Record of Provenance

The openwork of the work reads H E R C U L E S: eight positive, seriffed Roman capitals, cut from the iron of the plate and carrying its load, running about the plate as a single legend. S, C, R, L and U (a rounded U) are each legible on their own; H and the two Es are carried by the sequence. The NBTHK paper names the work for its letters, 英字透鐔 (Roman-letter openwork tsuba).^1, 2

The work is the Roman-letter tsuba of the published record of 1905 to 1935. The descriptions agree with it in every particular across four witnesses and thirty years: eight Roman letters pierced in the ground (1905: 羅馬字八字を地透し); the word Hercles (1913, and the lecture of 1934/35), printed with the U lost in typesetting; a rounded oblong plate of squared character (1905: 長丸に角味ある), called nade-kaku-gata in the lecture; and a thick rim with the ground planed down (1905: 耳厚すき下げ), the construction the lecture names dote-mimi (土手耳). Akiyama Kyūsaku, who examined the guard twice, counted eight letters, as the work bears.^3, 4, 5

The work was made between about 1590 and 1640. Roman letters could be known and copied in Japan only in the Christian century. The Jesuit mission brought a printing press to Japan in 1590 and printed books in Latin from 1591 until the expulsion edict of 1614, and the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1639 closed that world; in Higo the Roman-letter seals of the Hosokawa house and its retainers were given up in 1648. The letters of the work are seriffed display capitals, of the kind set on the title pages of the Latin printed in those years, and its iron and form belong to the earliest period of the school to which the NBTHK paper attributes it. Within these years the paper’s 甚五, written in the form reserved for the first two masters, points to the first master, Shimizu Jinbei (1599–1675), who moved to Higo in 1632; the second master, Jingorō, was born in 1620.^{9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 1, 2, 15}

The Jesuit letters of the 1580s appear to give the name of Hercules to one Japanese Christian as a standing epithet: Shibata Reinō, baptized Lino, the confidant and spear-master of Ōtomo Sōrin, killed at Usuki early in 1587. The reports of 1585 to 1587 call him 「リイノ（柴田礼能）と呼ばれる豊後のヘラクレスのようなキリシタンの貴人」, ‘a Christian noble called Lino (Shibata Reinō), like the Hercules of Bungo’, and Frois’s letter of 1 October 1585, printed as an appendix to the annual report of that year, gives him the same name. In the mission the word appears to have stood for a warrior’s prowess, apart from scripture.^16, 17

On 19 December 1905 (Meiji 38) Akiyama Kyūsaku was shown the guard as ‘the treasured piece of a certain person’ (或方の御愛藏品) and recorded it as 「長丸に角味ある耳厚すき下げ羅馬字八字を地透しにしたる珍らしき物」: ‘a curious thing, oblong with a squared character, the rim thick and the ground planed down, eight Roman letters pierced in the ground’. A senior colleague present pronounced it armourer’s work (甲冑師物); Akiyama dissented on the evidence of the iron. His account is printed in Ogura Sōemon’s book of 1925.³

Two years later Akiyama saw a tsuba signed Hōan, asked to see the lettered guard again and set the two side by side: 「之も法安なる可しと心付き請ふて再見し、彼の在銘鍔と見くらべたる」. On the density and softness of the iron, the exposed forging grain and the reddish cast, he judged the two to be of one hand (同作に間違なき事が明瞭した). His verdict: 「實に珍寄〔ママ〕の名鍔である、善良の歷史上の參考品である、恐らくは日本中の一品物であらう」, ‘truly a rare and celebrated guard, a sound historical reference piece, probably the only one of its kind in all Japan’. He argued that the guard had come through the ban on Christianity because its word is no outright religious text.³

In 1913 Wada Tsunashirō, in the Honpō sōken kinkō ryakushi, records an unsigned iron tsuba by Hōan in the collection of Count Terauchi, pierced with the letters Hercles: 「彼の法安作無銘（寺内伯爵所藏）の鐵鐔にHerclesの文字透彫したるものあり」. He takes it for the very beginning of Western letters on tsuba (洋字を鐔に用ひたる濫觴). The Count Terauchi of that year is Terauchi Masatake (1852–1919), created count in 1911, field marshal and later prime minister. Ogura reprints the passage in full in 1925.^4, 18

In 1925 Ogura Sōemon, writing as the fifth head of the Amiya house, names 「和田先生の說にある寺內家の英字透しの鐔」, the English-letter openwork tsuba of the Terauchi family given in Wada’s account, together with the signed wheel-openwork guard formerly Inukai’s, as the masterpieces accepted as works of the first-generation Hōan, and calls the pair 「傑作中の双絕」, the twin unsurpassed pieces among his works. His closing names it once more: 「羅馬字の鐔は前記の通り寺內家藏の名鐔であります」.^6, 7

Ogura appears to describe the guard once more in his lecture on fittings in the Nihontō kōza, first printed in 1934/35: a rounded-square plate with a raised rim (撫角形土手耳), pierced with the English letters Hercles, of very fine work. With the signed wheel-openwork guard it is one of two pieces that raise Hōan’s name the higher, and of both he adds that they seem to stand at a considerable distance from Hōan’s usual work. The post-war edition of 1968 reprints the lecture in modern wording.^5, 19

Abe Akiro’s study of Christian tsuba (1990), of some forty-nine guards, appears to set the Roman letters found on Japanese guards among Christian signs, legible to the instructed: INRI, and alpha and omega, beside the chalice and the host.²⁰

In 2025 the NBTHK designated the work Tokubetsu Hozon Tōsōgu. Its paper describes the work as 英字透鐔, unsigned, and attributes it to 甚五 (Jingo), written in the form the NBTHK uses for the first two masters of that name, without den (伝). The record of 1905 to 1935 (§§ 6, 8) attributes the guard to the first-generation Hōan; the two attributions stand side by side.²