Sanchomo — The National Treasure in Tozando's Backyard

In the permanent collection of the Bizen Osafune Sword Museum — the institution adjacent to whose Bussankan facility — operated by Tozando as Setouchi City's designated management operator — our specialists are present daily — there is a tachi that stops every serious visitor in their tracks. It is displayed under directional lighting that brings out the extraordinary character of its hamon: a jūka-chōji (layered clove-blossom) pattern of such density and depth that it seems almost to move as you shift your angle of view. This is the Yamatorige — known by its Sino-Japanese reading as Sanchomo — a National Treasure of Japan, forged in the mid-Kamakura period by a smith of the Fukuoka Ichimonji school, and associated for centuries with one of the Sengoku period's most celebrated warlords: Uesugi Kenshin. This article tells the story of that blade — the facts, the history, and what it means to Tozando that it is housed a few metres from where our specialists work every day.

What Sanchomo Actually Is — The Documented Facts

Unlike many swords whose historical record is fragmentary, Sanchomo's essential facts are well established. The Yamatorige is a tachi forged during the middle Kamakura period — the 13th century — by a smith of the Fukuoka Ichimonji school. The blade carries a single-character signature: Ichi (一) — the mark of the Ichimonji school, one of the great traditions of Bizen sword-making whose smiths produced some of the most celebrated blades in Japanese history.

The Hamon That Named the Blade

The name Yamatorige — "feather of the copper pheasant" — was not chosen for its historical associations or its famous owner. It was chosen for the blade's hamon. The jūka-chōji of Sanchomo is, by the consensus of everyone who has studied it, one of the finest expressions of this hamon style that survives anywhere. The chōji (clove-blossom) hamon is itself the most characteristic and celebrated pattern of the Bizen-den tradition — but jūka-chōji, in which the clove-blossom shapes are layered and multiplied to extreme density, is its rarest and most demanding form.

To produce jūka-chōji at this quality requires extraordinary control of the clay coating and quenching process. The complex, overlapping shapes of the hamon reflect equally complex variations in the clay thickness across the blade's surface — each shape the result of a precise decision about where the boundary between hardened and unhardened steel would fall. The density and depth of Sanchomo's jūka-chōji, achieved in the 13th century by a smith whose name we do not know, represents a level of technical mastery that later smiths studied for centuries and that contemporary Mukansa smiths — including Ono Yoshimitsu, whose work Tozando carries — have spent careers attempting to understand and recreate.

The name compares this hamon to the copper pheasant's feathers — layered, complex, rich in detail, beautiful at every scale of examination. It is one of the more evocative naming decisions in a tradition that has always taken the naming of great swords seriously.

Uesugi Kenshin and the Blade He Would Not Part With

The historical record connecting Sanchomo to Uesugi Kenshin (1530–1578) is consistent and well-documented. The sword was wielded by Uesugi Kagekatsu (1556–1623), a powerful warlord of the Sengoku period, and had been inherited by the Uesugi clan. The tradition of Kenshin's personal connection to the blade — his reported refusal to be parted from it throughout his campaigns — is preserved in the clan's records and repeated in historical accounts across the centuries.

Kenshin himself is one of the most celebrated figures of the Sengoku period — the "Dragon of Echigo," whose military campaigns against Takeda Shingen are among the most documented confrontations of the era. That such a figure chose Sanchomo as his personal sword — rather than a blade whose value was primarily its famous attribution — reflects a warrior's judgement: the blade's physical quality, its balance and cutting character, was what mattered to Kenshin, not its cultural prestige. The cultural prestige came later, from the association with him.

The Return Home — How Sanchomo Came Back to Bizen Osafune

For centuries after the Uesugi clan's dominance faded, Sanchomo passed through various hands and eventually entered the collection of the Maeda family — the lords of the Kaga domain, one of the wealthiest and most culturally active daimyo families of the Edo period. From the Maeda collection it passed into private hands, and for much of the 20th century it was held by a private collector in Tokyo, unavailable for public viewing.

In 2018, Setouchi City — aware that the blade had been forged within what is now its territory, and that its permanent home should be the Bizen Osafune Sword Museum where it could be seen by the public — launched an extraordinary effort to acquire it. The city ran a public crowdfunding campaign that raised over ¥1 billion — contributions from sword enthusiasts, history lovers, and Okayama residents across Japan who felt that Sanchomo belonged in Bizen Osafune. The campaign was one of the largest cultural property fundraising efforts in Japanese history.

In 2020, Sanchomo returned to Bizen Osafune. It is now on permanent display at the museum — visible to any visitor who makes the journey to Setouchi City, examined under the directional lighting that brings out its extraordinary jūka-chōji hamon in full. It took seven centuries to come home. It arrived in 2020, and it has been there every day since.

Sanchomo Goods — Bring the National Treasure Home

In Closing — The Blade That Came Home

Sanchomo was forged in the 13th century by a smith of the Fukuoka Ichimonji school — one practitioner among many in a tradition that was then at its peak, working with the iron sand of the Yoshii River valley, using techniques refined over generations to produce a hamon of extraordinary complexity and beauty. The smith did not know the blade would be named for a pheasant's feather. They did not know it would be carried by one of the Sengoku period's greatest generals. They did not know it would take seven centuries to return to the region where it was made, or that a crowdfunding campaign would raise a billion yen to bring it home.

They knew only the clay, the temperature, and the water — and what happened when the blade entered the quench at precisely the right moment, producing a jūka-chōji hamon that has been studied and admired ever since.

That blade is now in Bizen Osafune, in the museum building directly adjacent to the Bussankan where Tozando's specialists work every day. If you want to see what the Bizen tradition looks like at its absolute peak — forged eight centuries ago, by a smith whose name is lost but whose work is not — it is there, waiting for you, under the lights that bring its feather-pattern hamon to life. Come and see it.