Sansei Japanese Sword Appraiser Mike Yamasaki – Part One: Turning a Manzanar Dagger Into a Family Heirloom | DiscoverNikkei.org

Sansei Japanese Sword Appraiser Mike Yamasaki – Part One Turning a Manzanar Dagger Into a Family Heirloom
By Keiko Fukuda T
ranslated by Matthew Galgani

I met with Mike one day around 10:00 am at a Japanese café in Little Tokyo. He had an appointment with a client in the morning and more meetings again that afternoon. His job? Appraiser of Japanese swords.

Mike is a sansei (third-generation Japanese) and is married to Mayumi, who was born in Japan. While I was exchanging email with Mayumi about “Toyo’s Camera”, a documentary about internment camp experiences, she wrote that “my husband has a dagger made at the Manzanar internment camp.” I immediately wanted to see the dagger and meet Mike.

We’ll discuss how he showed me that dagger a little later, but first here’s what Mike told me about why he, as someone born in America, would become an appraiser of Japanese swords. His grandparents on his father’s side came from Wakayama Prefecture. His grandparents on his mother’s side came from Shizuoka and Fukushima Prefectures and made their way to America. During the war, his mother, grandmother and uncle were relocated to Manzanar.

Feeling a strong connection with his grandmother, Mike’s job from childhood was to repair the daggers she brought from Japan. Perhaps it was by continually polishing those daggers that the Japanese soul grew within Mike.

Soon finding himself wanting to work in a field related to Japanese traditional culture, Mike took a path that led to him becoming an appraiser of Japanese swords. Invited by an appraiser he had met at a Japanese sword exhibition in Texas, he headed for Japan. Getting a chance to work with the official Nihon Bijutsu Token Hozonkai (NBTHK, Society for the Preservation of the Japanese Art Sword), Mike went back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, developing an eye for Japanese swords. In 1998, at the NBTHK’s 40th Anniversary National Sword Convention, he took 5th place out of over 200 participants at the “kantei-kai” (sword identification challenge). And at the monthly convention in September 2001, he became the first-ever non-Japanese national to win.

Understanding Japanese swords means understanding the background of hundreds of years of samurai history. Even as a Nikkei, an American-born, Mike clearly has a more detailed knowledge of Japanese history than this writer born in Japan. Regarding second-generation Japanese Americans and Japanese people, Mike makes the following comment:

“Nikkei immigrants came to America before the war. Japanese people in Japan experienced the war and post-war period, and that dramatically changed their values. However, Japanese Americans held on to the old values from the Meiji and Taisho eras. It was a value system that said you had to be honest and hard working. For a Sansei like me, too, according to my own self-analysis, I’m more Japanese than the Japanese.  [read more]

Part Two