A television programme about Japanese swords brings together three guests: a beloved regional mascot character who owns over a hundred blades, a martial artist and actor who has just purchased a sword from one of Japan's leading contemporary smiths, and a comedian whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the tradition surprises even the specialists in the room. This is not a fantasy. It is a real programme that aired on TBS in late 2025 — and it illustrates something that anyone who spends time in Japan's sword world already knows: the boundary between nihonto and Japan's creative community has never been particularly firm. This article explores who is crossing it, what draws them there, and what their presence means for a tradition that has survived a thousand years by finding the people it needs.
Four Portraits — Japan's Creative World and the Sword
Ken Takakura spent fifty years defining the image of the stoic, honour-bound Japanese man on screen. From the yakuza films of the 1960s through internationally recognised work, his screen presence was characterised by a quality Japanese audiences recognised immediately — the composed intensity of someone who has thought deeply about discipline and its costs. That this quality extended into his private life, and specifically to an appreciation of nihonto, was perhaps inevitable.
Takakura's connection to the sword world included a documented relationship with swordsmith Miyairi Kozaemon Yukihira — one of the most respected contemporary smiths, whose work is exhibited in major museum collections. A historic blade known as Norishige — associated with Takakura through this connection — was displayed at a New Year hotel exhibition in Tokyo and subsequently at Meiji Jingu in November 2025, where its relationship to Takakura formed part of the display context.
What the Takakura story illustrates is not simply that a famous actor appreciated fine swords. It is that the quality of attention nihonto demands — patient, sustained, multi-directional — is entirely consistent with the artistic seriousness that defined his entire career. For such a person, the sword is not an accessory. It is another form of the same discipline.
Yokoyama Yasushi was, by most accounts, the greatest manzai comedian of his generation — a performer of explosive energy, surgical comic timing, and a stage presence that could fill any space he occupied. He was also, by his own public account, a serious collector of Japanese swords. His enthusiasm for nihonto was not a quiet private hobby; it was part of his public personality, discussed openly with the same passion he brought to everything else.
The Yokoyama case is culturally significant for a specific reason: at a time when nihonto collecting was considered primarily a pursuit of older male specialists in a narrow milieu, a flamboyant, working-class Osaka comedian demonstrated that the appreciation of Japanese swords existed entirely outside that expected profile. The combination was, on reflection, entirely natural. The discipline of the sword and the discipline of the comedian both require a specific kind of intensity, presence, and the willingness to do the same thing thousands of times until it becomes something else entirely.
Jun'ichi Okada is one of the most physically accomplished actors currently working in Japanese film and television. His martial arts credentials are genuine — he holds dan ranks in multiple disciplines including the classical school Tenshinsho-den Katori Shinto-ryu — and his action sequences in Netflix's Ikusagami (2025) reflect a practitioner's understanding of edged weapons that goes well beyond what screen training alone produces.
Okada's status as a sword collector entered the public record through a TBS television programme in late 2025, in which he appeared alongside fellow sword enthusiasts Funassyi and Robert's Akiyama Ryuji. His personal sword was featured in the programme — and it emerged that he had recently purchased a blade by contemporary swordsmith Matsuda Tsuguyasu, one of the respected voices in modern Japanese swordsmithing. The specificity of this acquisition — a blade by a named living smith, chosen with evident knowledge — places Okada firmly in the category of serious collector rather than celebrity accessory-owner.
The connection between his collecting and his professional work is not incidental. An actor who understands a sword as a practitioner and a collector brings a different quality of attention to the screen. The way a blade is held, drawn, and returned to the saya by someone who knows what these actions feel like — in the body, with the actual weight of the object — is different in ways that audiences perceive without being able to articulate why.
Of all the stories in this article, Funassyi's is arguably the most remarkable — not because of the public profile involved, but because of the genuine depth and seriousness of the collecting that underlies it. Originally interested in history, Funassyi encountered a sword at an online auction approximately five years ago, won the bid, and became completely absorbed. Today the collection exceeds a hundred blades.
The quality of this collection led to an extraordinary outcome in 2025: the Bizen Osafune Sword Museum — the institution at the historical heart of Japanese sword production, where Tozando operates the adjacent Bussankan facility — mounted a special exhibition titled "Swords Save People — Funassyi's Sword Exhibition." The exhibition displayed 63 blades selected from the collection, divided into summer and autumn showings, spanning Muromachi-era pieces through contemporary works. Ten percent of all admission proceeds were donated to support victims of the Noto Peninsula earthquake — a detail that reflects the ethical dimension Funassyi brings to his collecting.
This was not a celebrity endorsement arrangement. It was a curatorial decision by the museum's staff, who assessed the collection on its merits and found it worthy of institutional exhibition. That assessment, at one of Japan's most serious sword institutions, reflects how far the collecting had developed from an impulse bid at an online auction.
It asks whether you are paying attention.
Artists, by training, know how to answer that question."
Why Japan's Creative Community Is Drawn to Nihonto — Five Reasons
Every serious artistic practice involves the pursuit of a form simultaneously functional and beautiful — where the requirements of use have been refined over generations until what remains is exactly what is needed and nothing else. The Japanese sword is the clearest physical expression of this principle in Japanese material culture. Its geometry is not arbitrary; every curve, angle, and dimension has been refined through centuries of use and aesthetic consideration. An artist who understands their own craft recognises this process immediately. The sword is the product of a discipline they already know, in a different material.
