Western dining implements with Japanese kozuka and kozuka style handles.

From ancient times custom dictated that Japanese men should not wear jewelry, but eventually they were able to express their vanity and taste as well as their wealth and social status through the decoration on the swords they carried. Their high esteem for fine sword blades ensured magnificent mounting and adornment. (1) Beginning about the fourteenth century, samurai in civilian dress wore a daisbo (pair of ceremonial swords): a long katana and a shorter wakizashi. Later, certain businessmen and artisans were allowed to wear a wakizashi alone. The trappings of the smaller sword often included a narrow utility knife about nine inches long. Its blade slipped into a slot near the top of the lacquered wood scabbard of the small sword, and its handle projected through a piercing in the sword guard (tsuba) (see Fig. 1). (2) Called a kozuka, the finely handmade and decorated hollow metal handle (see the appendix for details) was highly regarded as a craft object. (3)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Following the fall of the Tokugawa military rule in Japan in 1868, samurai and others were eventually forced to abandon the wearing of swords. As a consequence, sword furniture such as knives with kozuka handles became obsolete. Because the new Meiji government was under pressure to support the reemployment of out-of-work artisans and to earn foreign currency to pay for modernizing the country, it encouraged the export of Japanese arts and crafts, including kozuka. At the time there was an eager market for Japanese art in the Western world, especially in the United States, which was experiencing a period of extraordinary wealth accumulation. Kozuka without blades became highly esteemed collectibles in the West, and ultimately knife handles styled after kozuka were made specifically for export.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the late nineteenth century, foreigners put kozuka to a use not originally envisioned by the Japanese--as handles for Western style dining implements. Among the first American silver manufacturers to do so was the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Recent research in the Gorham Company archives uncovered a photograph, code-dated for 1879, showing apparently genuine kozuka on a set of twelve dessert knives with ornately engraved blades (Fig. 3). Another photograph, code-dated for 1880, shows a similar handle on a tea knife. (4) No other records for these pieces survive; whether they were custom orders or prototypes to test market acceptance is not known. In any event, entries in Gorham's costing ledgers reveal that in 1881 the firm introduced pattern Number 5, a line of flatware by an unknown designer initially limited to knives and forks used for fruit and later expanded to include knives and forks used for fish. (5) These had blades and fork functional ends of sterling silver and handles in the Japanese taste.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]