Hatamoto and Sword Culture — Swords of the Tokugawa Direct Retainers

Hatamoto were the upper samurai stratum among the direct vassals of the Tokugawa shogunate whose fiefs were under 10,000 koku, yet who were granted omemie (audience with the shogun). Throughout the Edo period there were about 5,000 hatamoto households, and they functioned as working bureaucrats responsible for the administrative, military, and ceremonial functions of the bakufu.

The sword culture of the hatamoto occupied a distinct position, differing both from the lavish collecting of famous blades by daimyo and from the purely practical orientation of lower-ranking samurai. Caught between the status pride of being direct vassals of the shogun and the economic realities imposed by the limits of their hereditary stipends, the hatamoto cultivated their own approach to swords. In many hatamoto households, the hitokoshi (a single sword) handed down from their ancestors was carefully preserved as a family treasure, and the family name and their pride as samurai were entrusted to that blade. When they commissioned new swords, they often ordered them from swordsmiths in Edo.

Some hatamoto became patrons of swordsmiths. Kubota Sugane, a hatamoto and military scholar, recognized the talent of Minamoto Kiyomaro, set up a forge for him at his residence in Banchō so that he could devote himself to sword-making. In Tenpō 13 (1842), through Sugane's efforts, a subscription for one hundred blades at three ryō per person, called the Bukikō (sword subscription association), was commissioned from Kiyomaro.

With the Meiji Restoration, the status of hatamoto disappeared, and after the Haitōrei (Sword Abolishment Edict, 1876), their sword culture was dispersed.