The End of Tōshō?
By Anthony Deen
“In 1989 there were 300 swordsmiths in Japan, today there are only an estimated 150 practicing smiths, and many of them are aging.”
Introduction
Those of us who practice Japanese sword-arts may be approaching an event horizon. In studying any Japanese sword art, we’re participating in keeping alive traditions that are over 1,200 years old, tracing back to the 8th century or earlier. The oldest existent Japanese tachi, the Kogarasu Maru, was made by the smith Amakuni shortly after 700 AD.
Many of the sword arts we study today – even gendai arts – trace their origins back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and the swords we use are agents in keeping these arts alive along with all the associated skills, including the forging of nihontō.
While kenjutsu is often considered the pinnacle of Japanese martial arts study, the continuing loss of both practicing tōshō (swordsmiths) and of the factories outside of Japan that manufacture high-quality Japanese-style swords is a cause of concern.
There are still tōshō making swords of appropriate quality for iai-batto practice, but their number has declined over the past 70 years. Meanwhile Covid, American tariffs, and recent events in other countries – particularly China – have reduced the number of factories producing high-quality, Japanese-style swords. The question at hand is whether swords of appropriate quality will be available and affordable in the future.
A Little History on the modern era of Japanese sword-making
Although updated, some of the information in this part of the essay is included in A Short History of Iaido and Battodo, part 1. If you’ve already read that essay, please feel free to skip to the final section of this article.
The major first event in a steady 150-year decline of tōshō was the Haitōrei Meiji Kyunen or Sword Abolishment Edict of 1876. Even though modernization and Western weapons had already rendered Japanese swords anachronistic, as part of eliminating their main users – the samurai – the edict made the wearing of swords illegal by anyone other than police or military officers.
“Swords are still a prime necessity in war time, despite airplanes, armored tanks, machine guns and repeating rifles. It has been found, and the government has taken special steps, to see that officers have blades which will suit their needs.
However, the blades they carry these days are not up to the standards of olden times, according to Hikosaburo Kurihara, expert swordsmith, who recently returned from the Shanghai area, where with a party of smiths he has repaired 15,000 swords for Japanese officers.
So great was the need found for this repair work that the master smith has gone to the North China area, where he will attend to the needs of the officers there.”
In the 1920s sword study had something of a renaissance initiated in part with a 1925 decision by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy to add iai-batto instruction to the curriculum for their commissioned and non-commissioned officers. This decision by the IJA led to the resumption of sword making at scale. Kurihara Hikosaburo, a member of the Diet, helped revive interest in nihontō when he proposed that swords be included in the 15th Exhibition of the Imperial Art Academy in 1925. Nearly 80 swordsmiths participated in the exhibition. After 1925 swords were excluded from the exhibition so Kurihara created the New Sword Exhibition with backing from the Imperial Ministry of Education. He held an annual exhibition from 1926 until 1945. Among others, kenshi Nakayama Hakudo championed the use of modern steels in making new swords.
In 1933 the Imperial government determined that the craft was still endangered, so prime minister Saito Makoto asked Kurihara to undertake increasing the number of swordsmiths. That July, Kurihara created the Nippontō Tanren Denshu Jo (Japanese Sword Forging Institute) as a school for tōshō in Tokyo and began publishing a monthly journal Nihontō Oyobi Nihon Shumi (Japanese Swords and Japanese Hobbies) which was published through the end of the war.
In 1941 the Imperial Japanese Army created its own school for swordsmiths, the Nihontō Gakuin (Japanese Sword Institute) in Kanagawa Prefecture as well as regional forges such as the Tokyo Dai Ichi Rikugun Zoheisho.Starting in 1943, the first Army Gunto Exhibition was also held under the sponsorship of the Army Arms Administration Office. Although Japan invested heavily in steel manufacturing in the puppet state of Manchukuo, Japan’s multi-front war required that steel produced there be directed to modern weapons and artillery. Guntō – swords for the military – were usually manufactured from inferior steel usings machines and often with prisoner-labor.
After Japan’s surrender in 1945 American occupation forces banned Japanese sword making altogether, and official records state that 5,500 Japanese swords were confiscated and subsequently destroyed and another 1,500 were taken as souvenirs by GIs. Both these figures are almost certainly off by orders of magnitude. Some estimates suggest that over 3 million swords were destroyed or expropriated. Jim Dawson’s Swords of Imperial Japan and Richard Fuller’s Military Swords of Japan both put the number at approximately 500,000 swords destroyed. Not all of them were inferior quality guntō. The Honjō Masamune, a sword passed down through hundreds of years of the Shogunate, was allegedly taken by a sergeant at Allied GHQ and was never seen again. It was only through the intercession of Dr. Homma Junji and Dr. Sato Kanzan, co-founders of the NBTHK, that the sword ban was amended to apply only to guntō while allowing for ownership of traditionally made swords from before the war, which were considered of artistic merit.
