Swords from Japan from the collection of the Bizen Osafune Japanese Sword Museum

The Manggha Museum has decided to celebrate 2019 – a year of double jubilee, in which we celebrate the centenary of establishing Polish-Japanese relations and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum – with an exhibition of Japanese swords from the collection of the Japanese Sword Museum Bizen Osafune. Swords in the land of Bizen, now the prefecture of Okayama, have been manufactured from very ancient times - from the Heian period (794-1185) - on a large scale and were of exceptional quality. Famous for the quality of its products, this region was included in Gokaden ('5 traditional regions'), the most important centers of sword production in Japan.

This exhibition – a unique undertaking, organized from the beginning in close cooperation with the Japanese side- gives our audience the opportunity to admire the precious swords brought to Krakow from Japan. We want to emphasize this aspect of the exhibition, which for the first time shows the Japanese sword in Poland from the perspective of country of its manufacture.

Earlier demonstrations of Japanese weaponry at the Manggha Museum: swords, spears, armor and shield guards of tsuba, came from Polish private or museum collections. They proved how serious interest in the Japanese sword is in Poland and how it is treated here as an extremely important symbol of Japanese culture.
At this exhibition you will be able to see 37 swords from Japan from various periods of the Japanese sword chronology: kotō (794–1596) – the period of the "old sword" when there were many specimens treated to this day as incomparable masterpieces and a model for modern swordsmiths, through examples from subsequent periods: shintō (1596–1780) – the period of the 'modern sword', shinshintō (1780–1877) – the period of the 'new modern sword', gendaitō (1877–1945) - the period of the 'modern sword' up to shinsakutō (times after 1945) – the period of "newly made swords", when swordsmiths-artists were often looking for patterns in the past and they tried the high skills and expertise of old masters not to be forgotten.

We hope that the extensive and diverse information material accompanying the exhibition will bring the sword closer to all the viewers as an extraordinary work of Japanese metallurgy. And contemplation of individual parts of the sword will prove that this deadly weapon is a sophisticated example of Japanese aesthetics and art.