Mon-San Transparent Tsuba (gold Inlay Meirin Matanachi)

A Sword Guard Scattered with a Lord's Crests

An iron disc barely larger than a coaster, shaped like a ten-petalled flower and measuring 8.3 by 8.2 centimeters, carries one of the more refined designs to survive from Japan's age of the sword. Cherry blossoms and nine-circle star crests alternate around its pierced rim, each form cut clean through the iron and edged in fine gold. Near the central slot, where a blade's tang once passed, two small characters are set in gold: Matashichi.

This is the work catalogued as the Mon-chirashi sukashi tsuba, a sword guard "scattered with crests," accepted as the hand of the metalworker Hayashi Matashichi and held today in a private collection in Yamanashi Prefecture. A tsuba sat between a sword's grip and its blade, guarding the swordsman's hand. By the seventeenth century it had become something more: a small field for display, a place where a warrior signalled taste, allegiance, and rank. This one announces its owner's house twice over.

From Gunsmith to Sword-Fitting Master

Hayashi Matashichi did not begin his working life at the bench of a tsuba maker. His family came from Owari province, east of Kyoto, where his father worked as a gunsmith. When the warlord Katō Kiyomasa drew skilled craftsmen south to Higo, in present-day Kumamoto, the Hayashi made firearms for the domain. Matashichi himself, born around 1613 by the most cited account, started out forging guns under the name Shigeyoshi.

That path turned in 1632, when the Katō house lost its lands. The Hosokawa clan took over Higo, and with it the talented craftsmen left behind. Matashichi entered Hosokawa service and moved from guns to sword fittings, a change that would shape the rest of his long life; he is said to have lived to 87. He is remembered as the founder of the Hayashi, or Kasuga, line, named for the village near Kumamoto where the family settled. With the Hirata, Nishigaki, and Shimizu houses, the Hayashi formed one of the four schools known together as Higo kinko, the metalwork of Higo.

Matashichi built his manner from two sources. From the older openwork guards of Owari he took the instinct to cut bold silhouettes straight through iron. From the Shōami workshops of Kyoto he learned nunome-zōgan, an inlay method in which a surface is cross-hatched with fine chisel lines so that gold or silver can be pressed and burnished into the texture. His iron is the detail collectors return to: a dense, well-forged plate with a dark surface often likened to yōkan, the deep brown-black of a sweet bean jelly, sometimes carrying a faint purple cast.

Two Crests, One Allegiance

Japan recognised the guard as an Important Cultural Property on 20 March 1954. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it simply as a retained craftsman's rendering of his lord's house crest, and rates it a particularly fine and splendid example of its kind.

The crests scattered across the rim are not decorative invention. They are the two emblems of the Hosokawa. The nine-circle motif is the kuyō-mon, the nine-luminary crest the clan took up in the late sixteenth century; tradition holds that Hosokawa Tadaoki was so taken by the design on a small sword belonging to Oda Nobunaga that he asked leave to use it. The cherry blossom is the family's alternate crest. Most samurai houses avoided the cherry, uneasy with a flower whose falling petals suggested a life cut short. Tadaoki, a celebrated tea man with a taste for restraint, is said to have embraced precisely that fragility, finding beauty in the blossom's brief fall. To carry both crests on a single guard was to wear the Hosokawa identity in miniature.

One small puzzle sits behind the object. The national database records its period as Momoyama, the brief, ornate age that closed the sixteenth century. Matashichi himself is more often placed a generation later, in the early Edo period, which leaves the dating as one of the open questions that follow early Higo work. What is not in doubt is the hand: the cutting and the inlay match the master's known style.

Reading the Iron

Look first at the shape. The plate is not a plain circle but a ten-petalled flower, its outline echoed by ten small ring motifs worked around the edge. Within that frame the cherry blossoms and star crests trade places in a steady rhythm, openwork set against solid iron, so the design reads differently as light moves across it.

The gold and silver stay restrained, never flooding the surface. Fine nunome lines carry gold into the pierced crests and trace a scrolling karakusa arabesque across the iron ground beneath. Turn the guard over and the back rewards attention as much as the front, a quiet courtesy typical of the best Higo work. The signature sits to the left of the tang slot, two gold characters that a maker confident in his craft saw no need to enlarge.

Where to See Higo Tsuba

This particular guard belongs to a private owner and is not on regular public view, so a trip to Yamanashi will not bring you face to face with it. Higo metalwork, and Hayashi Matashichi's hand in particular, can still be met elsewhere.

In Tokyo, the Eisei Bunko in Bunkyō ward holds the Hosokawa family's own collection and rotates sword fittings through its themed exhibitions; the adjoining Higo Hosokawa Garden makes an easy pairing for the afternoon. In Kumamoto, the Prefectural Museum of Art shows pieces from the same Hosokawa holdings, including openwork guards attributed to the first Matashichi, though its display rooms have been subject to renovation closures, so checking the current schedule before travelling is wise. Farther south, the Yatsushiro Municipal Museum keeps a Matashichi guard among its sword fittings. Any of these brings you closer to the iron, the openwork, and the dark Higo surface than a photograph allows.