Gonnosuke withdrew to a Shinto shrine at Mount Hōman in Chikuzen province, (modern-day, Fukuoka Prefecture), where he would practice daily in perfecting his swordsmanship, praying and performing Shinto purifying rituals for 37 days. It is also said, however, that he spent several years on the road studying other martial arts in various dojos until he ended up at the Shinto shrine. After one of his regular (exhausting) training sessions, he collapsed from fatigue and reputedly had a vision of a divine being in the form of a child, saying to Gonnosuke: know the solar plexus [of your opponent] with a round stick. In another version he had the vision in a dream late at night. He took it upon himself to create the jo deliberately longer than the average katana of the day, 128 cm, as opposed to the sword's total length of approx. 100 cm, and use that length to his advantage in a fight. Gonnosuke, drawing on his own considerable experience with the spear, longstaff, naginata and sword, devised a series of jo-techniques for use to counter and defeat a swordsman. Arguably, he also developed techniques to target Musashi's trade-mark X-block.