When you are shown into the polishing room, the first thing you notice is a particular way of sitting. The posture resembles nothing in everyday movement, and someone working only by imitation cannot hold it for even a minute.
Seated before the polishing stone, Nagaoka calls himself someone who conserves cultural property. He polishes not in order to make the blade sharp, but in order to hand a single sword that has lived for centuries on to the next generation without diminishing it. Against the history of the Japanese sword as it changed from weapon to work of art, this article reads his paradoxical ethos of not reducing the steel, and the person he is.
Most sword polishers move into their master's house straight out of high school. Nagaoka's point of entry lies off to one side of that.
Toguri: I gather that the way you came into this craft was different from the usual apprenticeship. Could you start there?
Nagaoka: Yes. I originally ran my own businesses, and within that I was one of those people who simply loved swords — a collector, you could say. As I got more involved, I came to understand a great deal, the circumstances of the trade included, and I found I wanted to work on that side of it. What I chose was sword polishing. It began from something as simple as liking swords, but of course it is not an easy thing to do. The sword dealers and craftsmen I knew at the time all tried to stop me. "Don't," they said. "You'll never be able to make a living."
Toguri: Even though the people around you tried to stop you, you went ahead and jumped in.
Nagaoka: When people tell me I can't, I want to try it.
The reason they tried to stop him lay not in his own aptitude but in the condition of the field. At the time it was not as active as it is now; the generations were not turning over, and it was a period when the work did not easily function as a business. But there was another entrance that drew Nagaoka inside. The camera.
Nagaoka: Around that time I was running several businesses, and photography was one of them. I had a photo studio and worked as a cameraman, and within that, the fact that "you can't photograph a Japanese sword" may have been the biggest thing of all. People would ask me to photograph the scratches on a mirror. But it is a surface like a mirror, so if you stand in front of it, the camera and the background are reflected back. What, and how, do you photograph on that surface? When I took those photographs, everyone told me they were remarkable, and I found it fascinating. From being a single customer, I took one step into the trade.
Photographing a sword and polishing one — in that both mean facing how a surface appears, the two seem to overlap somewhere. His way of learning, too, was close to self-teaching. The parts he did not understand, he asked the craftsmen he knew.
Nagaoka: Some people won't teach you, but most of them told me, "You do it like this, like that, and there is a tool like this." That was how I worked through what I couldn't do and didn't understand, one by one. In the end a senior craftsman told me, "If you can do this much, you won't get any better unless you set up on your own as a craftsman who can do an average job."
Toguri: And how was it once you had set up on your own?
Nagaoka: It meant, in effect, "now go and struggle." And that is how it was — once I began, it was many times harder. After that, some well-known teachers reached out to me, and I spent several years going to them while I refined my technique. The basic thinking in this field is that you apprentice yourself, and for years you sit quietly beside your teacher and watch him work. I am nothing like that. I have apprentices who have gone independent and others still studying, but the way I teach is different, and the study period is extremely short. It comes from a rule of thumb: as long as the finished thing is properly made, that is enough.
His "entering from the side" would later shape Nagaoka's ethos itself. Precisely because he was not raised inside the apprenticeship system, he would come to question that system from the outside.
To polish is to reduce the steel. Yet Nagaoka's theory of technique begins from not reducing it.
Toguri: When you begin this work, what is the first thing you are taught?
Nagaoka: What almost everyone is taught is: do not reduce the sword. To polish is to reduce. But anyone can reduce. To finish it cleanly without reducing it — that is the skill. I think exactly the same. The time we are able to be involved with a single blade is, against the long time of the sword, only an instant. We show it and say, "This is a sword from several hundred years ago." If our descendants several hundred years from now cannot have that same conversation in the same way, it becomes a culture with no meaning at all. To reduce is to shorten the sword's life all at once.
Here Nagaoka draws a line that runs against the craftsman's instinct.