A nihonto reveals itself slowly. The jihada is invisible under direct light and appears only at a raking angle, in slow movement. The hataraki in the hamon — the kinsuji, the nie, the utsuri — emerge differently at different angles and under different lighting. The blade rewards exactly the kind of sustained, patient, multi-directional attention that serious artistic practice demands and develops. A performer who has spent years reading an audience's response to small physical cues, or a comedian who has refined the timing of silence, has already trained the perceptual faculties that nihonto appreciation requires.
A Kamakura-period blade is the direct physical record of a master craftsman's decisions — the specific clay application, the specific quenching temperature, the specific folding pattern — made seven hundred years ago and preserved in steel. For an artist who thinks seriously about craft and tradition, this encounter with historical mastery is not abstract. It is immediate and physical: evidence of another practitioner's skill, separated by centuries but present in the hand. This quality of direct contact with the past is rare in any collecting domain.
The Japanese aesthetic tradition has always been suspicious of beauty that is merely decorative. The sword is the clearest counter-example: an object of extraordinary visual beauty whose beauty is inseparable from its functional excellence. The hamon is beautiful because the differential hardening process that creates it also produces a blade that is hard at the edge and resilient at the spine. These are not separate qualities. For creative practitioners who work in traditions similarly demanding the unity of form and function — where beauty that does not serve the work is waste — this integration is deeply resonant.
Entering the nihonto world seriously means entering a community of practitioners with deep, specialised knowledge — appraisers, smiths, polishers, dealers, and collectors who have spent lifetimes developing expertise that cannot be shortcut. For artists who have similarly committed to the long practice of their own disciplines, this environment is immediately legible. The sword world's emphasis on earned knowledge, the primacy of physical engagement over theoretical discussion, and the transmission of understanding through direct relationship — these are values that resonate with any serious practitioner of any craft.
have always been its most serious practitioners
The stories in this article are not primarily stories about celebrity endorsement. They are stories about what happens when people of genuine discipline and seriousness encounter nihonto and pursue that encounter to its natural depth. Ken Takakura did not display a sword as a prop of status. Funassyi did not acquire a hundred blades as a distraction. Jun'ichi Okada did not buy a blade by a named contemporary smith to complete a theme. In each case, the engagement is characterised by sustained, deepening, personally demanding attention.
This is what the nihonto tradition has always required and always rewarded. The fact that it can be found equally in a regional mascot character, a postwar comedy legend, and a martial arts actor tells us something important: the tradition's appeal is not demographic or cultural in the limiting sense. It is available to anyone willing to bring to it the quality of attention that any serious practice demands.
For the long-term future of nihonto, these practitioners matter enormously. A hundred people who encounter the tradition through Funassyi's exhibition and pursue that encounter with seriousness are worth more than a thousand passive admirers. The creative community's visible engagement with nihonto is not a marketing phenomenon. It is the tradition doing what it has always done: finding the people who are ready for it, wherever they happen to be.
meets the real thing
Whatever brought you to Japanese swords — a film, an exhibition, a performance, or a lifetime of quiet curiosity — Tozando's collection and specialists are here for the next step. Browse our antique and modern collections, visit us at Bizen Osafune or our three Kyoto stores, or contact our English-language specialists to begin the conversation.
In Closing — The Sword Finds Its People
There is a tradition in the nihonto world that the finest blades find their way to the people capable of appreciating them, regardless of how long that journey takes. It is a romantic idea, but it contains a practical truth: nihonto do not reward passive ownership. They reward attention, knowledge, and the willingness to develop the eye that reads them correctly. People who are serious about anything tend to find their way to other serious things.
The creative community's engagement with nihonto — from Takakura's quiet appreciation to Funassyi's hundred-piece collection exhibited at the museum where the tradition was born — is not a departure from the sword world's normal patterns. It is those patterns working exactly as they always have: producing an encounter between a demanding object and a person capable of meeting its demands, which deepens over time into something that changes how both the object and the person are understood.
The sword knows nothing about screen presence or comic timing or mascot character licensing. It only knows whether the person holding it is paying attention. The people in this article all were. That is the whole story.
Sources: 刀箱師の日本刀ブログ（中村圭佑）— "俳優の岡田准一さん、愛刀家だった" (December 2025); 日本経済新聞 — "ふなっしーが集めた刀、見るなっしー♪ 備前長船刀剣博物館で企画展" (November 2025); 岡山観光WEB — "愛刀家・ふなっしーのコレクションが岡山「備前長船刀剣博物館」に！" (September 2025); TBS "今さらシロー！" 日本刀特集 (December 2025). Netflix "Ikusagami" Critics Choice Award nomination from published entertainment reporting. Funassyi's collection size (100+) from Nikkei; exhibition blade count (63) from official museum sources. All statements about named individuals reflect publicly reported information only.
Note: This article discusses the publicly documented relationship between named public figures and Japanese sword collecting. All factual claims are based on publicly reported statements or documented events. No private information is attributed without a public source.
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