Mr. Nakajima finally returned to his family home in Tokyo in August of 1946, only to find that not a twig was left standing for miles around. He borrowed some money from a friend and built a traditional Japanese house in two weeks, all by himself. He said it was not easy building his house, literally, on the ashes of his family. Nakajima spent the next ten years trying to survive in Post-war Japan and take care of the people he loved.

In 1956 Nakajima went to work for a business associate of his old teacher Hon'ami Kohõ. Mr. Hon'ami had retired after the war but knew Inuzuka Tokutaro. Inuzuka was not only a very fine sword polisher of the Hon'ami school tradition; he was also a sword dealer of very high reputation. Nakajima did a complete line of sword craft for Inuzuka and he was very happy to work once again, for a good man, in the craft that he loved.

In the late fifties a new sword organization was formed in the United States, the Japanese Sword Society of the US. The JSSUS had written to Dr. Homma, the head of the NBTHK in Japan, about sending a man to the United States to restore Japanese swords. The JSSUS didn't just want a polisher, they wanted one man who could do everything. Nakajima was that man and said that he was picked for three reasons:

1) First and foremost, he alone could do all the different jobs needed to make (or restore) a Japanese sword.
2) He was personally familiar with many of the missing National Treasures that Homma so dearly wanted returned to Japan.
3) Of all the sword craftsmen in Japan, Nakajima was one of the only ones to ever to have worked outside of Japan.

And so it was that on September 2, 1962, Nakajima Muneyoshi, at the age of 40, set sail aboard the Brazil Maru, with four thousand pounds of wood, stones, and other sword supplies, for Los Angeles.