The catalogue came in 1916. It documented nearly 1,798 objects, with information on material, period, motif, and maker. The original is now one of the hardest to find in the field — a rarity that reflects not only its age, but the destruction that followed. The collection itself was auctioned in Vienna on 17 October 1943, in the middle of a war that was consuming the city around it. Whether scattered, destroyed, or simply lost, the physical objects have never been coherently traced. What Oeder’s story offers the contemporary European collector is not just historical interest, but a mirror.

He arranged for his collection to travel to an exhibition in Copenhagen. On the night he crossed into Denmark, the Reichstag burned. A Danish friend intervened, rerouting the collection to Holland rather than back to Germany. The few remaining pieces in Berlin were smuggled out afterward, declared as samples of no commercial value. In Holland, the collection survived the occupation hidden by neighbours. Then it was stolen. Five years after the war, Dutch police pursuing art smugglers called Tikotin in as an expert. To his amazement, he recognised the pieces as his own. A collection that had survived so much, he concluded, deserved to survive further — and to be seen.

Brinckmann saw a Darwinian-evolutionary tendency at work, a progression from simple to complex forms. Hara found this nonsensical and argued for a classification according to schools and lines of tradition. The disagreement is more than a methodological footnote. It is a condensed version of the central problem of the European encounter with Tosogu. Brinckmann was applying a framework that made sense of Gothic cathedrals and centuries of Western decorative arts. Hara knew it was wrong — not because the objects were simpler or more complex at different periods, but because the logic of their development was entirely different. Hara prevailed. But the episode reveals something that remains unresolved for the European collector today: the frameworks we bring to these objects are never neutral.

What Fahrenhorst saw in Japan was what the Meiji Restoration was in the process of discarding. He returned to Germany, but Japan did not leave him. In 1934, he did something no other European collector of Tosogu appears to have done: he built a dedicated building for his collection. He died four years later, surrounded by his artworks. And then, in 1968, some of what had survived came back to Japan. Dr. Sato Kanzan examined the pieces one by one. He recognised what was there.

Jacoby did something different: he treated the collection as an occasion for scholarship, and the scholarship as inseparable from the collecting. In 1905 he translated and adapted the Higo Kinkoroku — a Japanese-language reference on the sword mountings of Higo province — producing a German text with illustrations and an appendix of signatures. To do this in 1905, when almost no European collector had the tools to approach it, was a contribution of genuine scholarly value. The image of his notebooks, in their grey cloth case by the Berlin binder Angermann — a collector working through a Japanese text, page by page — is a precise emblem of what distinguished Jacoby from the majority of his contemporaries.

He was in America when Europe closed. He could not go back. The period that followed was one of decline: a man in his late seventies and then his eighties, far from home, with a collection he could not move and affairs he could no longer manage. He died in Washington D.C. in 1949, following a period of decline during which he was not in control of his affairs. The collection had already been consigned to Parke-Bernet by a trustee. The two-day sale dispersed what remained while he was still alive, incapacitated, somewhere in Washington. He did not direct it. He did not see it. That is not the story of a collector who failed. It is the story of a collector who succeeded entirely; and whom history simply outlasted.