後鳥羽院御作

Emperor Go-Toba's life is one of the great tragedies of Japanese history, and his passion for sword-making is inseparable from that tragedy. In 1221, he issued an edict ordering the destruction of Hōjō Yoshitoki and raised an army to overthrow the Kamakura shogunate. The shogunate's forces crushed his rebellion in three weeks. Go-Toba was exiled to the remote island of Oki in the Sea of Japan, where he would spend the remaining nineteen years of his life. He never returned to the mainland. From this island exile he continued to write poetry — some of the finest of his career — and he continued to forge swords. Even stripped of his throne, separated from the capital and his court, confined to a small island, he sent for equipment and kept making blades. The swords that survive from this period carry within them the grief and defiance of a deposed emperor: objects made in extremity, by a man who had lost everything except his skills and his aesthetic vision. When you look at a Gotoba-in Gozaku sword, you are looking at something made by imperial hands in exile — and at the mystery of why a man who had lost the world would choose to spend his remaining years making beautiful things.