Sword (Gold Inlay Inscription Motoshige/Honami (monogram))

A Great Sword, Shortened and Sealed in Gold

Near the base of this blade's tang, on the face that once sat against the wearer's body, two characters are set into the steel in gold: 元重, Motoshige. On the opposite face sits a cursive monogram and the name Honami. The smith who forged the blade cut neither of them.

The sword measures 87.6 centimetres along the edge, with a gentle curve of 1.8 centimetres. It was not always this size. It began as an ō-dachi, an oversized great sword carried in the Nanbokuchō period, the fourteenth-century span when two rival imperial courts divided Japan. Sometime later it was cut down from the base, a reworking called suriage, and so extensively here that the term becomes ō-suriage. Shortening a blade this way removes length from the tang, and with it the maker's original signature. The gold characters were added afterward, by a hand that lived three centuries after the steel was forged, to record who had made it.

The blade was designated an Important Cultural Property on 20 March 1954.

Motoshige of the Bizen Forges

Old Bizen province, now the southeastern corner of Okayama Prefecture, forged more swords than any other region of premodern Japan. Its rivers carried iron sand down from the mountains, and the smithing town of Osafune grew into the busiest sword-making centre in the country. Motoshige worked there during the Nanbokuchō period.

Connoisseurs' catalogues place him among the finer smiths of his age and rank his blades at the top grade for cutting ability, a category called saijō ō-wazamono. Tradition also lists him among the three pupils said to have studied under the Sōshū master Sadamune, though his own steel shows little of the Sōshū manner and the link is treated with caution.

What does mark his work is a quirk in the temper line. Where most smiths arranged their clove-shaped chōji patterns leaning forward toward the point, Motoshige tilted his backward, toward the base. Swordsmiths and appraisers call this gyaku-chōji, reverse chōji, and it became one of his recognisable signatures. On this blade the temper runs as a broad, mostly straight line with reverse chōji and short reverse ashi worked into it.

The designation rests on more than the name attached. The forging of the ground and the activity in the edge are judged fine, and after losing its original length the blade still survives in sound, healthy condition.

Reading the Gold Inlay

For roughly five centuries the Honami family appraised, polished, and maintained swords for the shogunate and the great warrior houses. Their judgement carried weight, and they developed a way of recording it directly on the blade. When a sword had lost its signature to shortening, the head of the family could inlay the attributed smith's name into the bare tang in gold, a practice called kin-zōgan-mei. On unsigned blades that had not been shortened, red lacquer was used instead. The monogram, or kaō, set beside the name was the appraiser's personal mark, his signature in all but form.

The kaō on this blade belongs to Honami Kōon (1603–1667), the eleventh head of the main Honami line and the author of a respected book of sword tracings. The attributions made by Kōon and the heads near him are the ones later collectors trusted most. Read together, the two inscriptions form a verdict rendered long after the forge had cooled: this unsigned, cut-down blade is the work of Motoshige, and Kōon set his own name behind that opinion in gold.

What the Blade Shows

The shape announces its century. The body is broad, the curve shallow, and the point unusually large, an ō-kissaki of the kind favoured in the middle of the fourteenth century, when fashion ran to long, imposing weapons. A viewer who knows the periods reads that outline at a glance.

Up close, the surface steel shows a wood-grain pattern, itame, threaded with fine dark lines of chikei and a scattering of bright ji-nie crystals across the ground. The temper in the point, the bōshi, turns irregular before settling into a small rounded tip. A straight groove, a bōhi, is carved down each face of the blade, running off into the tang. That tang, cut back so heavily, now carries a single peg-hole and the gold characters that stand in for a lost signature.

Where to See Work by Motoshige

This particular sword is in private hands and is not on regular public display, so a traveller cannot plan to stand in front of it. Closely related work, however, is accessible.

The Tokyo National Museum holds an unsigned blade attributed to Motoshige that once belonged to the Matsudaira house of Echizen; its sword galleries rotate their displays, so it is worth checking the current schedule before a visit. To understand the tradition that produced this blade, the Bizen Osafune Sword Museum in Setouchi, Okayama, stands on the historic forging ground itself. It shows Bizen swords in rotation and runs live forging and polishing demonstrations on set days, which makes the steel terms above far easier to read in person.