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昭和29年（1954年）
日本全国
About 15 min read
In September 1945, the occupying GHQ/SCAP ordered the nationwide surrender of weapons, swords included, as part of Japan's disarmament. More than 200,000 blades were collected from the Kantō and Tōkai regions alone, and the greater part are reported to have been disposed of by dumping at sea. Because the confiscated swords were gathered at the US Eighth Army ordnance depot at Akabane in Kita Ward, Tokyo, they came to be known collectively as the "Akabane swords," after the place where they were stored. In 1946 the Ordinance Prohibiting the Possession of Firearms and Similar Weapons (Imperial Ordinance No. 300 of 1946) was enacted as a Potsdam ordinance, banning in principle the possession of firearms and swords as such.
In 1947 approximately 5,600 blades were returned to the Japanese side on the grounds of their artistic value. Of these, 1,132 were restored to their owners, while 4,576 whose owners could not be identified were placed in the custody of the Tokyo National Museum. The disposition of the Akabane swords remained unresolved for decades. Only with the Act on the Disposition of Confiscated Swords, enacted in 1995 and brought into force in February 1996, was a mechanism established; in 1999 the remaining 3,209 blades were transferred without charge to 191 public museums across the country. Seki City in Gifu Prefecture received the largest number at 480, followed by Okayama Prefecture with 228 in total and the Saga Prefectural Museum with 114. Half a century thus elapsed between defeat and the full recovery of these swords into national custodianship.
Under the Occupation not only the possession of swords but the act of forging them was effectively banned, and forging technique handed down from master to apprentice over centuries lost its field of practice and faced extinction. What legally restructured this situation was the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties of 1950 and, in the same year, the Ordinance Controlling the Possession of Firearms and Swords. Swords ceased to be treated uniformly as weapons and could instead be possessed as registered works of art.
On the production side, the Weapons Manufacturing Act was promulgated on 1 August 1953, and with it began a system under which the making of artistic swords was permitted by approval. Forging moved from "prohibited" to "permitted to those who have received approval." Jurisdiction over approval lay with the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Properties, and forging without it was not allowed. The scheme has been maintained since as the Regulations for the Approval of Artistic Sword Manufacture, the current version being Ministry of Education Ordinance No. 3 of 1992. On the possession side, the framework was consolidated in the Firearms and Swords Control Act, which came into force on 1 April 1958 and acquired its present title in a 1965 amendment.
The year 1954 matters because it is when this approval system began to operate concretely in the hands of individual smiths. The representative case is Takahashi Sadatsugu.
Born in Ehime Prefecture in 1902, Takahashi began his training in 1919 at the Chūō Tōken Kai in Tokyo and established his own forge in Matsuyama in 1936. At the First Sword Exhibition in 1938 he received the Prime Minister's Award. In 1940 he forged a sacred sword for Kamakura Hachimangū, but with defeat in 1945 came the forging ban, and the work was closed to him. As forging shifted to a permit system, he forged a treasure sword for the 1951 rebuilding ceremony of the Ise Grand Shrine, and in 1952 he was designated an Intangible Cultural Property. Then, in 1954, he obtained approval to forge from the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Properties and resumed full-scale work as a swordsmith. In 1955 he became the first swordsmith ever designated a Holder of an Important Intangible Cultural Property — a Living National Treasure — and he remains to this day the only swordsmith from Ehime to have been so honoured. He went on to forge many swords for the imperial family, including the guardian sword for Crown Princess Michiko in 1959 and guardian swords for imperial children in 1960 and 1965. He died on 21 August 1968. One of his blades is said to have come into the possession of Aung San, the founding leader of Burma, and later to have passed to his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi — a reminder that postwar Japanese forging did not remain sealed within domestic cultural-property administration.
From prohibition to approval, and from approval to designation as an Important Intangible Cultural Property: within roughly two years the state's posture toward those who made Japanese swords reversed, from "manufacturer of weapons" to "holder of a traditional technique deserving protection." If the revival movement is to be given a single point of origin, this passage from 1954 into 1955 is the most defensible choice. The nationwide competitive forum for new blades was institutionalised as the Shinsaku Meitō Ten, begun by the NBTHK in 1955, and it is that series which continues today as the Gendai Tōshoku Ten.
The institutional work of postwar sword revival was carried by the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords (NBTHK), founded on 24 February 1948. Behind its establishment lay the fear that the Japanese sword itself might be lost through the GHQ confiscations and destruction that followed defeat.
The Society began its appraisal system in 1950, with "Especially Precious Sword" as the highest grade. In 1955 it began holding the Shinsaku Meitō Ten; in 1958 it added the higher grade of "Important Sword," in 1971 the top grade of "Especially Important Sword," and in 1973 the grade of "Kōshu Especially Precious Sword." In 1982 the older scheme was abolished in favour of the present four-tier system. In 1968 the Japanese Sword Museum opened at Yoyogi as an attached facility, and in the late 1970s the Society opened its Nittōhō Tatara works in Okuizumo, Shimane Prefecture, resuming production of tamahagane. It became a public interest incorporated foundation on 1 April 2012, moved the museum to Sumida Ward in 2017, and the following year renamed its forging competition the Gendai Tōshoku Ten.
The forging division of that competition is organised in two categories — tachi, katana, wakizashi, naginata and yari; and tantō and ken — with special, excellence and encouragement prizes (recent supplementary awards are 100,000, 50,000 and 20,000 yen respectively). The Society describes its purpose as "to preserve and improve the traditional techniques of sword forging, to make the excellence of contemporary technique widely known, and to raise interest in swords as cultural properties." More than seventy years after its founding, the distinguishing feature of this framework remains that appraisal, exhibition, raw-material supply and public display are all bound together within a single body.
The regulation of possession developed in parallel. The Firearms and Swords Control Act that took effect in 1958 was amended in 1962 to bring certain short-bladed folding knives within its scope, and again in 1965, when import controls on handguns were added and the statute took its present title. Further amendments followed in 1971, 1977 and repeatedly through the Heisei and Reiwa eras, but the basic structure settled in the late 1940s and 1950s — that registered artistic swords may lawfully be possessed — has been maintained to this day.
The postwar revival of the Japanese sword was achieved not by any single competition but by several institutions meshing together within a few years: a registration system that made possession possible, an approval system that made forging possible, a competition that evaluated and published technique, tatara operations that secured tamahagane as raw material, and a museum that preserved and displayed works and documents. Moving the sword from "weapon" to "cultural property" required all of them.
The forging approvals of 1954 and the exhibition and Living National Treasure designation of 1955 sit at the junction of that chain. Forging practice, which had nearly been severed under the Occupation, was publicly sanctioned once more, and the circuit by which it could be judged, criticised and handed to the next generation was restored. That contemporary Japanese swords continue to be produced each year as a living demonstration of traditional technique rests on the framework assembled in these years.