An issue that I run into, a lot, when it comes to martial arts in general, but KishimotoDi, in particular, is that a lot of people confuse popularity with legitimacy–they believe that all “legitimate” styles are popular, and if a style is not popular, it must not be “legitimate,” which is simply not the case. As others have mentioned, Higa Seitoku (founder of the Bugeikan and direct student of Kishimoto Soko) was a highly respected martial artist with excellent credentials, and his son has continued his legacy at the Bugeikan. Unfortunately, only one student of “Bushi” Tachimura (Kishimoto Soko) went on to each, and only two students of Kishimoto (Higa and Shukumine) went on to teach, so there simply hasn’t been much opportunity for the art to be disseminated. It doesn’t help that where Higa chose to preserve the methods he was taught, Shukumine decided to try and evolve it, which is why KishimotoDi and Gensei-Ryu/Taido don’t match, even though they have a good bit of crossover.
Another part of why KishimotoDi is so small is that the Bugeikan never registered it as a style with the Japanese government until 2011, when Ulf Karlsson and a few others urged Higa Sensei to do so in order to try and preserve the art. Up until that time, KishimotoDi was simply taught as “Kishimoto’s material” or “Kishimoto’s Ti” at the Bugeikan, usually mixed in with their other curriculum. This led to a decent number of people learning Tachimura no Naihanchi and Nidanbu, in conjunction with the Hanashiro Chomo Shorin-Ryu and Motobu Udundi material, but very few of them studied those kata thoroughly enough to then go on to learn Tachimura no Passai and Tachimura no Kusanku. Ulf Karlsson has been the most dedicated student of Kishimoto’s material, which is why he has become the only person outside of Okinawa to be granted a Shihan license in the art. There simply hasn’t been enough time since the preservation efforts began for there to be a significant number of instructors or practitioners out there. The only people who have published material about it in English, so far, have really been myself, Ulf Karlsson, Mark Bishop, and Motobu Naoki. More will come as more people experience the art, and Ulf Karlsson is currently working on a book that will go into great detail on the system and its history, which he has been researching EXTENSIVELY on his annual trips to Japan and Okinawa, including getting access familial and government records. It’s a big project, so it’s taking a long time, but I’m excited for it to be finished!
With regard to the kata being changed, none of us have ever claimed that the kata are “the original versions” or “unchanged.” We have merely said that they were “not altered by Itosu,” or “not altered to fit Itosu’s approach to karate,” and that they are likely to be “closer to the original versions” than modern Shorin-Ryu. We are all very well aware of the fact that every practitioner in history has altered the material they learned as they passed it on, either because they forgot things, or misunderstood things, or purposely changed things to meet their preferences and understanding. Tachimura no Naihanchi, Tachimura no Passai, and Tachimura no Kusanku are certainly not the same kata that “Todi” Sakugawa taught, and they are likely not the same as what Tachimura, himself, taught, and that’s okay. Those are still the sources of the material, and the material was specifically separated from the efforts made in the early 1900s to modernize karate and make it suitable for the school system and teaching large groups.
Now, as someone who has been training in the art for the past decade, I can tell you that it works well, and it meshes so well with what we know of classical Okinawan martial arts that various masters (Motobu, Itoman, Mabuni, Funakoshi, etc.) of the past wrote about that it seems impossible for it to NOT be a legitimate system, even if we didn’t have the direct lineage of Kishimoto Soko to Higa Seitoku to back it up. It has really helped me understand my Shorin-Ryu better, and expand my understanding of the art and how it likely developed. It’s also a very cohesive system that makes sense together, rather then feeling like the kata are all different systems thrown together into a collection. I can also tell you that some of it is so subtle that, unless you experience it firsthand, you won’t think it works. There was one technique that Ulf taught me on his first visit to the US that I just could NOT figure out for about a year, until it finally clicked. He likes to say that KishimotoDi is “so simple it’s difficult,” and I’ve found that to be true. It’s a very soft style, and it uses power generation methods that simply don’t fit with modern karate, so from a modern karate perspective, it looks weak, but that’s a case of something being different and being assumed to be wrong, when that isn’t the case.