日光助真

Bizen Sukezane's blades were the swords of the Kamakura warrior class at its most powerful and most aesthetically demanding. The great vassals of the Kamakura shōgunate wanted weapons of the highest cutting performance, but they were also men of sophisticated aesthetic sensibility — the Bizen tradition's chōji-midare hamon, blooming along the edge like clustered cloves, satisfied both requirements simultaneously. It was genuinely beautiful and genuinely deadly. Nikkō Sukezane's preservation at the Tōshōgū Shrine — the great mausoleum-shrine built by the Tokugawa dynasty to enshrine Ieyasu as a deity — gives the sword a sacred dimension beyond its artistic one. To offer a sword to a god was to consecrate it, to remove it from the world of use and place it in the world of eternal veneration. The clove-blossom hamon still blooms, unchanged, seven hundred years after Sukezane finished his work.