Tachi (inscription Made by Mori Yoshiki on the 10th Day of

Tachi by Moriyoshi: An Offering Sword from the Year 1347

The tang of this sword carries an unusually talkative inscription. One face names a place and a patron: a sacred blade for Shirasaki Hachimangū Shrine in Suō Province, commissioned by a man recorded as Minamoto no Kanetane. The other face gives the maker and the date, Moriyoshi, the tenth month of the third year of Jōwa, which corresponds to 1347. Very few medieval Japanese blades state their purpose, their dedicatee, and their year so directly. This one was never intended for a soldier. It was forged to be handed over to a shrine.

The patron, also documented under the name Hironaka Kanetane, was a provincial lord who controlled the Iwakuni district in what is now eastern Yamaguchi Prefecture. A gift like this was a public act. To donate a freshly forged sword to a war deity such as Hachiman was to ask for protection and to display one's standing in the same gesture, and the long inscription made sure that act was remembered in iron.

Moriyoshi of Bizen and the Shape of the Blade

Moriyoshi belonged to the Hatakeda group of smiths in Bizen Province, centred on present-day Hatakeda in Bizen City, Okayama. Records place his activity in the Northern Court years of Jōwa and Jōji, roughly 1345 to 1368. Bizen was the great sword-producing province of medieval Japan, and the Hatakeda smiths worked within that tradition.

The blade is built in shinogi-zukuri, the standard ridged cross-section, with a peaked back. The steel surface is forged in a fine ko-mokume pattern, a small burl-like grain, and the tempered edge runs as a medium-width straight line, suguha, broken here and there by tiny inward feet of crystalline activity called ashi. The point finishes in a short, stubby form known as an ikubi-kissaki, literally a "boar's neck." By the mid-fourteenth century most smiths were reaching for long, dramatic points, so this compact tip reads as a deliberate look backward, toward the heavier blades of the earlier Kamakura age.

Sources differ slightly on its size. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the designated blade at 80.0 centimetres, while cultural-property listings in Yamaguchi give a length of 83.0 centimetres with a curvature of about 2.6 centimetres. The tang is in its original ubu condition, finished with a chestnut-shaped end, filed in a coarse slanting pattern, and pierced by a single peg hole, all signs that the sword survives essentially as Moriyoshi made it.

One detail sets this commission apart. The Moriyoshi sword was not dedicated alone. It was offered together with a second blade carrying the same inscription but left as muyakiba, an unhardened bar of steel with no tempered edge at all. A sword with no hardened edge cannot cut. The pairing of a finished, functional blade with a deliberately unfinished twin points to a ritual rather than a practical purpose, the offering itself mattering more than the weapon.

From Old National Treasure to Important Cultural Property

The sword was recognised early. On 25 April 1927 it was named a National Treasure under the prewar designation system, and when the Cultural Properties Protection Law took effect in 1950 it was reclassified as an Important Cultural Property, the category it holds today. The unhardened companion blade is recorded alongside it as an attached item.

What gives the piece its weight for historians is its certainty. A great many old swords are anonymous, re-shortened, or attributed only by style. This one is signed, precisely dated, and tied to a named donor and a named shrine, with its tang untouched. That combination turns a single object into a fixed point: evidence of who was forging in Bizen in the 1340s, of how a regional lord in distant Suō expressed his devotion, and of what a paired shrine offering looked like in the Nanbokuchō period.

Lost After the War, Then Located Again

The sword's modern history took an anxious turn. During the Second World War the shrine's blades were sent to the Yūshūkan, the museum at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, to be put on display. After the war ended, their whereabouts became uncertain, and for decades the record was incomplete. Accounts vary on exactly which pieces went missing: some name the unhardened companion and a separate sword by the smith Yasuyoshi that the shrine also held, while others count the Moriyoshi blade itself among the lost.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs placed the Moriyoshi tachi on its national list of missing designated cultural properties, the public register through which the government seeks information on heritage items whose location is unknown. Its entry for this sword now carries a short, welcome line: the property has been found. Because the recovery is recent and the object's display status is not fixed, the sword is best approached as a documented survivor rather than a piece reliably waiting on a museum shelf.

Iwakuni, the Sword's Home Ground

The story belongs to Iwakuni, where Shirasaki Hachimangū still stands on the rise of Shirasaki-yama. Shrine tradition dates its founding to 1250 under an earlier lord, while Kanetane, the donor of this sword, built the grand shrine hall in 1348 and gave lands to support it. The sword was forged the year before that construction, so it arrived almost as a founding gift.

The shrine keeps other heritage of its own, including a bronze bell cast in 1366 by Kanetane's widow in memory of her husband, a piece local tradition says could be heard for several kilometres. Iwakuni itself rewards a visit for the famous Kintaikyō, the five-arched wooden bridge over the Nishiki River, and the reconstructed Iwakuni Castle on the ridge above it, reached by a short ropeway. Together they make the town a natural base for anyone tracing the world that produced this offering blade.