa Yukiyoshi, but his teacher, Matsuda Toshimi, apologized and the matter was put to rest.
However, these facts were, of course, completely unknown to the Okinawa seminar. In general, if an instructor holds a seminar by misrepresenting his own background and charges a fee as high as the average monthly salary, it may be considered fraud. Even today, arrests are often made in the news for fraudulent high priced seminars.
According to Uehara Seikichi, the fee for the Hakkō-ryū seminar was "the highest in the world," but since he had been begged by Kaneshima Shinsuke (Tozan-ryū) to participate, he had no choice but to pay it because he knew that refusing to pay and leaving the venue would ruin Kaneshima Sensei's reputation.
Furthermore, the actual teaching time was extremely short: 15 minutes per day, or one hour in total for the four days.
Even so, Okuyama was so amazed at Uehara Sensei's ability that he omitted the awarding of dan rank and conferred a shihan license on him, but this was nothing but an unwelcome inconvenience for Uehara Sensei. In the first place, the techniques of Hakkō-ryū did not apply to Uehara Sensei, and on the contrary, his instructor, Yasuda Hidenori, even became Uehara Sensei's student.
What was even more unforgivable to Uehara Sensei was that Okuyama wrote a fictitious dojo name "Hōyūkan" in "Hakkō-ryū Jūjutsu Shihan Meikan" (1962), and listed Uehara Sensei's dōjō as a branch. Uehara Sensei's dōjō name was "Seidōkan," and he did not have a dōjō at that time. The Seidōkan was built in 1964. Okuyama had a habit of misrepresenting himself, perhaps to make his school appear bigger, as when he falsely claimed that Nagamine Shōshin was also from the "Okinawa Branch" and had the local newspaper report it.
According to Fujiguchi Tōgo, "Hakkō-ryū Sōke: Okuyama Ryūhō" (1969), the number of shihan authorized by Okuyama exceeded 2,000 (p. 265). Takeda Sōkaku did not appoint shihan, but instead appointed "acting professors." Ueshiba Morihei (founder of aikido) was one of them. However, there were less than 20 of them. This clearly shows how huge the number of shihan that Okuyama authorized was. Incidentally, the number of Shihan authorized by Uehara Sensei during his lifetime was five.
As mentioned previously, Uehara Sensei had publicly adopted the name Motobu-ryū since the year before the Second Okinawa Hakko-ryū Seminar (1962), and was active in participating in a kobudo demonstration organized by the Okinawa Kobudo Association. He also began teaching torite (Oki: tuitī) to Higa Seitoku, the president of the Kobudo Association, in the same year. This fact is mentioned in Higa Sensei's profile in "Seisetsu Okinawa Karate-do" (1977), supervised by Uechi Kan'ei (Volume 4, p. 724).
In 1961, he became the first president of the Okinawa Kobudō Association.
In the same year, he studied under Sōke Uehara Seikichi to learn torite, the secret martial art of Motobu-ryū.
Therefore, Uehara Sensei did not call himself Motobu-ryū or begin teaching torite (Oki: tuitī) after taking the Hakko-ryū seminar. However, an article in the October 1989 issue of "Monthly Karatedō" (p. 51) slandered Uehara Sensei's name along with other martial artists, saying, "It is a fact that there are many people who have studied Hakkō-ryū, but have concealed this fact and created new styles and become sōke" (p. 51).
* "Monthly Karatedō" was discontinued in December 2015.
It is no laughing joke that a "karate magazine" would uncritically take up the argument of Hakkō-ryū, which advocates that karate should be banned by law. Perhaps the editorial staff of "Monthly Karatedō" had not even read Okuyama's autobiography. Nor, of course, did they interview Motobu Udundī.
Since Hakkō-ryū already had a reputation in the martial arts world at the time as a "fake martial art" that promoted untruths, the editorial staff of a martial arts magazine should have checked past literature and interviewed the Motobu Udundī side to cross-check the claims. If they had done so, they would have at least noticed that the timeline of the above claim is not correct.
Sō Dōshin (Shōrinji Kempo) wrote that Okuyama was advertising himself (Sō) as his disciple because he was becoming famous, which was laughable. Hakko-ryū did the same thing by fabricating facts when Uehara Sensei became famous, which is extremely regrettable.
References
Fujita Tōgo, Hakkō-ryū Sōke: Okuyama Ryūhō, Soshi-sha, 1969.