NihontoWatchIt has appeared, it has appeared; a grand, wide wakizashi passed down through generations of an old family as the work of Hoki no Kami Nobutaka of Owari has appeared. Nobutaka's real name was Kawamura Saemon. Originally from Seki in Mino Province, he was a descendant of Sanami Kanekuni, born in Eiroku 6 (1563) (463 years ago); in Tensho 20 (1592) (434 years ago), through the mediation of the Lord of Kiyosu Castle, Kanpaku Hidetsugu, he received the title of Hoki no Kami, and when Nagoya Castle was completed in Keicho 15 (1610) (416 years ago), the swordsmiths of Kiyosu moved en masse to the Nagoya Castle town, as preserved in the term "Kiyosu-goshi." This wakizashi is wide, with a wide moto-mihaba and a wide saki-mihaba, possessing sori and exhibiting a grand shobu-zukuri wakizashi shape without a yokote-suji; the jigane is itame-hada mixed with mokume-hada, and the hamon is a nioi-deki with ko-nie, a large gunome-midareba with a boshi that returns deeply to the mune, fired with great spirit and skill. The koshirae, featuring a Nobuie-style tsuba and a kuro-ro-saya with a kaerizuno fitting, adds further splendor to this wakizashi passed down as Hoki no Kami Nobutaka. This time, as we received this Hoki no Kami Nobutaka wakizashi—which had been cherished for generations by an old family—with the request to "pass it on cheaply to someone who will treasure it since we ourselves have grown old," and because the buffalo horn of the koiguchi on the saya has suffered damage due to changes over many years, we are offering it at a special bargain price; please do enjoy it.
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As written by the shop
Machine translation from the shop's Japanese · may contain errors ·
Mino-den · Mino
8 pieces on the market now
The San'ami line takes its root in Mino Province, where its head smith Kanenori (兼則) worked as one of the so-called Seki Seven Schools. The setsumei place Kanenori from the close of the Nanbokuchō period into the Ōei era of the early Muromachi, alongside Kanemoto and Kanesada among the representative hands of Sue-Seki, and the earliest extant signed tachi of his is appraised as no later than Ōei. A second early smith, Kanekuni (兼国), is recorded as belonging to the San'ami lineage and is judged to predate the Sue-Seki group proper; the remote ancestry given for him runs variously to a disciple of Naoe Kanetomo, to Yamato Kanekuni, or to Kanenori, though the setsumei note that nothing survives to confirm so distant a descent. From this Mino stock came Hōki no Kami Fujiwara Nobutaka (信高), born at Kami-Ōchi in Mino in 1563 and said to descend from San'ami Kanekuni. After receiving the title Hōki no Kami in Tenshō 9 (1581) he moved to Kiyosu in Owari and, serving Tokugawa Yoshinao, later settled at Nagoya, carrying the line into the early Shintō era through a second generation who took the tonsure in Kanbun 2 (1662). Across the corpus the jigane is itame, often closely forged and tending to nagare-hada or flowing grain along the edge, with ji-nie and a frequent standing of the grain (hada-dachi); a faint whitish cast (shirake) marks the older Mino work of Kanenori and Kanekuni. The temper rests on suguha as a base. In the early hands it is a tight, clear (saete) suguha in nioi-deki, sometimes mixed with small gunome, angular elements and pointed ha, carrying ashi, hotsure and scattered tobiyaki.
The Nobutaka works open this out: a broad suguha shifting to shallow notare, ko-notare with a gunome-flavored edge, deep nioi with nie unevenly applied and partly coarse, nie-kuzure at the yakigashira, kuichigai-ba, kinsuji, sunagashi, yubashiri and tobiyaki that climb into the shinogi-ji until the upper half reads as hitatsura. The bōshi runs to sugu with ko-maru, at times midare-komi, pointed, or hakikake, and the early swords keep a slender, high-sori tachi shape while Nobutaka's carry the wide-bodied, ō-kissaki form of the Momoyama transition. The hand is recognized in this pairing of a flowing Mino itame with a suguha core that, in the descendants, breaks toward bold hitatsura. For kantei, the setsumei fix several anchors. In Kanenori's signature the scooped chisel at the fourth stroke of the character kane (兼) is read as a trait of late Nanbokuchō through Ōei work, matched in dated Kaneyoshi mei; the clear suguha of Kanekuni is likened to a Zenjō Kaneyoshi masterpiece. The jizō-flavored bōshi and the nagare-mixed itame in Nobutaka are named as the surviving stamp of the Mino root beneath his Owari manner, and one of his katana is recorded as an Inabae-utsushi. Provenance runs through the corpus: a Kanekuni bears kinzōgan recording it as the sashiryō of Ōkubo Genban-no-jō Tadanari, lord of Odawara in Sagami, worn at the age of ninety-three; Kanenori's tachi descended in the Yamanouchi family. Among the Owari yari makers beginning with Masatsune, Nobutaka's yari of extraordinary length is held in particular regard, and the second-generation Nobutaka is judged no less skilled than his father, with the finest extant Nobutaka works counted to his hand. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Nobutaka信高 | 1581-1615 | 3 |
| Nobutaka信高 | 1624-1644 | 2 |
| Nobutaka信高 | 1673-1681 | 0 |
| Kanekuni兼國 | 1455-1457 | 1 |
| Kanenori兼則 | 1370-1372 | 1 |
Mino in the Momoyama period
Unification closed the mass market, and Seki’s smiths moved to where the new money was: the Mishina line to Kyōto with court titles, Daidō smiths to castle towns across the provinces. Mino became the great technical ancestor of the Shintō age.
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