Kashima-Shinryû North America is the governing body for all schools, instructors, and students of Kashima-Shinryû in the United States and Canada. It is directed by William BODIFORD (president) and Karl FRIDAY (vice president). Our goal is to maintain a close working relationship with the Kashima-Shinryû federation of Martial Science (Kashima-Shinryû Budô Renmei) as we work to preserve and pass on the traditions of Kashima-Shinryû in a way that upholds its integrity as an expression of Japanese culture while also permitting a flexible organizational structure suited to American circumstances.
During the 1980s several exchange students came to Tsukuba University where they began to study Kashima-Shinryû under the direction of the shihanke, SEKI Humitake, who was then a professor at Tsukuba. After several years of intense training, they returned to the United States where they continued their academic training in graduate programs at Yale University and at Stanford University and where they founded small Kashima-Shinryû clubs. Over the course of their graduate training and teaching careers, they repeatedly came back to Japan, where they continued to train in Kashima-Shinryû under the direct supervision of the shihanke, and they continued to organize local Kashima-Shinryû clubs at their home universities in North America. As several different Kashima-Shinryû groups emerged, they recognized the need to develop a formal organizational structure to help all the groups to teach orthodox Kashima-Shinryû, to help all groups maintain close relationships with the shihanke and with the Kashima-Shinryû Federation of Martial Sciences, and to help all groups cooperate with one another. In response to these needs, in March 1993 William BODIFORD, Karl FRIDAY, Richard PIETRELLI, and Mark TAPER organized the Kashima-Shinryû Federation of North America.
The constitution of the Kashima-Shinryû Federation of North America can be found in appendix 5 (pp. 182-190) of the book: Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryû and Samurai Martial Culture, by Karl FRIDAY with SEKI Humitake (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997).
For more information, please see the Internet Home Page of the Kashima-Shinryû Federation of North America (http://www.kashima-shinryu.us/). The individual chapters within our federation can be contacted as follows: