Tsuba: Plum Blossom Design, Signed Tadashige at age 81 (Akasaka)

Tayuemon Tadashige is a signing master of the Akasaka school, the makers of iron openwork tsuba who, the published sources record, moved from Kyoto to the Akasaka district of Edo at the beginning of the Edo period and flourished there until the end of the shogunate. The first three generations, Tadamasa, Tadamasa and Tadatora, the so-called old Akasaka, have no confirmed signed work. Signed pieces begin only with the fourth generation Tadatoki around the Genroku era, signing Bushu ju Akasaka Hikojuro Tadatoki saku, and the main line carried the name Tadatoki down to the ninth generation. Tadashige was a pupil of this Tadatoki line. Most entries say he entered under the fourth generation, one calls him a pupil of the fifth, and the latest reconciles the two: he entered in the fourth generation's old age, but his teacher in practice was the fifth. He was long-lived, with a signature dated at seventy-eight and a last work signed at eighty-four, and the sources praise him as "among the finest hands of the Akasaka tsuba makers from the fourth to the ninth generation"[[c:1]].

His guards keep the Akasaka construction the published sources describe for the school. The iron is at times laminated in the manner called sanmai-awase, the plate is modelled high at the centre, the connecting bars of the openwork widen near the rim to give stability, and the rim is usually a rounded maru-mimi. His technique is ji-sukashi openwork with kebori, on iron plates of a large and dignified size. The sources dwell on the steel: the forging is superb, the rust colour has a sheen, and on one daisho the colour of the patina is called clear.

What the sources single out in him is design. Novelty of composition is one of the points of Akasaka work, and Tadashige, they write, was especially strong in design, "enterprising enough to take in the pattern designs of Ogata Korin"[[c:2]]. His large openwork guard of old pines, called a representative work of his hand, sets two pine branches of different sizes in a three-tiered matsukaze design that the sources call "Tadashige's own invention, not seen even in Higo tsuba"[[c:3]]. A daisho pair signed at seventy-eight shows a plum tree giving off its faint scent under a blue moon in the depth of winter, and the sources find that it "well displays the character of Akasaka tsuba, whose forte is stylish openwork"[[c:4]].

His subjects draw on nature and on old stories, as the school's do. Beside the pines and the plum stand a tsuba of sacred deer with a torii, signed with the place name Kasugayama, a guard of paulownia framed in a window, and a round iron guard of the yellow hollyhock, whose full, soft modelling the sources read as showing the skill that makes him the white eyebrow of the Akasaka makers. On the larger guards the build is big and dignified and the cutting of the openwork is keen. The paulownia guard, which takes the Higo master Kanshiro as its model and adds a new freshness, is modelled with the flesh dropped away at the rim, and the sources note that this modelling "well shows Tadashige's particular character"[[c:5]].

The signature itself carries a question the published sources address directly. The paulownia guard bears the age inscription of eighty-four, his last, and is judged "from the style of the signature a substitute work and substitute signature"[[c:6]] by his eldest son Tadayoshi. Even so the sources call it an outstanding work that shows his forte, so the late age-dated pieces stand at the edge between his own hand and his workshop.

For the collector Tadashige is represented by five tsuba at the Juyo level, all signed, with no higher designations and no recorded provenance. They include the old pines held as his representative work, the plum daisho and the age-dated pieces of his final years. A signed Tadashige of his large, inventive openwork appears only from time to time, so a documented example is a deliberate find for a collector of Edo iron tsuba.