Professor 'Henry' Seishiro Okazaki

Danzan Ryu Jujutsu was founded by Prof. Henry Seishiro Okazaki in Hawaii around 1922. He immigrated to Hawaii in 1906. In 1909 he was diagnosed by a doctor to have been suffering from incurable tuberculosis. After learning this, Okazaki started to practice Jujutsu in earnest and in defiance of death. His frantic efforts and devotion to Jujutsu miraculously healed his tuberculosis, and Okazaki decided to devote the rest of his life to the teaching and promotion of Jujutsu. 

While he was in Hilo, Hawaii he mastered the Yoshinryu, Iwagaryu, and Kosogaburyu schools of Jujutsu. He then combined these schools with the Karate techniques of the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) and the knifing techniques of the Philippines; and created his own Danzan Ryu school of Jujutsu. 

In 1924 Okazaki returned to Japan, traveled extensively while visiting more than fifty Jujutsu dojo that were scattered between Morioka City in the north and Kagoshima in the south, studying the "Okugi" (secret teachings). He mastered 675 techniques of Jujutsu. 

Upon his return from Japan he then started teaching on the island of Maui for a short period. Then in 1929 he moved to Honolulu where he bought the "Nikko" (Rays of the sun) residence at South Hotel Street. He converted it into the "Okazaki Seifukujitsuin" (Okazaki adjustment and restoration clinic), while at the same time he founded the Kodenkan Dojo where he taught Jujutsu until a series of strokes eventually caused his death in 1951. 

After Okazaki’s death in 1951 Sig Kufferath, Okazaki’s senior student and chief instructor at the Kodenkan was formally elected by the board of directors of the American Jujutsu Institute, founded by Okazaki in 1939, to succeed Okazaki as head and Professor of Danzan Ryu Jujutsu. This became official on October 6, 1953.