Tsuba

This tsuba (sword-guard) is made of a copper alloy known in Japanese as shakudo; it contains approximately 95% copper and 5% gold (with other trace elements) and is patinated to a rich black. The 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi likened the colour to ‘rain on a crow’s wing’.

Here the surface has been hammered to give the stone effect known in Japanese as ‘ishime’. The tsuba is decorated with inlaid panels of translucent cloisonné enamels (enamels contained within wires) in the traditional style of the Hirata school. There is a gold plaque with the engraved signature of Hirata Narikazu. He worked from about 1601 to 1652 and this piece would appear to be an early 19th-century copy of his work.

The two holes through which two small utility knives would have passed have been here been filled with gold plugs decorated in the ‘cat’s-scratch’ technique. A copper spacer has been applied to the bottom of the central slot for the sword blade; this would enable the blade to fit snugly in the tsuba.