In 1952 Kurihara again helped support traditional swordsmithing when he petitioned the new civilian government to work to revive it. In 1953 sword production was allowed to resume under strict controls and limitations. Japan at this time was still in the throes of extensive post-war trauma and the desire to create a more pacifistic society. Sword arts and sword making only survived at all because they fit with a general aspiration to reconnect with what was imagined as Japan’s honorable past, the time of the samurai.
Nevertheless due to the numerous restrictions and the requirement to be licensed, many smiths turned to making kitchen knives, crowbars and metal tools. Among many criteria, all shinsakutō (new swords) had to be made in a traditional manner, the details of which are described in our earlier article on how to buy a sword. Swordsmiths were also limited in the number of blades they were allowed to make in a year. The resumption of sword production was oriented specifically to creating swords of artistic merit. On March 10, 1958 the Swords and Firearms Possession Control Law was passed and codified these restrictions.
As noted in the History of Battodo parts 1 and 2 essays, international interest in the study of sword arts expanded as GIs returned from Japan and with the international popularity of jidaigeki, historical sword films.
“Regardless of which art you are involved in, be it iaido or kendo, unless you experience cutting with a real sword, you will never begin to taste true sword technique.”
At that time the only way to practice iai-batto was with bokken or by obtaining a nihontō, usually through one’s sensei. This was the case until the early 1970s when zinc-aluminum blades began to be produced in Japan. These were used to make iaitō or mogitō – “imitation” swords – which are lighter than shinken and have dull blades which can’t be sharpened. This new type of practice sword was appreciated by many and abhorred by a few. While mogitō expanded the market of iai-batto students, they also signaled that practitioners didn’t need real swords, as something approximating one would suffice. We can surmise that while this expanded the accessibility of iai-batto it also diluted the practice.
It’s important to note that any steel “blade” not created in the traditional manner remains illegal to this day in Japan, even if it is completely dull. As students outside of Japan advanced in their study, many realized that the light weight of mogitō impacted the quality of their technique, and as shizan/tameshigiri became popular in the mid-1980s, a new conundrum developed. The number of shinsakutō for iai-batto was constrained, but iaidoka who wanted to practice shizan certainly wouldn’t use expensive “art blades” for cutting due to the potential resultant damage – bending, chipping, scratching, etc. Also, many “art blades” made after the Sengoku jidai were never meant to be used in combat and therefore weren’t robust enough to be used for repeated shizan.
This situation was ameliorated in 1990 when Paul Chen (Chen Pao-Po) of Taiwan founded the Dalien Hanwei Metal Company to manufacture mass-market swords. Dalien is a city in northern China, just east of Korea in the former Manchukuo. It’s an area that was developed by the Japanese for steel manufacturing prior and during World War II and was the origin point for China’s post-war industrial revolution. Dalien may be compared to Japan’s Seki City as a hub of forges and smiths.
Rather than using traditional Japanese tamahagane or crucible steels to make swords, Chen used less expensive tool and spring steels. The rest as they say is history. Although not nihontō Chen’s shinken further expanded the market for Japanese-style swords.
Chen’s factory produced swords also raised a series of new questions. Were swords made outside of Japan suitable for iai-batto? Were swords made in an assembly line of sufficient quality to be used in iai-batto? Did swords made of modern steels provide the same feel and performance as nihontō?
The market provided its own answers to these questions. Today it’s flooded with both inexpensive and overpriced Japanese-style shinken, while sales of genuine nihontō have continued to decline. Unfortunately, Chen’s business model eventually led to the proliferation of inferior swords (from a martial arts perspective) as the low price point became the determinant priority for expanding sales.
As long as a sword looked like a katana, it seemed to be acceptable to the mass market, but as non-Japanese sword manufacturers continued to tailor their products to that market and to collectors of “wall-hangers,” the product quality (again, from a martial arts perspective) continued to decline. Today, even if a replica katana is made with “tamahagane” or another high-carbon steel, even if it costs over a thousand dollars, even if the factory’s smith supposedly studied in Japan – none of that guarantees that the end-product will be a quality sword. The bar for how poorly and cheaply a sword can be manufactured gets lower and lower every year.
While not all traditionally made Japanese swords are of high caliber, most of the factory made swords are of poor quality and pale in comparison with a genuine nihontō. Nor do they replicate the feel and action of one. Importantly, some are actually dangerous in that they are of such shoddy construction that can fail during use. Most of these swords weren’t and aren’t meant to be used for the rigorous practice of iai-batto or tameshigiri.
All of this is to say that while there are still a few factory-produced Japanese-style shinken of a quality to be safely used in shizan, and of a weight and balance that can be used comfortably for kata practice, it’s a buyer beware market.
