The History of Tameshigiri and the Wazamono Rankings

"Does this sword actually cut?" — That simple question in the mind of a samurai holding a blade gave rise, in the Edo period, to a kind of official testing system. A culture once existed in Japan where the sharpness of a sword was quantified using corpses and the bodies of executed criminals — something almost unthinkable today.

What is tameshigiri?

Tameshigiri (試し斬り, literally "test cutting") refers to the practice of verifying a sword's sharpness and durability through actual strikes. Historically, it falls into two broad categories.

The first is zashiki tameshi — testing against tatami mats, straw bundles, or rolled straw. This tradition survives today in the martial arts of iaido and shiken-do. The second, far more controversial historically, was kubi-kiri tameshi (neck-cutting test) and do tameshi (torso test) — tests performed on the bodies of executed criminals, commonly known as shikabane tameshi (corpse testing).

The reality of corpse testing — a man named Yamada Asaemon

In the Edo period, tameshigiri was carried out by specialists known as tameshishi (test cutters). The foremost among them was the Yamada Asaemon family.

Generation after generation, the Yamada family served the Edo shogunate as official sword testers — a role called otameshi goyō. At execution grounds (primarily Kozukappara and Suzugamori), they would conduct cutting tests on corpses using swords and record the results, issuing formal certifications of quality.

The "grading" of cuts — how sharpness was measured

Tameshigiri had its own system for ranking the difficulty of cuts. Each level had a name, ordered from easiest to hardest.

These results were recorded in documents called origami (certificates of authenticity), which served as official proof of a sword's quality. The phrase origami-tsuki — meaning "guaranteed quality" or "proven ability" in modern Japanese — derives directly from these sword certification papers.

The wazamono rankings — the hierarchy of the finest swordsmiths

Based on accumulated tameshigiri results, rankings of swordsmiths were established in the late Edo period. The most prominent sources are the Kaihō Kenjaku (懐宝剣尺, 1797) and Kokon Kaji Bikō (古今鍛冶備考), which graded swordsmiths into four tiers based on cutting performance, durability, and reputation.

Why is Kotetsu considered the greatest?

Most often cited at the pinnacle of the supreme tier is Nagasone Okisato, better known as "Kotetsu." His background is remarkable.

Kotetsu began his career as an armorer — a craftsman of suits of armor — only switching to swordsmithing after the age of fifty. Despite a short career as a smith, he produced blades of astonishing sharpness one after another, earning the highest possible recognition. His name became widely known through Kondō Isami's "Kotetsu sword," and he remains a frequent presence in period dramas and manga to this day.

However, swords bearing the Kotetsu signature are riddled with forgeries. Even in the Edo period, it was said that "nine out of ten Kotetsu swords are fakes," and whether Kondō Isami's blade was authentic remains a matter of debate to this day.

The end of tameshigiri culture

The Haitorei (sword prohibition edict) of 1876 and the tide of the Meiji Restoration swept this culture of tameshigiri into the distant past. Not only was corpse testing abolished — the samurai class itself ceased to exist, and the sword's identity shifted from weapon to work of art.

Yet the wazamono system of evaluation lives on today. Among sword collectors and museum curators, this Edo-period ranking is still referenced as a common language for discussing a blade's value.

In closing

Tameshigiri was not merely a brutal custom — it was, in its own way, a quality assurance system: an attempt to objectively verify the performance of swords as precision craft objects. As the idiom origami-tsuki still shows, that culture lives on in our daily language, transformed but not forgotten.

The next time you hear someone described as origami-tsuki no jitsuryoku — proven ability, certified quality — think of the Edo-era test cutters and the wazamono blades they measured.