Kan'ei-Era Sword Culture

The Kan'ei Culture and the Aestheticization of Swords

The end of the Summer Campaign of Ōsaka in Genna 1 (1615) and the promulgation of the Buke Shohatto brought lasting peace to Japan. The Kan'ei era (1624–1644), when the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, consolidated his rule, is known as the Kan'ei culture, a period of cultural flowering in early Edo in which the tea ceremony, Noh, painting, literature, and other arts blossomed. Within this cultural environment, swords rapidly lost their character as weapons and grew stronger as art objects and as spiritual symbols of the warrior.

The family that played the most important role in this transformation was the Hon'ami, a lineage of sword appraisers. Hon'ami Kōtoku (1556–1619) systematized sword appraisal as an organized discipline and established a system of issuing certificates called origami for famous swords. An origami recorded the smith's name, the blade length, and the appraised value. As an appraisal backed by the authority of the Hon'ami family, it officially certified the cultural and economic worth of a sword.

The Hon'ami Appraisal System

After Kōtoku's death, the Hon'ami appraisal system was carried on by successive heads of the family, including Kōshitsu, Kōon, and Kōjō. By the Kan'ei years it was fully established as the institution that managed sword holdings for the bakufu and the daimyō. The Hon'ami hereditarily held the position of goyō kantei-shi, appraisers to the shogunal household, and dominated the economic foundations of sword culture, including issuing origami for famous blades and setting sword market prices.

The establishment of this appraisal system was the greatest institutional factor promoting the transformation of the sword into an art object. Because origami made value objective and quantifiable, swords changed from the private weapons of individual warriors into cultural property to be collected, appreciated, and traded. Early Edo daimyō competed to collect origami-certified masterpieces, and the quality and quantity of their collections became proof of their cultural refinement.

Swordsmiths of the Kan'ei Period

After the masters of the Keichō shintō had completed their work, a new generation of smiths rose to prominence in the Kan'ei years. Of particular note in this period are the activities of the second and third generations of Echizen Yasutsugu. Inheriting the skill of the first Yasutsugu, who had been discovered by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the second and third generations continued to serve the shogunate as goyō kaji, meeting the demand of the shogunal household. Permitted to cut the aoi crest into the tang, the Yasutsugu family became one with the authority of the Tokugawa regime and came to symbolize the sword culture of early Edo.

In Settsu Province (present-day Ōsaka and Hyōgo prefectures), the foundations of the Ōsaka shintō, which would flower in the Kanbun period, were quietly laid during the Kan'ei years. The first-generation Izumi-no-kami Kunisada (Oya-Kunisada), who was active from the end of the Keichō era through the Kan'ei years, inherited techniques from Horikawa Kunihiro and developed them in Ōsaka. Kunisada's works display the vigorous hamon of gunome-midare together with the strong nie inherited from Kunihiro, and they formed the basis of the later Ōsaka shintō.

The Maturation of Bushidō and the Transformation of Sword Views

The period around Kan'ei was also an era in which the ideology of bushidō was being put into words. Neo-Confucian scholars of Shushigaku provided the intellectual background of warrior culture. Hayashi Razan, who had studied under Fujiwara Seika, was one of them, and Yamaga Sokō, who became a disciple of Razan in Kan'ei 7 (1630), later discussed the moral principles of the warrior. Within this context, the sword took on spiritual and philosophical meaning as the bushi no tamashii, the soul of the warrior, rather than remaining a mere weapon.

The expression "the sword is the soul of the warrior" symbolizes how the spiritual significance of a warrior wearing a sword came to be socially recognized. This ideological transformation gave warrior society a justification for collecting and appreciating swords as art objects. Together with the Hon'ami appraisal system, it formed the ideological foundation of sword collector culture.

What the Kan'ei Culture Opened

The three elements that the sword culture of the Kan'ei period established, namely the aestheticization of the sword, the origami system, and the union with bushidō, continued to function as the foundation of Nihontō culture throughout the Edo period. The frameworks for evaluating, preserving, and appreciating swords that were organized in this era are a historical origin directly connected to the appraisal system of the present-day NBTHK (Nihon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai). Studying the Kan'ei era is also a way of touching the roots of contemporary sword culture.