Tsuwano Castle

Connection to Swords

The connection between Tsuwano Castle and sword culture is interwoven multiple times throughout this castle's complex history. As the castle's lords changed from the Yoshimi to Sakasaki to Kamei clans, the sword cultures that each military commander brought accumulated in the history of this mountain castle. Sakasaki Naomori was a fierce warrior born into the Ukita clan who originally served Ukita Hideiie under Toyotomi Hideyoshi's rule, but at the Battle of Sekigahara he broke with his lord Hideiie (Western Army) and fought alongside the Eastern Army (Tokugawa faction), and was granted Tsuwano as reward for his military exploits. Naomori's intense temperament was reflected in the swords he is said to have favored, and the martial character of a commander who preferred powerful blades exerted a strong influence on the swordsmiths of Iwami and Izumo. The Kamei clan governed Tsuwano for a long time, and as successive lords encouraged learning and culture, swords came to be valued as objects of cultural aesthetics. Particularly from the mid-Edo period onward, sword art became an essential cultural accomplishment for upper-ranking samurai of Tsuwano Domain, alongside the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and poetry. The swords cherished by generations of Tsuwano Domain samurai are preserved in two types: those made by local swordsmiths and those commissioned from master smiths of Kyoto and Osaka. San'in swordsmiths were active primarily in Izumo and Iwami, and against the backdrop of high-quality iron sand from this region, they formed a distinctive artistic style. Izumo tamahagane was blessed with high-quality iron sand called "Izumo iron," and the beauty of the clear jigane that this material produced became a major characteristic of swords from Izumo and Iwami. Mori Ōgai, while contributing to Meiji modernization as a military physician, continued to express a deep spiritual interest in bushido and swords in his literary works. The fusion of warrior spirit and literary intellect that the land of Tsuwano nurtured represents most purely in Japanese culture the dual nature of the sword—its practical utility as a weapon and its beauty as art. Standing at the Tsuwano Castle ruins and glimpsing the stone ramparts emerging from the mist of the steep mountain, the experience of sensing the thoughts toward their swords of the warriors who lived in this castle becomes an experience that deepens understanding of the world of Japanese swords from its roots.