The Named Swords of Japan, Part 2: Visions in Steel

Mikazuki Munechika

Among the Five Swords Under Heaven, Mikazuki Munechika is widely considered the most beautiful. That is a remarkable distinction in a group that includes Dōjigiri Yasutsuna — the blade often called the greatest surviving example of Japanese swordmaking. What sets Mikazuki apart is not power or history but a purely visual quality, a surface phenomenon that no other blade in the catalogue replicates: a scattering of crescent-shaped ko-nie — tiny crystalline particles of hard steel — that drift along the blade's surface like a half-moon reflected in still water. The smith Sanjō Munechika worked in Kyoto during the same late Heian period as Yasutsuna, at the founding moment of the distinctive Japanese blade form. Where Yasutsuna's blade speaks of function elevated to art, Mikazuki speaks of a smith who understood that the surface of steel could be made to carry light.

The blade's history is partly legendary. The most celebrated account involves the smith Munechika himself: asked to forge a sword of exceptional quality, he is said to have prayed at the Inari shrine, and to have been joined in the work by a divine figure — a fox spirit in the guise of a young man — who worked the other side of the blade alongside him, so that the finished sword was partly human and partly divine in its making. Whether the story is taken literally or as a way of saying that the blade's quality seemed to exceed what a human craftsman could achieve alone, it reflects how highly the work was regarded even in its own time.

From the hands of the Ashikaga shoguns the blade passed through Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the Tokugawa collection, and in the Meiji period it was transferred to the household of the imperial family. It is now in the Tokyo National Museum and is a National Treasure.

Juzumaru Tsunetsugu

Juzumaru Tsunetsugu is the only one of the Five Swords Under Heaven that has never left the custody of a religious institution. It is held at Honkōji Temple in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture, the head temple of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism — and its association with that sect, and with the monk who founded it, is inseparable from its name. The smith Aoe Tsunetsugu worked in Bitchū Province (present-day Okayama) during the Kamakura period, and the Aoe school is known for blades of a distinctive character: a dark, complex jigane with a particular depth to its surface quality, and a hamon of a type associated with the region's own steel tradition.

The blade's history after Nichiren is less clearly documented than those of the other Tenka Goken blades, most of which passed through the hands of the Ashikaga and Tokugawa shoguns. Juzumaru went the other direction: it remained in the religious world. After passing through several hands, it came to Honkōji Temple, where it has been held ever since. It is not on regular public display — the temple exhibits it on specific occasions — which gives it a different relationship to its audience than the blades held in national museums. To see Juzumaru is, in some sense, to visit the religious tradition it has inhabited for most of its life.

Ōtenta Mitsuyo

Of the Five Swords Under Heaven, Ōtenta Mitsuyo is in some ways the most elemental. Where Mikazuki Munechika is celebrated for its visual refinement and Dōjigiri Yasutsuna for its technical mastery, Ōtenta carries a quality that is harder to describe and more immediately felt: a physical presence, a weight of steel and character, that made it one of the most valued objects in the Maeda domain's treasury for generations. The smith Miike Tenta Mitsuyo worked in Kyushu — in Chikugo Province, present-day Fukuoka Prefecture — during the late Heian period, at the same early moment in the Japanese sword tradition as Yasutsuna and Munechika. His work is associated with the Miike school of smithing, a tradition distinct from the Kyoto and Sagami lineages that dominate the canonical histories.

The blade entered the Maeda family collection in the late Sengoku period and remained there for the entire Edo period, one of the most closely guarded treasures of the Kaga domain. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was deeply interested in obtaining it and reportedly sent several requests to the Maeda — which the domain declined. The blade is said to have had a reputation beyond its aesthetic quality: it was believed to have the power to cure illness, and when a family member of the Maeda was unwell, the blade was brought near them as an act of healing. This belief in the sword as a bearer of spiritual power is a recurring feature of the most celebrated named blades, connecting their material character to something beyond it. The blade is now held by the Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation in Kanazawa.

Hizamaru / Usumidori

Hizamaru is unusual in this series because it carries two names, each earned at a different moment in its long history, and each from a different logic of naming. The first name — Hizamaru — belongs to the same category as the blades in Part 1 of this series: it is said to have come from a feat of cutting, specifically from cutting through the knee of a great spider demon that the warrior Minamoto no Yorimitsu's retainer Watanabe no Tsuna encountered at the Rashōmon gate of Kyoto. The blade severed the creature's knee precisely, and the name recalled that act. It was paired with another blade, Hoemaru (蜘蛛切), which had its own name — "spider-cutter" — from the same encounter.

The blade's history is entangled with the legends of the Minamoto warriors and the great cycle of tales surrounding Yorimitsu and his four retainers — the same narrative world that produced the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna story. Where Dōjigiri is an authenticated historical object whose legend can be evaluated against the physical evidence, Hizamaru/Usumidori sits at a more complex intersection of the legendary and the historical. The blade designated by this name and held at Hōkoku Shrine in Kyoto is a National Treasure, but the relationship between the surviving object and the blade of legend involves the same interpretive questions that attend many of the named swords: the legends are not history, but they are not nothing either. They record how a culture thought about its own exceptional objects.