Bronze Sword

The Sakuragaoka Bronze Dagger-Axes: Weapons Made for the Gods

On December 10, 1964, a work crew digging clay for wall plaster on a hillside in the Nada ward of Kobe struck metal. They had cut, by accident, into one of the richest caches of bronze ever recovered from Yayoi-period Japan. Buried together on a northeast-facing slope about 243 meters up the southern foot of the Rokkō range were fourteen bell-shaped dōtaku and, packed in among them, seven bronze dagger-axes. The dagger-axes are the focus here, though they are seldom discussed apart from their celebrated companions.

A dagger-axe, dōka in Japanese, takes its form from the Chinese ge: a blade fixed at a right angle to a wooden shaft and used to hook or slash rather than thrust. The weapon reached the Japanese islands from the continent by way of the Korean Peninsula. The seven blades from Sakuragaoka, however, were never meant to draw blood. They belong to a regional variety that archaeologists call the Osaka Bay type, and by the time they were cast they had drifted far from anything a warrior would carry into a fight.

Look closely and the contradiction is plain. The metal is thin, the edges unsharpened, the proportions broad and flat. These are objects shaped like weapons but built for ceremony, the bronze equivalent of a ceremonial sword that has never left its scabbard.

From Battlefield to Altar

The dagger-axe did not begin as a sacred object. In China it was a practical killing tool, refined over centuries toward sharper, deadlier forms. Around the second century BCE a variant took shape on the Korean Peninsula, and a handful crossed to northern Kyushu, where Japan's first bronze dagger-axes were cast at the close of the Early Yayoi and the start of the Middle Yayoi. That early tradition lapsed, then revived from the middle of the Middle Yayoi onward, this time with a different purpose. Casting workshops, concentrated in northern Kyushu, began producing blades that grew steadily larger and were clearly intended for ritual rather than combat.

The Kinki region around Osaka Bay went its own way. There, smiths developed the Osaka Bay type, which moved in the opposite direction from the Kyushu blades. Instead of swelling in size, these dagger-axes became thinner, flatter, and smaller over successive generations. A defining detail separates the two families: the hi, a shallow groove running along the blade, is left open at the tip on Osaka Bay examples, while Kyushu blades close it off. Many Osaka Bay pieces also carry a row of fine sawtooth marks along that groove.

The type was distributed mainly around Osaka Bay but spread northeast as far as present-day Nagano, an unusually long reach for a Yayoi bronze. Its appearance is generally read as a local reworking, in the Kinki area, of the weapon-shaped bronze rituals that had taken hold earlier in Kyushu.

Why the Find Matters

Bronze dagger-axes, swords, and spearheads are grouped together by Japanese archaeologists as buki-gata saiki, ritual implements in the shape of weapons. The Sakuragaoka cache is valued for several reasons, and the dagger-axes carry their own weight within it.

First, the sheer concentration. Hoards of multiple bronzes buried at a single spot are rare, and most that were recorded in earlier centuries have since been scattered or lost. The Sakuragaoka group survived intact in one place, which makes it an exceptional reference point. Second, finding seven dagger-axes alongside the bells is itself significant: the pairing of bell-shaped dōtaku with weapon-shaped bronzes in a single deposit helps researchers think about how these different ritual objects related to one another. Third, four of the accompanying bells bear pictorial designs, including scenes of people and animals that offer a rare window onto Yayoi life.

The bells span a noticeable range of manufacturing dates, judged from the form of their suspension loops and bodies, while lacking both the earliest and the very latest known styles. On that basis the deposit is generally dated to around the end of the Middle Yayoi and the beginning of the Late Yayoi. The whole assemblage of fourteen bells and seven dagger-axes was designated an Important Cultural Property on June 20, 1969, and elevated to National Treasure on May 25, 1970, under the name Sakuragaoka Bronze Bells and Dagger-Axes.

What to Look For at the Museum

All twenty-one pieces are kept and shown at the Kobe City Museum, where a dedicated collection gallery presents the bells and dagger-axes side by side. Standing in front of the case, give the dagger-axes the attention they usually lose to the larger, more famous bells.

Note the broad, leaf-like spread of the blade and how little of it could have done any cutting. Trace the groove down the center and see if you can spot where it opens out near the tip, the small feature that marks these as Osaka Bay work. The seven are not identical; differences in width and thinness reflect the type's gradual change over time, so compare them against one another rather than treating them as a matched set.

Then step back to the bells beside them. The two pictorial bells numbered four and five are the ones to seek out, their surfaces divided into panels filled with figures, and a procession of deer running around the lower band. Seen together, the silent weapons and the once-sounding bells make clear that the people who buried them on that Kobe slope were performing something deliberate, even if its exact meaning is now lost to us.

Around the Museum

The Kobe City Museum sits in the old foreign settlement (Kyū-kyoryūchi), a grid of handsome early-twentieth-century buildings just inland from the harbor. The museum itself occupies the former Kobe branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank, completed in 1935 and now a Registered Tangible Cultural Property; the long colonnade of Greek-style columns across its front is worth a look before you go in. The ground-floor gallery on Kobe's history is free to enter and makes a good primer on the region the dagger-axes came from.

The surrounding district rewards an unhurried walk, with cafes, design shops, and the broad shopping streets of Sannomiya and Motomachi close at hand. The harbor at Meriken Park and the older lanes of the Kitano foreign-residence area are both within easy reach for the rest of a day in the city.