Western dining implements with Japanese kozuka and kozuka style handles

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by William P. Hood, Jr.

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)

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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.

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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.

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Pattern Number 5 flatware can be recognized by the "5" and the Gorham trademark with which the pieces are stamped, in conjunction with their unique handles. An archival photograph identifies the fruit knife, but there are no extant archival photographs or Gorham catalogue illustrations documenting the other functional types. (6) Plate III shows a group of pattern Number 5 fruit knives. Plate I shows a group of forks traditionally regarded as representing pattern Number 5 fruit forks. The knives are occasionally found on the market, but the forks are rare. (7)

How Gorham originally described or represented the Number 5 handles has been lost. Without mentioning pattern Number 5, but in all probability referring to it, William Hosley has stated that "[Gorham] made table knives out of cannibalized kodzukas (sword ornaments). (8) Several other modern observers have characterized the handles as being American-made cast silver or bronze reproductions of kozuka. (9) Charles H. Carpenter Jr. (who may not have had access to Gorham's costing records) went so far as to assert that Gorham could not have afforded to import Japanese-made kozuka or to bring Japanese workmen to Providence to make them, so the firm was forced to fashion relatively inexpensive copies. (10) The costing entries for the pattern Number 5 fruit knives and forks as usual itemize costs for producing the silver blades and fork functional ends. As for the handles, entries are limited to "Handles @ 4.50/dz," strongly suggesting that they were bought rather than made in-house.

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Pattern Number 5 flatware occurs with handles made from various metals and with various finishes. The six knives in Plate III, from a set of twelve, have handles most typical of the line. The set of six fruit forks in Plate I has handles of another base metal and finish. Each piece in these two sets has a handle with a different motif, but in some sets motifs were repeated. These pieces have been examined independently by Paul R. Allman and Sachiko Hori, two experts in Japanese sword fittings, both of whom have declared them to have Japanese-made "kozuka-style" handles, produced in the Meiji period (1868-1912) for export. (11) The handles of the knives illustrated in Plate III and those of the forks in Plate I are fabricated from low-quality, relatively cheap mixed metals, not bronze (see the appendix). Their relief decoration, which is the same on each side of the handle, was made by manual die-stamping, as described in the appendix, not by casting. Selected areas were then high-lighted with gilding. Some of the decorative subjects on the Gorham knives and forks and other flatware presented here are discussed in the appendix. (12) The knife blades and functional ends of the forks have a brushed finish and are engraved with various Japanese-inspired designs--the blades on both sides, the functional ends of the forks only on the front.