Women and the Japanese Sword — From Edo's Only Female Swordsmith to the World's Only Female Murage

Today, Japan's approximately 300 licensed swordsmiths are all men. This is a fact — and it is also, when placed in the full context of the tradition's history, a more complicated fact than it first appears. Because in the mid-to-late Edo period, in the western part of what is now Okayama Prefecture, a woman forged Japanese swords. She was recognised in her own time as a skilled practitioner. She signed her blades. Several of them survive. And in 2025, on the other side of that long tradition, a woman in Tokyo's Ome district is producing tamahagane — the very steel from which Japanese swords are made — as the world's only female murage. This article tells both stories: the historical exception who became a quiet landmark, and the contemporary practitioner who is redefining what participation in Japan's sword tradition can look like.

Otsuki Gen — The Woman Who Forged in Edo-Period Bitchu

The Blades She Left Behind

The works that Otsuki Gen produced and that survive are all tantō — short blades under one shaku (approximately 30 centimetres). It is generally considered that the physical demands of forging longer blades made them impractical for her. The tantō format demands no less technical mastery than longer blades; its shorter canvas simply concentrates the same craft into a smaller space.

Those who have examined her surviving works describe them as carrying a particular warmth — a quality distinct from the austere precision of the great male smiths of her tradition, without being lesser for the difference. A portrait of her, painted at her son's commission by a Kano-school artist, shows a woman of small build but noticeably strong arms, with a gaze described as sharp yet gentle. It is one of the very few portraits of any Edo-period swordsmith — male or female — that survives.

Her work was signed. The signature on a tantō by Otsuki Gen is the record of a practitioner who operated within the tradition's standards, was recognised as meeting those standards, and transmitted the craft to the generation that followed her. That is what the tradition asks. She delivered it.

Women and the Sword Tradition — A More Complex History

The assumption that women have always been excluded from Japan's sword-making tradition is historically shakier than it appears. When you consider the time required to complete a single sword and the volume of production demanded throughout Japanese history, it is more difficult to argue that women were not involved than to accept that they were. Historical paintings from before the Edo period show women engaged in sword-related activities. The notion of the sword as strictly male territory becomes widespread only in the late Edo and Meiji periods — very late in the tradition's long history.

Historical photographs from the wartime period show women working in large numbers at sword polishing facilities. The picture of absolute female exclusion from the sword world is, historically, a relatively recent and relatively brief phenomenon.

In recent years that picture has further softened. Among today's sword-related crafts — polishing, habaki-making, handle-wrapping, metal fittings — women now practice in growing numbers. The primary exception remains the licensed swordsmith category, where the physical demands of sustained heavy forging and the structure of the traditional apprenticeship system have made entry rare. As of 2026, there are no female licensed swordsmiths in Japan. What there is, at the very foundation of the swordsmith's work, is Hirata Nodoka.

Hirata Nodoka — The World's Only Female Murage

What These Two Lives Tell Us About the Tradition

Otsuki Gen did not choose swordsmithing freely. She entered it to honour a dying uncle's wish and prevent a family lineage from extinction. The tradition did not welcome her with open arms — it simply did not stop her, and eventually had to acknowledge what she had done. Her story is not one of emancipation. It is one of persistence, and of skill that spoke for itself when no other argument was available.

Hirata Nodoka's story is different in almost every surface detail — she entered freely, she is publicly celebrated, and she speaks openly about her ambitions for the tradition. But the essential quality is similar: a person who encountered something serious and brought seriousness to it in return.

What both stories illustrate is that the tradition's standards are not gendered, even if access to the tradition has sometimes been. The tamahagane does not know who produced it. The tantō does not know who forged it. The hamon does not know whose hands applied the clay. What the finished work shows is the quality of the craft — and on that measure, both women produced work that their contemporaries and successors have had to take seriously.

In Closing — The Steel Does Not Know

There is a temptation, when telling a story like Otsuki Gen's, to foreground the surprise — to present the exception as a curiosity against the rule. This article has tried to resist that temptation. Not because her story is unremarkable, but because framing it as remarkable does her a disservice: it implies that the quality of her work requires special explanation, that we need to contextualise the gender before we can appreciate the craft.

The signed tantō she left behind do not require that framing. They exist in the same category as every other signed blade in the nihonto tradition — as the records of a specific person's specific decisions, made at a specific temperature, in a specific moment, with a specific piece of steel. The steel did not know who was holding the hammer.

What survived is what survived: blades of genuine quality, made by a person of genuine skill, who chose to keep forging when stopping would have been easier. Two centuries later, in a workshop in Ome City, another person from Okayama is making the same choice every day at the tatara furnace. The tradition continues — as it always has — by being practised.