Nagaoka: A craftsman cannot help wanting to show his skill. He wants to put it out in the open: look how remarkable my work is, how beautiful, how perfect. But that comes to mistreating the sword. To put it at its most extreme, even a sword polished with the greatest care will be scratched the moment the customer takes it home and draws it roughly from the scabbard (saya). It ends in that instant, and it must be polished again. It is that fragile a thing. And for the sake of something like that, should we reduce the sword at all?
Toguri: You yourself were taught to "do perfect work," weren't you?
Nagaoka: I was. A senior craftsman taught me that as long as you are a craftsman, you must do perfect work. But there was always a question mark there for me. What is that, really — isn't it no more than a wish to display oneself? Against the length of the sword's culture, for a sword that is only an instant, a sword on which no one will even know who polished it, there is surely no need to assert yourself so much.
Nagaoka explains this idea of leaving something behind with the word togishiro, a "polishing allowance": steel deliberately left unspent for whoever polishes the blade generations later. It means deliberately leaving work for the next person — not using up the blade, but keeping a margin for a future hand.
Nagaoka: It is fine to leave work for the next person to polish. Someone else who sees it might think, "Whoever polished this sword left it a little half-finished." Even if they think that — if the sword lives long, isn't that fine? I am not doing this because I want anyone to think, "Whoever polished this was remarkable."
Why can he erase himself to that degree? The reason lies in the fate of the polisher's work.
Nagaoka: The name of the person who made the blade survives for centuries. Look at it, and with study you can imagine what era it is from and what kind of person made it. So then, who polished it? That, no one will ever know. If that is so, the polisher is the one who helps the sword live long. If it is not beautiful, no one will want to own it or feel drawn to it. That is true — but even when I think, "It would look better done this way," I deliberately leave it undone.
Being nameless is, for Nagaoka, not a lack but a premise. And precisely because of that, the polisher's work is freed even from the measure of sharpness.
Nagaoka: People often think of it as something like an extension of a kitchen knife, and say, "You're improving the sharpness, aren't you?" But the cutting is a result; I have never polished in order to improve sharpness. Fundamentally the Japanese sword now exists as a work of art, a traditional craft, so how to maintain it and hand it down to later generations is the main work. The work of conserving cultural property is what we mainly do.
Nagaoka likens this to the conservation of temples and shrines, of paintings, of ceramics. It is not "restore" — tearing something down and building it anew — but a Japanese way of conserving that keeps the sense of its age intact.
Nagaoka: To take a temple or a shrine and tear it down once to rebuild it — that is "restore," isn't it. But Japanese conservation holds that keeping the sense of the age intact, somehow keeping it alive, is part of the skill. It takes many times the labour and money, but you preserve the original. It is the same with paintings, with calligraphy, with ceramics. It isn't "it cracked or chipped, so throw it away." The method born from carrying that on as a pattern of its own, as a beauty, is kintsugi, mending a broken vessel so that the repair itself becomes part of its beauty. And if someone says, "Then you can't drink tea from it," the answer is: please don't use it, please keep it carefully. The Japanese sword is the same — not a tool for cutting, but a craft to be carried on to later generations.
That judgment in conservation cannot be left entirely to a machine, Nagaoka believes.
Nagaoka: The part that is like sending out information — a time will come when we can leave that to the IT field, which is better at it than we are. But the part of what people, across a long history, have felt and thought beautiful, what they have held important — that part, I think, still cannot be done by anything but a human. Every Japanese sword is different. The era, the region where it was made, the people, the way it was handed down — all different. To look at all of that as a whole, to judge, and to work — that is very difficult, so I think it is not a kind of work that will disappear.
Not reducing is the skill; disappearing is the ethos; judgment is what remains. This paradox lies at the core of Nagaoka's work.
The swords Nagaoka conserves are often seven or eight hundred years old — from the late Heian period through Kamakura, Nanbokuchō, and Muromachi. Why does a weapon that old still rest in the palm of a hand? The question leads to the change in character that the Japanese sword has passed through.
Toguri: There is an image that the sword belonged only to the samurai. What was it actually like?
