The February 9th issue of Jinja Shinpō included an article about a sword.
About five years ago, Kumata Jinja (杭全神社) in Osaka was sorting out a store room for the jinja’s treasures, and they found a box with eight swords bundled inside. It seems that there were no helpful records at the jinja, because they called in an expert. He looked at them, and said that it was very likely that one of them was the work of Gojō Kuninaga, a swordsmith active in the mid-eleventh century.
The swords had got a bit rusty, because they had not been cared for — obviously, as no-one knew they were there — and so the jinja organised a crowdfunding last year to pay for a conservator to clean them up. Once that was done, the swords could be examined properly, and two experts confirmed that one of them was the work of Kuninaga. Two of the other swords in the bundle were important, as well, but the article does not say any more about them — the focus is on the one that is almost a thousand years old.
According to the inscription on the covering found with it, the sword was presented to the kami by a monk at the associated temple in the Edo period, and so there is no information about the previous seven hundred or so years of its history. It is a small sword, 26.4 cm long, and if you go to the crowdfunding page and scroll down, you can see pictures of it. (It’s the basically straight one.)
All the other surviving swords by Kuninaga appear to be Important Cultural Properties, at least, so it is probably only a matter of time before this one is designated such as well. The jinja therefore decided to put it on indefinite loan to a museum. There was some soul-searching involved, because the situation in which the swords were found suggests that they were hidden in the Meiji period to stop the government seizing them as cultural properties and putting them in a national museum. However, the jinja doesn’t have the facilities to store the swords in a way that will maintain their condition, nor does it have the security necessary for something so portable and potentially valuable, so in the end the priests decided that this was the best option.
This sort of thing happens at older and larger jinja with some frequency. Items are offered to the kami, and then stored in the sanctuaries or sacred store rooms. The conditions might not be ideal, but they are not bad, and nobody touches the items, or even knows that they are there, and so they often survive until the jinja needs to rebuild, or decides to thoroughly catalogue the stores. And thus sometimes thousand-year-old swords turn up. I think you would have trouble with suspension of disbelief if you included this in a novel, but in real life — yes, it happens.
This is why I still have hope that some of the lost Fudoki will turn up, with a copy offered to the kami in the fourteenth century or so found among the treasures of a jinja.
I’ve written an article about Ainu votive objects which were offered by Japanese sailors then neglected in this way. They were put in a bin labeled “Ainu gohei” by some unknown person in the 20th century but were not properly cataloged until about 2015. And I know about some rare Edo texts that were preserved like this as well. One wonders what sort of treasures are still out there.
That’s quite an interesting story. Indeed almost like from some fantasy novel (the mighty hero recovering the mythical ancient weapon sort of thing). It’s interesting to see such things happening in the real world from time to time, too.
But I’d like to ask, what’s the “Fudoki” you’ve mentioned in the last sentence? I hope it’s not too silly of a question.
Thank you.
The Fudoki are records of the ancient provinces of Japan, compiled in the eighth century. The surviving ones (about five, with fragments, depending on how you count) have quite a lot of information about the kami and jinja of the region, so it would be really interesting to have more.