"Showa" or "Dept of Interior" stamp?
The inspection stamp we commonly refer to as the Showa stamp, is called "Department of Interior Ministry of Ordinance" by Ohmura:
.
内務省令検査印
Inspection mark of the ministerial
ordinance of the Department of the Interior
Link to his page:
u“VÆŽR’b˜BêìvEu–³–¼ vŠÖˆó "Tenshōzan Forging Workshop Saku", "Seki inspection mark"
Any ideas about Ohmura's naming of this?
Last edited by Bruce Pennington; 12-17-2016 at 04:25 PM.
Perhaps you need to say what you are getting at for people to respond
Thanks Nick, my wife says that to me too! I guess Ohmura-san's description of the Showa stamp opened my eyes a bit to the bigger picture behind them. As a newbie, I have been simply picturing "inspectors" of some generic nature, walking through factories with the job of making sure blades met military spec, and stamping them with their mark. Seki stamps and arsenal stamps made sense, in my head, because they were locationally tied. But the Showa stamp (and not so much, but sort of, the Star) seemed not tied to anywhere and nebulous. So, that's where my head was until I read Ohmura-san's label.by nick komiya
Would it be true to say that all inspectors were working for the Dept of Interior, Ordinance Ministry? Or maybe just Showa and Star stamp bearers? Or did they all work for the Arsenal? Now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably true that Arsenals fell under the D. of I., right? I need to re-read Ohmura-san's pages to see if the "D of I" label is used on other stamps, or if it's just the Showa.
It just surprised me to see the Showa stamp called that and made me start to wonder why he called it that. I was hoping you, or someone with a greater understanding of the background on this could educate me on it.
It is not research I want to devote my time to, but the connection to the Ministry of the Interior is not obvious to me either. They were the police and ordinances from that Ministry dealt with petty crime, registration obligations for prostitutes, horse racing regs, roadworks, etc. The only item here that may have some relevance is the part that became the minor crimes act in post war years. This contains the gun and sword control regs.
The ministry of the interior had nothing to do with army arsenals or quality control. If they required that stamp, it must have had something to do with controlling possession or carrying of swords. By having that stamp, the sword must have gained some kind of legal privilege. You need to check the prewar gun and sword control law, if you need to know more.
Interesting fact about the "post war years" bringing the sword regs under the department. Since Ohmura-san did his work post-war, maybe that has something to do with his labling of the Showa stamp. Ah, so many mysteries!
Swords regs were not brought under the Ministry of Interior in the post war years, but rather the opposite. Ordinances of that ministry dealt with policing of petty crimes like I listed above, and they came with penalties that a police chief could hand out, not the justice system. So in post war years, they took these "police-state-like" controls away from the Ministry of the Interior and made them proper law to be enforced by the justice system. That was how the minor offense laws of post war years got established, and this includes regulations that impact our hobby, like sword and gun control and also prohibition of making copies of orders.
I was saying that post war sword control is within the jurisdiction of a law that had its prewar roots in the Ministry of Interior ordinances, and though a cursory look at headings of the prewar ordinances did not reveal any sword connections to me, some kind of control over sword possession or carrying must have been under the police's authority in those days. Ohmura-san did not quote any specifics on the source, so if you want to verify what he says without his help you have to find the prewar sword control regs and see if the marking is discussed there.
Out of curiosity, I had a look at some other Japanese sites to see what they had to say about the 昭 in cherry blossom mark. The Ohmura site did not really explain what the marking was for, so my interest was in the purpose.
I understood that these were all blades made without the traditional process of folding the steel numerous times, not a kind of blade you could register in Japan as having artistic value. Therefore a polisher says people should not bring such swords to him.
As to the origins for the mark, I understood that there were many cases of such mass produced blades snapping in the freezing cold weather of Manchuria. So the people in Seki decided to do voluntary impact testing on their products to ensure quality on blades for use by the military. They stamped blades that passed this test initially with the Kanji for Seki 関, signifying the guild. But later, one of the army arsenal factories happened to adopt the same kanji for marking, so the Seki people deferred and changed their impact test mark to the 昭 in cherry blossom mark for army orders and an anchor mark for navy orders. Anyway, that was what I took out from other sites.
So far as the purpose was a voluntary test applied only to Seki products, I see not much room for the Ministry of the Interior to enter the picture, but according to Ohmura, the Seki people seemed to have prevailed upon the government to obligate all blades made in the same manner, wherever they were made, to undergo this test.
Enforcing such testing on a national scale would have required some kind of national ordinance and that would be the context in which some kind of ministerial involvement probably became necessary. Whether it was the Ministry of the Interior that provided such a legal framework is still questionable, but nothing I feel driven to check.
That's fabulous information Nick, thank you! As you suggested, I did send an email through the Ohmura website to ask him about his label for that stamp. Hopefully he's able to respond.
Just remember to let us know what you hear back.
Not to burden the elderly gentleman with having to reply in English, I ended up writing Ohmura-san in Japanese on behalf of Bruce and got his reply today, which I will share with you all translated into English below.
Firstly, he apologizes for being tardy about responding to Bruce, but he was badly tied up in having to finish two articles for a monthly sword magazine, while working on his own book. Also, his two frail elder sisters had to be hospitalized and he had to care for them.
The short answer, however, is that he also has no further details on the Cherry blossom and 昭 mark, as he only has that information second hand from post war write-ups on Seki blades. That material did not specify which ordinance of the Ministry of the Interior stipulated the allocation of that mark to Seki.
When the Sekiwake factory under the Nagoya Arsenal decided to use the abbreviation of Seki on its own swords, causing the clash with the already existing Seki mark, they should have discussed this with the Seki people directly to find a solution, but in Ohmura-san’s opinion, because Japanese bureaucracy tends to loathe stepping out of the bureaucratic chain of command, instead of dealing direct, they escalated the issue to central government.
And because municipal governments like townships and villages came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, they ended up having to arbitrate between the Seki municipality and the Army. Of course there was no way the private sector could prevent the army from claiming the Seki mark, so it would not have been any real arbitration, but the Ministry of the Interior simply offering an alternative through the Seki town office.
He further says, if documents addressed to the Seki municipality survived somewhere, one could perhaps learn more, but otherwise only the fact that the marking was changed is known without further details. Ohmura-san is not optimistic that further details could be clarified, due to the huge amount of documents destroyed at the end of the war.
He apologizes again that until his book is out of his hands, he will unfortunately not be able to correspond further.
It is an interesting and plausible take on how the Ministry got drawn in, but his version does not explain how the ordinance could have the authority to force producers outside of Seki to also undergo the impact test (if that is true, what I read at other sources).
Such a law addressing a wider audience would normally be in the government gazette, as it would not have been a private deal only with the Seki people. It should have survived, but is a lot of documents to go through, so unless you have someone proficient in Japanese among the sword aficionados, you are at a dead end, sorry.
Please don’t ask me about his book or his article, as I do not have any information and neither am I interested. I’m sure he’ll say something on his site when the time comes.
He was very kind and sincere in the way he wrote, perhaps, because I described Bruce as his ardent fan.
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