Nagaoka: It wasn't something only the samurai could own; if anything, I think it was something anyone could own. There seem to have been restrictions on length and so on. People carried one for self-protection, took one along when setting out on a journey. Some carried one as a mamorigatana, a small sword kept as a protective charm. And by the Edo period, it was clearly the merchants who had more money and more comfortable lives than the samurai, so the ones with fine pieces were often merchants rather than samurai. The samurai drew a stipend, but they were not so wealthy — that is the reality.
The sword was a symbol of status and, at the same time, not necessarily something to be wielded. Here lies a view Nagaoka returns to again and again: yō no bi, the beauty of use — a beauty that presumes usefulness, yet finds its meaning in not being used.
Nagaoka: That it can be used is the basic premise. It does not mean that because it is beautiful it cannot be used; there is, of course, the element of functional beauty. But the meaning lies in the fact that it can be used and yet is not used — it is a slightly tangled way of thinking. In ages when there was war, a certain number were surely used, but Japanese warfare did not require killing everyone. Think broadly: the armour, the large standards worn on the back — when the principle in war is not to stand out, why did they wear bright red armour, or make such large helmets? The style of fighting and the thinking were completely different from now; they aimed at a political settling point. That is exactly why the Japanese sword, too, was not used as much as people imagine.
Toguri: How has the sword changed over time?
Nagaoka: First and foremost, that it is a weapon. From there, something that shows status, an object of prayer, something that places weight on spirituality, and then artistic elements were added more and more, until it took shape as the work of art it is now. The great change is the change in the style of fighting. Depending on how one fought and against whom, the overall shape changed clearly — long ones with a deep curve; short but sturdy ones with width and thickness; short, light ones that could be handled in one hand. The difference from era to era is plain enough that we can see it at a glance. In terms of the eras an ordinary enthusiast can easily get hold of, by the late Heian period the shape was already almost the same as it is today.
It was in the Edo period, he says, that the sword's character moved most.
Nagaoka: When an age of lasting peace came — tenka taihei — and with it an age of "you must not use it," metalwork, the lacquer of the scabbard, the cord of the hilt (tsuka) all turned not just black but many-coloured, and even raden, decorative inlay of iridescent shell, appeared. A weapon would need none of this. For the Edo samurai, the sword was also one part of a uniform that had to be worn. If you are wearing something you will never use, then, as with a kimono, you want individuality. So the shape kept changing, growing more and more ornate.
That "uniform" left the public stage with the Meiji-era Haitōrei, the 1876 edict that banned the wearing of swords in public. But the sword did not vanish.
Nagaoka: With the Haitōrei it was officially said that you could not walk around with a topknot and a sword at your waist. This was one of the great turning points of the modern age. Another was the year Shōwa 20 [1945], when the war ended. It was interpreted that all Japanese swords were weapons — that the guntō, the military swords the soldiers had carried, were weapons too.
Here Nagaoka quietly adds his own view of the often-told image of the "sword hunt."
Nagaoka: The occupying army went house to house with metal detectors and confiscated them — it is sometimes told that way, but it seems it did not go that far. Surrendering and requisitioning themselves, of course, happened. But the guntō was probably, from their side, frightening. A spiritual anchor for the Japanese, you might say — why are the Japanese soldiers this strong? Perhaps they thought that if they took it away... And so the reading of the Japanese sword as a weapon spread. Against this, the knowledgeable people of the time went to great lengths, saying: no, these are crafts from old eras, there are national treasures and important cultural properties among them, there are pieces handed down in the shogunal house and the imperial household; let us separate those out. And so they somehow survived. On the other hand, when demand for guntō arose, old swords were revived with only their fittings remade. Perhaps the sword never left us, and not once did it disappear.
The occasions on which the sword touches daily life have not, even now, entirely disappeared.
Nagaoka: If there is one, it would be the funeral. There is a religious aspect, so it is not always done, but the custom of laying a blade upon the deceased still exists in Japan. These days the undertaker often sets down a plated replica as a formality, but some people use a real short sword. And the custom of having a new sword made at the turning points of a life — a child is born, comes of age, a new house is built — remains deeply rooted even now.
So what is the sword to people now? Nagaoka answers with an unforced comparison.
