関ヶ原・大坂の陣と刀

On September 15, 1600, the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu (Eastern Army) and Ishida Mitsunari (Western Army) clashed at Sekigahara in Mino Province — a single day's battle that ended the Sengoku era and determined Japan's political future. The subsequent Siege of Osaka in 1614 and 1615 extinguished the Toyotomi clan and completed Tokugawa unification. These fifteen years (1600–1615) represent an equally critical transition in sword history: as battlefield demand rapidly disappeared, a new era of peacetime sword culture was dawning — the eve of shintō, the "new swords" period. Date Masamune participated in Sekigahara on the Eastern side and subsequently maintained his Sendai domain's prosperity through careful management of Tokugawa relationships. A known connoisseur of swords, many blades Masamune collected or received as gifts entered the Sendai domain collection; the Sendai City Museum retains works from this period. After the Osaka campaigns ended, swordsmiths nationwide relocated in search of new patrons in the peacetime order — the great post-war migration that determined the geographic distribution of shintō swordsmithing. The era's most symbolic figure was Horikawa Kunihiro, who had survived the Sengoku period in Satsuma and established a workshop in Kyoto's Horikawa district during the Keichō era. His school produced many great smiths, including Echizen Yasutsugu and Inoue Shinkai, forming the genealogy of Keichō shintō. Once permanent peace arrived after 1615, the criterion for evaluating swords shifted fundamentally — from battlefield performance to artistic value. Sekigahara and Osaka were the last great historical occasions that completed the transformation of the Japanese sword from a war implement into a crystallization of the samurai spirit and aesthetic beauty.