A Different Kind of Inheritance
The early European collectors described in the first essay did not simply accumulate objects. They built a methodology. Oeder’s connoisseurial rigour in Tokyo, Brinckmann’s insistence on classification, Fahrenhorst’s correspondence with Japanese scholars, Jacoby’s patient translation of the Higo Kinkoroku: What these men left behind was not only a body of objects, but a way of approaching them.
This tradition, however, was never institutionalized in the way that Japanese knowledge transmission was. In Japan, understanding of Tosogu is embedded in living practice: collectors, craftsmen, and scholars inherit it through apprenticeships, mentorship, and generational networks. Motifs, schools, and techniques are learned within a cultural framework that remains continuous.
Europe presents a fundamentally different environment. The scholarly lineage of the early collectors did not produce academies or formal apprenticeships. It produced books, catalogues, and collections — resources available to those who seek them, but requiring the seeker to find their own way in. Joly’s Legend in Japanese Art, Brinckmann and Hara’s Die Meister der japanischen Schwertzierathen, Oeder’s 1916 catalogue, Halberstadt’s meticulous handwritten notes in Copenhagen — these were the instruments through which knowledge was preserved and transmitted. And they remain, for most European collectors today, the primary point of entry.
The Self-Directed Path
For most European collectors today, learning is largely independent. Understanding develops through books, catalogues, and historical publications; through personal networks and relationships with trusted dealers; and through sustained, careful observation of the objects themselves.
This is not without precedent. The early collectors worked in much the same way — corresponding across borders, visiting each other’s collections, building expertise through comparison rather than through formal instruction. Gilbertson’s 500 signatures mapped a field that had no map. Joly photographed, catalogued, and cross-referenced because no institution existed to do it for him. Even Brinckmann, despite his museum directorship, only arrived at coherent classification by bringing Shinkichi Hara into the room.
The difference today is one of density: those early collectors formed networks, however informal, that carried cumulative knowledge forward. Today’s collector often begins without direct access to those networks. The catalogues survive; the relationships that produced them do not.
This has real consequences. Initial understanding develops slowly. Motifs and technical subtleties may remain partially opaque for years. The significance of a school’s lineage, the reading of a signature, the logic of a surface treatment — these reveal themselves gradually, through sustained engagement rather than instruction.
Yet this mode of learning is not without its own logic. The absence of inherited framework encourages something the early scholars also exemplified: rigorous observation, careful comparison, and a reflective approach to what the object itself can tell us. Church’s chemist’s eye, Jacoby’s annotated notebooks, Fahrenhorst’s school-by-school classification — none of these emerged from tradition. They were built through attention.
Linking Perception and Practice
In Europe, learning and seeing are inseparable. Because there is no tradition to defer to, the object becomes the primary text. Direct observation reveals structure, material, and craft; research deepens understanding of context, symbolism, and school. The two reinforce each other.
This relationship between eye and mind defines the European encounter with Tosogu. It is gradual, cumulative, and self-constructed — but it connects, however indirectly, to the same scholarly impulse that drove the collectors of the pre-war generation, and to the French, Danish, German, and British traditions their work represents.
Learning without tradition is not a limitation. It is a different mode of engagement — and one with a longer history in Europe than is often recognized.
