Masamune of Sagami, working around 1300, is to Japanese swordsmithing what Stradivari is to violins: the summit by consensus, his blades prized for a steel whose tempering line seems lit from within, and wrapped in parables — set in a stream, the tale runs, a rival’s blade cut everything the current brought, while Masamune’s cut only what deserved cutting. The blade later called the Honjo Masamune carried the summit’s summit reputation: named for the 16th-century general Honjo Shigenaga, who took it in battle (from an enemy who had split his helmet with it) and later pawned it in hard times, it passed upward through Toyotomi and into the Tokugawa line, where it became the shogunal house’s symbolic sword — handed down as an emblem of the dynasty itself — and, in 1939, a designated National Treasure of Japan.
December 1945
The American occupation, disarming Japan, initially required the surrender of weapons broadly — and Japan’s swords, from factory blades to seven-century-old masterpieces, went into the collection system by the hundred thousand before policy was refined to exempt artistic treasures. Late in 1945, Tokugawa Iemasa — head of the family, a former diplomat and parliamentarian — chose scrupulous compliance over quiet retention: he delivered a group of family swords, the Honjo Masamune among them, to the Mejiro police station in Tokyo.
In January 1946 the station’s holdings were signed out to the occupation forces by a sergeant whose name the Japanese record renders as “Coldy Bimore” of the US 7th Cavalry — a name that matches no American service record and is presumed a phonetic mangling of something else. With that receipt, the greatest sword in Japan exits history. No depot inventory, sale, or collection has ever produced it.
The hunt
The likeliest fates are prosaic: thousands of surrendered blades were dumped at sea, melted, or — overwhelmingly — carried home in American duffel bags as trophies, where masterpieces have been surfacing ever since: identified Masamune-school and other treasure blades have turned up in Midwestern attics, one famously handed back by a Texan veteran’s family, and sword societies on both sides of the Pacific screen candidate blades every year. The Honjo has been “found” repeatedly in headlines and never once in fact; the family’s documentation would allow authentication in minutes if it appeared.
So it stands as the art world’s tidiest open case: an object of supreme, well-documented value, last seen entering official custody with a receipt — and a solved-looking mystery that has stayed unsolved for eighty years, somewhere, plausibly, above a fireplace that has no idea.