The Named Swords of Japan, Part 1: Legends of the Cut

Dōjigiri Yasutsuna

Of the five swords counted among the Tenka Goken — the Five Swords Under Heaven — Dōjigiri Yasutsuna is said to be the oldest, and by many accounts the most celebrated. Its smith, Yasutsuna of Hōki Province (present-day Tottori Prefecture), is considered one of the founding figures of the Japanese sword tradition. Working at a time when the distinctive curved tachi form was still being established, Yasutsuna produced blades of a character that would define the standard for a millennium afterward. No biography of him survives; only his work speaks, and this is the work that speaks loudest.

The story is mythology, almost certainly: Shuten-dōji is likely a folk memory of bandits or a rival power on the outskirts of the capital, and the account was written down centuries after the events it claims to describe. What is not mythology is the blade. Dōjigiri Yasutsuna survives in the Tokyo National Museum, still in a condition that has led scholars to call it, alongside the great blade Ōkanehira, one of the two finest surviving examples of early Japanese swordmaking — described in one tradition as the two yokozuna of the craft.

Its provenance runs through the highest reaches of Japanese history: from the Ashikaga shoguns to Oda Nobunaga, then to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and from the second Tokugawa shogun Hidetada to the Matsudaira lords of Tsuyama, in whose family it remained until the modern era. It entered the Tokyo National Museum's collection in the 20th century and is designated a National Treasure of Japan.

Heshikiri Hasebe

Hasebe Kunishige worked in Yamashiro Province — present-day Kyoto — during the turbulent Nanbokuchō period of the 14th century, when the court had split into two rival factions and the country's political order was fractured. The Hasebe school drew heavily on the techniques of the Sagami tradition — the tradition associated with Masamune and his circle — and produced blades of a distinctive character: wide, with a thin profile, a large kissaki, and a hamon of flowing notare that in Kunishige's finest work is accompanied by hitatsura, the full-body hardening that gives the blade the appearance of snow falling across its surface. This blade is one of the finest surviving examples of that aesthetic.

The blade's subsequent history connects two of the most consequential figures of the Sengoku period. Accounts differ on the exact sequence: some say Nobunaga gave the blade to Kuroda Kanbei, the strategist who became one of his most valued advisors; others say it passed through Toyotomi Hideyoshi before reaching Kuroda Nagamasa, Kanbei's son, who became a Fukuoka domain lord. What is certain is that the Kuroda family held the blade as a domain treasure from the early Edo period until 1978, when it was transferred to Fukuoka City, which now holds it in the Fukuoka City Museum.

The original signature — Hasebe Kunishige's own inscription on the tang — was lost when the blade was shortened from its original tachi length. What identifies it now is a gold inlay added by the Hon'ami family of appraisers, confirming the attribution and recording the ownership of Kuroda Nagamasa. The blade is a National Treasure of Japan.

Honebami Toshirō

The smith known as Awataguchi Yoshimitsu — also called Toshirō, the name that appears in this blade's title — is considered one of the supreme masters of the tantō form. Working in Kyoto at the end of the 13th century, in the Awataguchi school that had already produced several generations of outstanding smiths, Yoshimitsu brought the short blade to a level of refinement that has never been surpassed. His tantō are prized above all others in this form; several are National Treasures. The blade known as Honekuibei is unusual in his catalogue: it began its life not as a tantō but as a naginata — a curved polearm — and was later reworked into its present form. Even so transformed, the quality of the steel is unmistakable.

The blade's history runs from the earliest records of Japanese sword collecting through to the present day. Tradition holds that Minamoto no Yoritomo — the founder of the Kamakura shogunate in the late 12th century — was among its earliest owners, though the dating is uncertain. It passed through the Ashikaga shogunal collection and subsequently through several of the most powerful figures of the Sengoku period, eventually coming to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who valued it among his greatest treasures. After the Toyotomi family's defeat by the Tokugawa in 1615, the blade came into Tokugawa hands. In the Meiji period, the head of the Tokugawa family donated it to Toyokuni Shrine in Kyoto — the shrine dedicated to Hideyoshi's deified spirit — where it remains today.

Tonbogiri

The Tenka Sannei-sō — the Three Great Spears Under Heaven — are the three polearms that the Hon'ami appraisers placed alongside the greatest swords in Japan's catalogue of named weapons. Tonbogiri is the most celebrated of the three, inseparable from the reputation of the man who carried it: Honda Tadakatsu, one of Tokugawa Ieyasu's foremost generals. Tadakatsu's reputation bordered on the supernatural — he fought in over fifty battles without once receiving a significant wound, a record so remarkable that even his opponents commented on it. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who faced Tadakatsu across a battlefield more than once, reportedly said that there were only two things in the world he could not defeat: his own ambition and Honda Tadakatsu. The spear was part of the legend.

The smith, Fujiwara Masazane, worked during the Sengoku period. The blade he produced for Tadakatsu has a distinctive cross-shaped (jūmonji) head, the form associated with the most celebrated spears of the era. After Tadakatsu's death, the spear passed through his descendants and eventually into private ownership, where it remains today, held on loan by the Sano Art Museum in Mishima, Shizuoka Prefecture.

Ningen-Mukotsu

The second of the Three Great Spears under Heaven carries a name that is, if anything, more extreme than its companion's. Where Tonbogiri named a quality by what it did to a dragonfly, Ningen-Mukotsu names a quality by what it did to human beings — or rather, what it did not need to do, because there was nothing there to resist. Ningen-mukotsu: humans have no bones. When this spear cut, bone was as nothing.

The two versions are not necessarily contradictory: the name may have attached to the weapon through one story and been confirmed by the other. What is consistent across the accounts is the nature of the claim — not merely that the blade was sharp, but that sharpness, at this level, dissolved the distinction between cutting through flesh and cutting through air. The spear is attributed to Izumi-no-kami Kanesada, a smith of the Seki tradition in Mino Province. It passed through the Mori family for generations, was displayed at the Yūshūkan museum at Yasukuni Shrine in 1940, and is now held in private ownership, with replicas preserved at several historical sites.