Hansuke Nakamura

was a Japanese jujutsu practitioner. He was one of the best regarded jujutsu stylists in Japan before the rise of judo, and remains as the most famous exponent of the Ryōi Shintō-ryū school.

When the Meiji Restoration caused the Nakamura clan to be dissolved in 1868, Hansuke became a fisherman and a sake brewer in order to make a living, yet he didn't stop practicing his art. The same year, he fought a challenge match against Genshin Eguchi from the Kyushin-ryū, a rival faction from Higo Province. Nakamura won the match, breaking Eguchi's arm with an armbar, but the scuffle was so brutal that Eguchi tried to escape the hold by gruesomely biting Nakamura's leg.

Around 1883, Nakamura also fought Hidemi Totsuka, the son of renowned Yoshin-ryu master Hikosuke Totsuka, in a best of three. Hidemi, widely considered to be Nakamura's superior in technique, won the first time, but Nakamura rallied back and defeated him twice in return, winning the challenge.

Challenges on the Kodokan Nakamura (second row, eighth from the right) among other jujutsu masters in 1888.

In 1886, with the rise of Jigoro Kano and his Kodokan institute, Nakamura sided against them in behalf of Hikosuke Totsuka's Yōshin-ryū, the country's main jujutsu school. He challenged one of their members, Tsunejiro Tomita, during the opening of Magoroku Hachitani's Tenshin Shinyō-ryū dojo. However, as soon as the match started, Tomita immediately scored a tomoe nage, and he repeated the technique two more times before his shocked opponent managed to block it. The judoka followed with an ouchi gari, which Nakamura blocked, and a hiza guruma, which seemed successful, but the jujutsuka pulled Tomita to the ground and tried to pin him with kami-shiho-gatame. In the process, however, Tomita locked a gyaku-juji-jime from the bottom. Trapped in the chokehold, Nakamura showed signs of hypoxia, so Hachitani stopped the match before he lost consciousness.

From this point, the fighters continued trying to escape their opponent's field of strength while attempting to bring him to their own, until the draw was called at 55 minutes. In total, they fought half an hour standing and 25 minutes on the ground, and they were rendered so tired that the referee had to forcefully pry their numb fingers apart to separate them when the match ended. As they match lacked a result, commentators settled it down by nicknaming Yokoyama as the and Nakamura as the . Nakamura and Yokoyama formed a friendship after the match.

Last years and legacy Immediately after the Kodokan matches, Nakamura challenged again Masaaki Samura. This time Nakamura won, though details of the match are sparse. He also rematched Yokoyama, though being defeated by harai makikomi in a less well received bout. Afterwards, Nakamura joined the Kodokan for a multitudinous jujutsu exhibition, being paired with Yokoyama's former master Keitaro Inoue.

Nakamura died in 1897 at 52 years old, but he was immortalized by a character of Tsuneo Tomita's Sanshiro Sugata novel series, Hansuke Murai, who was directly based on him. Baku Yumemakura also wrote a novel series about Nakamura named Toten no Shishi ("The Lion of the East").