Further exacerbating the challenge of finding shinken appropriate for iai-batto, in 2011 there was a fire in Chen’s Hanwei factory. The combined effects of Covid, the tariff war with China during the first Trump administration, and rising steel prices due to war in Ukraine and the Middle East caused conditions at the factory to continue to decline, and in January 2025 the factory closed. Chen’s brother Fred had also been making swords in Longquan, but his factory recently closed as well. Many workers from Hanwei moved to another Dalien forge, Dragon King, owned by Frenchie Jin, Chen’s former lead engineer.
Fortunately, there’s the option of avoiding the mass-production quality issue by purchasing custom made swords made by regional smiths outside of Japan. Quality will vary from country to country and smith to smith, but on the positive side, options in blade steel increase.
Here in the US, perhaps the best-known smith is Howard Clark, and there are a handful of other American swordsmiths – although none of them would be characterized as inexpensive. Walter Sorrell, Rick Barrett, Michael and Gabriel Bell, Goya Kenny, Anthony DiCristofano, and Jesus Hernandez are among the well-known smiths currently producing swords here in the US.
Katana made by Howard Clark
There are also a number of well-known smiths in China and Taiwan who make high-quality custom swords. They include Ron Chen, Chen Yuan-fang, and Chris Zhou (aka Zheng Wu). Again, none of these smiths’ work is inexpensive. Some Chinese-based factories offer Japanese-style shinken on a custom order basis including Longquan’s Z-Sey and Shadow Dancer.
For many years Butouken in Korea was also a very good option for custom shinken. Butouken swords are likely made from SK7 steel but use a bainite quenching process that results in superior blade performance. Butouken has never publicly identified their smiths which has led to concern over the consistency and quality of their product.
Also made in Korea, Evolution Blades’ Motohara swords, are a popular custom shinken. Motohara blades are made from a specific selection of tool and spring steels including Japanese SGT, SK3, CPM3C and the extremely robust D2. Noting the cost of both newly made American and Japanese blades, Evolution offers excellent quality at a relatively affordable price point (between $3,000 and $5,000). In the dojo I belong to, most if not all of the senior faculty have owned Butouken shinken and now also own and use Motohara shinken.
Reconsidering Shinsakutō
Shinsakutō for martial arts use, made by Sato Shigetoshi
Appreciating that many of us would someday like to own a genuine Japanese katana – as much as we wouldn’t practice a Japanese sword art in a dojo that didn’t have an ongoing connection to Japan – we might ask if it’s appropriate to practice with equipment that isn’t Japanese in origin.
The continuing manufacture of mogitō and inexpensive Japanese-style shinken may be a death knell for Japanese swordsmiths – especially for those who make the relatively lower priced swords of the caliber for iai-batto. With the production limit placed on the number of katana a Japanese smith can produce in a year, it’s a difficult way to earn a living, period.
In this essay’s opening paragraph, the headline quote notes that there are now only 150 registered swordsmiths keeping the tradition alive in Japan. Many of them augment their income by making high-end kitchen knives, or by giving tours or workshops. Unless we support them, in any way we can afford, fewer and fewer will take up the discipline, and eventually it may cease to exist in Japan.
Support can be in a variety of ways, ranging from visiting Japan and taking a tour to purchasing a pre-owned shinsakutō. Pre-owned shinsakutō of quality for iai and shizan are reasonably priced (approximately $2,000 to $5,000) depending on the reputation of the smith who made it, and of course, the condition and quality of the blade.
Due to the increased international interest in shizan over the past 45 years, there are numerous previously owned shinsakutō of the proper caliber available at sword shops in Japan and through online brokers like e-sword, and Giheiya among others. Although these swords aren’t bespoke, this is a more affordable option that still supports the Japanese tōshō industry. Many American instructors use pre-owned shinsakutō from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s that are in excellent condition.
Ideally, one would have a shinsakutō made to one’s own performance needs and physical specifications. Although expensive, this is an option which may require a visit to Japan or use of a Japanese based intermediary. Such intermediary services are offered online by Giheiya, Tozando, Swordstore and Tokyo Nihonto, or can often be arranged in consultation with your organization’s hombu dojo in Japan.
“The hope, Tsubouchi says, is not necessarily for new customers to convince people to buy ultra-premium pieces, but rather to cultivate a market for Japanese swords that are within the budget of even people who aren’t wealthy art collectors.”
All shinsakutō are unique as they’re made according to the criteria described in our earlier guide for how to buy a real sword. A custom shinsakutō for iai and shizan made by a living smith will be expensive ($8,000+) but nowhere near as costly as a katana of artistic merit. Shinsakutō for iai and shizan generally won’t have the bright polish of an art blade, but they’ll perform, and they will have many other unique characteristics.
While it may seem like there are hundreds of options for purchasing a shinken, in truth there are few that will support the continued practice of the arts we study. Hopefully now you’re better informed about this and the issues that surround it.
