豊臣家の名刀政策

Toyotomi Hideyoshi executed two seemingly contradictory sword policies simultaneously. His Sword Hunt edicts (1588, 1590, 1591) forcibly disarmed peasants and temples across Japan, completing the separation of the military class from agricultural society and cementing the sword's identity as the exclusive symbol of samurai status—a cultural equation that persisted until the Meiji era. Yet Hideyoshi himself was among the greatest sword collectors in Japanese history, amassing a collection of named masterworks (meibuttsu) that rivaled or exceeded the Tokugawa treasury. His relationship with Hon'ami Kōtoku, whom he appointed as sword magistrate (o-katana bugyō), accelerated the systematization of sword authentication and the origami (appraisal certificate) system, establishing the meibuttsu classification framework—ōmeibuttsu, meibuttsu, sukimono—that governed sword valuation for the next three centuries. The Korean campaigns (1592–1598) brought Japanese swords to the peninsula in vast numbers, generating documented Korean and Chinese accounts of Japanese blade superiority in close combat. The fall of the Toyotomi clan at the 1615 Siege of Osaka triggered the largest single redistribution of named swords in Japanese history, scattering Hideyoshi's collection to Tokugawa family repositories and warrior-class recipients across Japan. Many blades now in Japanese national museums trace their provenance directly through this post-Toyotomi redistribution.