Nagaoka: If you ask whether it is necessary for daily life, it is not. But it is a matter of the heart, of a certain enrichment. When a favourite painting hangs in your room, your mood softens, or brightens. In the same way, the Japanese sword, too, exists now. And a sword from the kind of era that appears in textbooks is right there in front of you, and anyone who wants to own one can. Some are expensive, but there are also ones you can buy for about the price of a slightly nice brand-name bag or watch. If you like it, you can tap your card and take it home today. It has that kind of ease, too — it is a slightly strange thing to exist.
At the same time, there are many "established theories" made by later generations, Nagaoka says. A theory whose origin no one knows settles in as common knowledge before you notice, and it takes effort to break it down. The preconceptions around the sword are one of these. Owing to films and the like, the sword is sometimes seen as something from a dangerous world, but the actual customers, he says, are ordinary people — company employees, the self-employed, and so on.
And the sword is not something completed by one person's hands.
Nagaoka: The Japanese sword is still made by a division of labour among specialists. The swordsmith who forges the steel into a blade; we polishers who polish it; the craftsman who makes the scabbard, the one who makes the metal fittings, the one who makes the hilt, the one who braids the cord, the one who applies the lacquer... many people come together, and it is completed as a single composite work of art.
Those who carry it on are by no means many. Sword polishers, by Nagaoka's own sense of it, number "a hundred at most" across the whole country. The Gendai Tōshoku-ten — the modern sword-craft exhibition held once a year by the Nihon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai (the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords) — is one of the few public stages where their work is shown, in the form of a competition.
What Nagaoka held in his hands during the interview was a wakizashi — the shorter of the paired swords, worn together with the long blade — made about 450 years ago in Bizen (the southeastern part of present-day Okayama Prefecture), in the late Muromachi, the Warring States era. The long sword and the short wakizashi are worn as a pair of two, a category that amounts to a kind of spare sidearm.
Born as a weapon, refined by not being used, it survived as a work of art. At the far end of that long road is the hand of the polisher.
The actual work of polishing is, against the image of a blade, surprisingly plain and physical.
Toguri: Is it right to picture polishing as something like filing?
Nagaoka: That picture is fine as it is. The condition of swords varies — deep rust, shallow rust, and some whose very shape has collapsed and must be corrected. At the stage of seeing the actual blade, I choose which grade of polishing stone (toishi) to begin with. Basically you move from coarse stones to gradually finer ones. At the end, you finish it to the point where the steel's surface and the temper pattern come alive.
There are almost no expenses, Nagaoka says. About all there is to buy is the stones; beyond that, it is work that needs little capital. What polishing handles are the three points worth seeing in a sword.
Nagaoka: To put it simply: the sugata — the overall shape, the length and the curve; the hamon — the pattern that appears along the edge; and the jigane — the skin of the steel itself. You look at these three elements and take pleasure in them.
Toguri: What, concretely, does sugata refer to?
Nagaoka: There is the length, of course, but it is the matter of the sori, the curve of the blade. It is a beauty, but it is also the result of changing in response to what each era demanded — of what was easiest to use at a given time.
The very posture of polishing is already out of the ordinary.
Nagaoka: If you watch the posture we polish in, it really does look strange. There is a reason we sit that way, of course, but it is completely different from how the body is used in daily life. Most people, after sitting for a minute, will start to ache all over — the lower back, the legs, the shoulders. I think most cannot even sit that way at all.
And when people come into contact with the structure of the sword itself, many are surprised.
Nagaoka: A sword comes apart into pieces surprisingly easily. Though it is made on the premise of being used, it has no robustness. That it is held in place by a single bamboo peg — a mekugi — alone may be a fresh discovery for people. Without an experience like this, it is something you surprisingly never notice.
A blade sharp enough to cut at a touch is held by a single small peg of bamboo. That fact quietly unsettles how the sword is seen. Texture, weight, density — the site of polishing is, before any idea is spoken, first a place to know the sword through the body.
What Nagaoka speaks of most strongly is neither theory of technique nor history, but the closedness of the craftsman's world itself.
