On this page
The family
The Japanese Wikipedia gives him as born in 1979, eldest son of Gassan Sadatoshi and grandson of Gassan Sadakazu II, and fully active as a swordsmith since 2006. His father, Gassan Sadatoshi (月山貞利, Gassan Sadatoshi) was born in Osaka in 1946, is the third son of Gassan Sadakazu II, a Living National Treasure, has been mukansa since 1982 and is an intangible cultural property of Nara Prefecture; in 1995 he opened the Gassan museum in Sakurai.
In the NBTHK catalogues of 2025 and 2026, father and son exhibit together: Sadatoshi as mukansa (無鑑査) and Sadanobu in the competition.
Training and licence
According to him, he was born in Sakurai and in 1998, on entering Kyōto Sangyō University, he also became his father’s pupil. In 2006 (Heisei 18) he received from the Agency for Cultural Affairs the approval to forge (作刀承認, sakutō shōnin).
He is the sixth generation of the Osaka branch of the family (大阪月山, Ōsaka Gassan) and a board member (理事, riji) of the 全日本刀匠会 (Zen Nihon Tōshōkai), the swordsmiths’ association.
Outside the forge
According to him, in 2004 he made with his father a sword requested by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he has taken the sword to other audiences: exhibitions with anime (Evangelion and the Japanese sword, in 2012, and another in 2013) and sessions to learn how to look at swords.
With Casio he made the G-Shock MR-G “Gassan” watch (MRG-G2000GA), presented at Baselworld in 2019, and later a titanium MRG-B2000GA, of 500 pieces, for the 40th anniversary of G-Shock: he applied by hand the family’s yasurime (鑢目, the file marks) to the centre links and the kanji 鍛 (tan) and 錬 (ren). In a 2019 interview with Watches by SJX he said that he considers the next sword he makes to be the best he will make, and that today’s smiths must dare to innovate on the inherited technique.
