The Named Swords of Japan, Part 3: Spirits and Omens

Onimaru Kunitsuna

The fifth of the Five Swords Under Heaven is the only one that remains in the custody of the Imperial Household Agency — not on public display, not held in a museum, but in the possession of the imperial institution, as it has been for most of its recorded history. Its smith, Awataguchi Kunitsuna, worked in the same school that produced Honebami Toshirō — the great Awataguchi lineage of Kyoto, which reached its height in the Kamakura period and produced several of the finest short blades in the Japanese tradition. Kunitsuna's work represents the school's mastery of the full-length tachi form.

The blade passed from the Hōjō family through the Ashikaga shoguns and into the possession of the imperial family during the Edo period, where it has remained. It is not exhibited publicly; to know it is to know it through documents, through the records of the Hon'ami appraisers, through the accounts of those few who have been permitted to examine it. It is the most inaccessible of the Five Swords Under Heaven, which gives it a quality the others lack: it remains truly mysterious, truly withheld. The other four can be seen by anyone willing to travel to their museums on the right day. This one cannot.

Muramasa

Most named swords are singular objects — one blade, one name, one provenance. Muramasa is different. It is the name of a school: the Muramasa lineage of smiths working in Kuwana, Ise Province (present-day Mie Prefecture) during the late Muromachi and Sengoku periods. The school produced blades of exceptional sharpness and distinctive character, valued by warriors throughout the period of civil wars. The name Muramasa appears on many blades, made by several generations of smiths. And yet "Muramasa" functions in Japanese cultural memory as a singular name — a thing, not a school — because of a legend that attached itself to the entire school's output and proved impossible to separate from it.

What is not legendary is the quality of the blades themselves. Muramasa school swords are prized among collectors for their sharpness, their distinctive hamon of a bright and active midare pattern, and the vigor of their workmanship. Many survive in excellent condition and are held in museum collections across Japan. They are assessed by the NBTHK on the same criteria as any other blade — their quality, their condition, their attribution — not on the basis of their reputation. For a collector, a well-attributed Muramasa school blade represents a direct connection to one of the most consequential smithing traditions of the Sengoku period, and to the most famous legend in the history of Japanese sword collecting.

The name "Muramasa" itself — the characters 村正, meaning something like "village righteousness" or "village corrector" — is unremarkable in isolation. It is the legend that transformed it into the most recognizable word in the entire nihontō vocabulary outside Japan, familiar to anyone who has encountered Japanese swords through fiction, film, or games. That familiarity almost always precedes the actual blades, which are more varied, more nuanced, and more quietly excellent than the legend suggests.

Kogitsunemaru

Mikazuki Munechika — the great crescent-moon blade discussed in Part 2 of this series — was not the only famous work of its smith, Sanjō Munechika. The same legend that describes the divine assistance Munechika received in forging Mikazuki names a companion blade forged in the same episode: Kogitsunemaru, the "little fox," made by the fox spirit that worked alongside Munechika while he prayed at the Inari shrine. If Mikazuki is the blade whose name describes what can be seen on its surface, Kogitsunemaru is the blade whose name describes what, according to tradition, made its forging possible.

Unlike Mikazuki, which survived the centuries intact and can be seen at the Tokyo National Museum, Kogitsunemaru's physical fate is uncertain. Various blades have been associated with the name at different points in history, but no currently surviving blade commands universal scholarly acceptance as the original. The name Kogitsunemaru therefore exists in a different relationship to the material world than Mikazuki: Mikazuki is a name and a blade, inseparably. Kogitsunemaru is a name, and a story, and a space where a blade once may have been.

That absence may be the most fitting ending for a blade that was always primarily a legend. The fox spirit at the Fushimi Inari shrine is associated with transformation, with crossing between worlds, with the gifts that cannot be possessed but only received. A blade that embodies those qualities and then disappears into uncertainty is, in its way, behaving exactly as the legend predicts.

Hōemaru / Kumokirimaru

In the great cycle of legends surrounding Minamoto no Yorimitsu and his four retainers — the same narrative world that produced Dōjigiri Yasutsuna and Hizamaru/Usumidori — one blade carries two names from two different kinds of spiritual power. Hōemaru, also known as Kumokirimaru, was the sword of Watanabe no Tsuna, the greatest of Yorimitsu's four retainers, whose exploits at the Rashōmon gate of Kyoto are among the most celebrated episodes of Heian legend.

The blade that howls before battle is an archetype found across sword-naming traditions: the idea that a great weapon knows what it is about to be used for, that it participates in the event rather than merely enabling it. Hōemaru carries this idea in its name. It is a sword that speaks — not in the metaphorical sense of a blade whose quality speaks through its craftsmanship, but in the literal sense of a sword whose nature announces itself in advance of events, as an omen.

As with Kogitsunemaru, the relationship between the blade of legend and any surviving physical object is uncertain. The stories of Tsuna's exploits at Rashōmon were written down long after the events they claim to describe, and the blades named in them existed primarily as narrative objects — swords in a story — before they were ever identified with specific surviving pieces of steel. What survives from this tradition is not the blade but the stories, and the understanding of what a sword could be that the stories encode: a thing that acts, that speaks, that knows, that participates in the world rather than waiting passively to be used.

What the names tell us

Across the three parts of this series, we have encountered swords named for demons killed, food shelves cut through, bones bitten through, dragonflies divided by their own weight, crescent shapes in the steel, prayer beads wrapped around a hilt, curses visited on a dynasty, fox spirits at the forge, and howls in the night before battle. That variety of origin is itself the point.

Japan's sword-naming tradition reflects a culture that understood exceptional objects to participate in the world rather than merely to occupy it. A named sword was not a passive tool; it had a biography, a character, a reputation, sometimes a will. The name was the record of the moment when that character became visible — when the sword stopped being one of many swords and became irreducibly itself.

For collectors today, the named swords are touchstones: ways of understanding what the tradition was capable of, what it aimed at, what it valued. The blades available on the market are not the named swords — those are national treasures in museums and imperial collections — but they were made by people who knew these names, who worked within a tradition that the named swords defined. To collect nihontō is, in part, to participate in that tradition. The names are the tradition speaking about itself.