Toguri: When it comes to the problem of successors, is it, after all, anxiety about making a living that weighs most?
Nagaoka: The person and their parents are surely anxious. But that is the same in any profession. The biggest problem, I feel, is on the receiving side. They make the technique a black box and don't teach it. And they have strangely turned it into something mystified — deified, even. That, I'd say, is the biggest problem. I want to break that, and — it may be rude to my seniors — I am doing the opposite.
The "opposite" is, first, the way of teaching. The edge of his criticism points not at any particular person but at the way that has long been handed down itself.
Nagaoka: "I was taught this way, so I teach others this way." There is no ingenuity in it. People say, "That is what carrying on a tradition means." But it does not fit the times. "That one needn't come; even if he comes once, send him away; if he doesn't come the next time, that's the end of him." In the morning, when you go to start work, there is an apprentice sweeping in front of the house — that one has promise. What era is this, I'd say. "Spend a day watching the master and learn, steal it from him." No, I say. What could be settled with "give it a try, watch this, you do it like so" — instead they make him sit for months. And in that time, all he can think about is being hungry, or having no money.
Tying up a person's time, leaving them unable to fall back on anything else — Nagaoka sees this as an enclosure borrowing the name of transmission. What Nagaoka values is looking after someone until independence — no, even after independence.
Nagaoka: There is a way of thinking that says, "A polisher should study for ten years at least," "Once you go independent, you are a rival now." I am the opposite. I look after them until they can make a living. Without that resolve, you should not take an apprentice. I bring them customers, I teach them how to do business. My own apprentice has gone independent and is making a good living, and still he brings me a sword — "Is this one all right? It's a bit much for me." Grumbling a little, I take care of it for him. Learn it that way, I tell him. To let someone fail and then cast him out — that I do not want to do.
What the old apprenticeship has overlooked is raising the craftsman as a businessperson in his own right.
Nagaoka: You apprentice at eighteen, and you are allowed to go independent past thirty. Some craftsmen go out into the world without even knowing how to exchange business cards. When I tried to give one work as a gift to mark his independence, he said, "I can't say I can't do it — depends on the budget, though." Anyone who has been knocked about in the business world knows this comes across badly. But the person himself doesn't even sense that he has given offence. He was raised only in that world, so it is no wonder. Even after taking a good prize at a competition, it can happen that his living does not hold together.
On top of that, Nagaoka believes this work, done properly, holds together perfectly well.
Nagaoka: It is not that the work can't feed you; it's that they don't know how, weren't taught, haven't thought about it. Let's think — it's that simple. For everyone, doing business is a matter of course, isn't it. It's only that craftsmen have not been able to do it. There's a sweet hanging right in front of you; whether you go and take it is up to you — that is what I tell my apprentices, too. If you ask me for a new polishing now, the lead time is a three-year wait. The work is filled three years ahead. Once it's like that, there is no anxiety. The rest is how carefully and how efficiently you get the work done.
Nagaoka lays the problems the craftsman's world holds over a larger story, too — the transmission of culture. The ujigami, for instance — the Shinto deity that protects one's own neighbourhood — is something not a few people today no longer know. What has been handed down within daily life thins out before anyone is aware of it. Nagaoka speaks of that sense quietly.
Nagaoka: Culture, if you are not conscious of it, is replaced easily. The Japanese sword may be a symbol of that changeability, too. Still, I also think that by the time of one's child, and that child's child, people may turn their eyes again to what they have inherited. I don't know what things will be like then, though.
That is precisely why Nagaoka does not close his workshop inward. The sense that a craftsman is better off not coming out front remains deeply held, but Nagaoka does the opposite: he holds introductory courses for beginners, creating chances to "try holding a real sword." He takes a group to the nearby sword museum and holds gatherings to look at swords with someone knowledgeable beside them.
Nagaoka: Seen through glass, it ends at "how pretty, swords lined up." With someone beside you, understanding deepens, and a familiarity grows. In the past it tended to be said that a sword is something you hold only after you have studied. Now it is the reverse — please, just take an interest; whatever you don't understand, ask us.
