Hi there,
I hope you are doing well.
There was a family in Edo called the Yamada. For generations they held two jobs for the shogunate, and both of them involved the same blade. They were the official sword testers - they proved a new sword by cutting through the bodies of executed criminals, recorded how many bodies each blade went through, and ranked the smiths by the result. They were also the executioners.
The sword they carried was a tachi dated by its own maker to the fifth month of 1322. Low in the groove near the collar there is a dragon carved in relief, set so low that it seems to peek out at you from underneath. That is where its name comes from.
In 1873, with the shogunate gone, the Yamada handed that sword over. It went into the household of the Meiji Emperor. The executioner’s sword became the emperor’s.
Three more blades in this one, all four of them National Treasures of Japan, all four held today at the Tokyo National Museum: a Sadamune the Tokugawa of Nagoya gave to a shogun in 1698, a sword that cut down a chief retainer suspected of treachery in 1584 and is still named after the dead man, and a Masamune that Tokugawa Ieyasu took from a family of Noh actors and that then spent a century moving between shoguns as a wedding gift and a bequest.
Not one of them was famous when it was made. Every one of them is named for the hands it passed through.
Watch it here: https://jpn.la/NationalTreasure4NL
keep your edge
Kind Regards,
Kei, Matt & Team from the History of Katana
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