Opening a closed world. More than a matter of drawing customers, this is, Nagaoka believes, a condition for handing culture on to the next generation. To conserve old cultural property with one's own hands and carry it on to later generations — it is rewarding, and a work with dreams in it, Nagaoka says.
What a visitor can experience under Nagaoka goes one step in from "seeing" the sword, on to "holding," "taking apart," and "reassembling."
Toguri: What, in practice, can a visitor experience?
Nagaoka: First, I have them hold the real thing in both hands. Not in the sense of drawing it from the scabbard — first, just take it in hand. Its texture, its weight; some people, including the workmanship, say they "feel its density." What they feel, I let them experience honestly. Then they actually draw it from the scabbard, hold it in both hands, and gaze at the blade. Looking at the sugata and the hamon, some say it is frightening, and some say it is beautiful.
Next is the time of touching the structure.
Nagaoka: With their own hands, they remove the parts one by one. The mekugi — it is held by a single peg of bamboo, and even that, people don't know. Take it apart, and you see plainly what role each part plays and what shape it has. Take it apart and put it back, and you come to feel differently about what you had only been gazing at until then.
For those who experience it, there is also a moment of testing the polisher's body itself. That strange way of sitting. Most cannot hold it even a minute, and learn for themselves how different the body that handles a sword is from everyday life.
And this experience has a margin with no set answer.
Nagaoka: What you find beautiful can be however the viewer feels. The maker's intent is put into it, but there were fashions of the age, too. And in your first year of taking an interest in swords, your third, your fifth, your taste changes. How you felt at that time — looking at the sugata, the hamon, the jigane, you notice your own change: ah, this is how I have changed. You can enjoy it that way, too.
Why have people held a sword they never use this dear? Nagaoka's answer does not narrow to one thing.
Nagaoka: It is a very difficult question. That there was something that spoke to people — that is one. Then there is asset value. From the age of the samurai, swords were granted as rewards, as recognition. There are pieces "handed down in such-and-such a family." It holds that kind of value, too. And — something you feel but cannot explain. People often use the expression osore-ōi, a reverent awe that makes one hesitate to use the very thing one admires: it is, on the basic premise, a weapon, and touch it and it cuts. And yet there is a beauty, a numinous quality, that makes one hesitate, even shrink, from using it. No one quite understands it, but somehow everyone has carried it on as it is. There, perhaps, is the core of the thing called the Japanese sword.
The world of the sword was long closed, Nagaoka says, and what seniors and antique dealers said was taken as one hundred percent correct. But now it is different.
Nagaoka: Whether you like it or not, what you find beautiful — you may decide for yourself. "Everyone says it's good, but I don't care for it; everyone says it's nothing, but I think it's fine" — I want people to value that sensibility. You may stretch to acquire something, or keep at hand what suits your own measure, what you thought was good at the time. That, I think, is the most important thing.
Here the experience goes beyond merely observing a process. The weight that rests in both hands, the precariousness of a single length of bamboo, the posture one cannot hold, and the question of "how do I feel?" Through these, the visitor comes to know the sword, and their own way of feeling.
The polisher leaves no name of his own. The name of the swordsmith who forged the blade lives on for centuries, but who polished it will, in time, be known to no one. Nagaoka does not call this a lack. Rather, only a hand that has taken on disappearing can touch the long span of time for a single instant, and hand it on to the next hand.
"Half-finished is fine. If the sword lives long, isn't that enough?" In this single line, set against the craftsman's instinct to seek perfection, there is a quiet conviction that calls not reducing a skill and being nameless an ethos. At the same time, Nagaoka does not lock that conviction in one chest. He opens the closed world of the craftsman and does all he can so that those who follow can carry it on as a living. To keep culture is to keep the sword — and also to keep the people who polish it.
There is much in this work that words alone cannot grasp. The strange posture of sitting before the polishing stone, the silence of peering into the blade, the hesitation of the fingertips drawing out the bamboo mekugi. If those gestures and expressions make you want to come a little closer — then the Behind the Scenes carries on, into the air of the polishing room and the very movement of Nagaoka's hands.