NihontoWatch次郎太郎直勝は文政二年に十五歳で荘司大慶直胤に入門。後に直胤の娘婿となる。 備前伝と相州伝の名手として知られ、師直胤に勝るとの評もある。
NihontoWatchSuishinshi Masahide Jirotaro Naokatsu直勝
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Suishinshi Masahide line (Naotane school) · Musashi · around 1805-1858
Fujishiro Jo saku · Tōken Taikan top 31%
2 pieces on the market now
Jirotaro Naokatsu signed his katana with a large six-character mei and dated them across the late-Edo decades. The earliest of his designated works carries a Tenpo 2 date of 1831 and the latest an Ansei 2 date of 1855. He was a pupil of Taikei Naotane and later Naotane's adopted son, serving the Akimoto house of Tatebayashi in Joshu and living at Shitaya in Edo. He first used the name Kazusa Taro and afterward changed it to Jirotaro, though the published sources note that no work signed Kazusa Taro has been seen. Through Naotane he stands in the Suishinshi line of Masahide, the central school of the shinshinto revival. The published sources rank him within that line as the most capable hand after Naotane and Masayoshi[[c:1]], and a noted master in his own right[[c:2]]. He died on the twenty-second day of the seventh month of Ansei 5, in 1858, the year after Naotane, at fifty-four.
The published sources divide his work broadly into Soshu-den and Bizen-den, and his hallmark is the Bizen-den modeled on the old Osafune masters. Its carrying feature is a kataochi-gunome taken from Kanemitsu. On one katana the published sources describe the temper as primarily kataochi-gunome[[c:3]], and judge that the aim was plainly Osafune Kanemitsu. Into that base he sets angular and pointed ha and ordinary gunome, with long ashi entering and yo intermingled. On four of his seven blades the temper slants in places toward saka-gakari. The sugata that carries this manner is robust: a wide mihaba, little taper, a thick kasane and an extended kissaki. On the long Tenpo 13 katana of eighty centimetres the published sources call the weighty blade in the hand truly martial. Of the Ansei 2 katana they write that in works of this type his sugata is bolder than Naotane's and his kataochi-gunome larger, with a bright and at times clear nioiguchi.
Beneath the temper he forges a ko-itame that packs well, at times an itame with areas of large mokume and some nagare-hada. The ji-nie lies thick and the steel is bright. An utsuri of some kind is named on four of his seven blades. Only on the long Tenpo 13 katana does a full midare-utsuri stand. Elsewhere it is faint: a faint midare-utsuri-like effect on the Tenpo 2 katana, a weak choji-utsuri on the Tenpo 14 katana, and a pale utsuri-like effect over the muji-toned jigane of the Ansei 2 katana. On the Tenpo 13 blade the published sources add that the pattern of the jigane shows well and that the temper is set a little smaller and lower than usual, evoking an antique atmosphere. The boshi enters midare-komi and turns with a slightly pointed tip or a ko-maru.
His work is not confined to the Kanemitsu model. The Tenpo 2 katana carries carvings unusual for him, a kurikara on the omote carved down into the tang and a suken on the ura. The published sources read it as aimed at the classical Nagamitsu, perhaps a copy of a lost original, and call it valuable as an example of his copies of masters other than Kanemitsu. They add that the angular ha and the partly slanting ashi are 「彼の兼光写しに共通する手くせ」, a habit common to his Kanemitsu copies. A Tenpo 9 katana, made to order, shows the bolder side of the Bizen-den. Its temper mixes many kinds of ha, the nie attaching well with coarse particles, and the kinsuji and sunagashi run longer than usual. The published sources call its large mokume and slanting midare points to see in his work, as in Naotane's.
The other face is the nie-laden manner. A katana dated Kaei 5 and made at Suibara in Echigo has a choji-midare mixed with gunome and long ashi. The nie attaches thickly, at places strongly enough to suggest yubashiri, muneyaki appears on the back, and the nioiguchi is bright and clear. The published sources call it 「直勝の本領発揮の一口」, the blade in which his true ability shows. A katana dated Tenpo 6, recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection, belongs to the same side: over an itame with a slight masame tendency, a choji temper mixed with gunome deepens in the monouchi, with nie, sunagashi, ashi and yo. Its commentary adds that in Naokatsu's Soshu-den, as in Naotane's, there is often a swirling grain within the itame (「板目の肌の中に渦巻いた肌を現わすものが多く」), and calls it a point of interest. On which of his manners surpasses his teacher, the published sources differ by date. The earlier designations say that his Soshu-den at times surpasses Naotane[[c:4]]. The later ones say it of his Bizen-den in the manner of the old Kagemitsu and Kanemitsu. Of the Ansei 2 katana they write that it stands beside Naotane's masterpieces of the type, calling it 「同作中の白眉」, the finest among his works.
For the collector he is a fine late-Edo name held within a single rank. He has no National Treasures, no Important Cultural Properties and no Tokubetsu Juyo. His designated record runs entirely through the Juyo, with six katana raised to that rank between the 18th session in 1969 and the 68th in 2022, every one of them signed and dated on an ubu tang filed in o-sujikai with kesho. A seventh signed and dated katana, of Tenpo 6, stands in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection. Fujishiro rates him Jo-saku, and the Toko Taikan values his work at 450 points. The Juyo blades are in private hands, and none of his blades carries an old daimyo denrai. Because his whole designated record is six signed katana, a Naokatsu of this quality comes to market only seldom. A Bizen-den katana in the Kanemitsu manner, with its kataochi-gunome and utsuri, is the side of his work the published sources hold up most often.
Where Jirotaro Naokatsu stands among comparable artisans: across all of nihontō, and within tradition, era, and period. The tiers (Foremost · Leading · Major · Notable) weigh official designations from the NBTHK and Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, together with historical honors of lasting repute such as the Sansaku and Meibutsu-chō.
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Years he was demonstrably active, proven by signed-and-dated blades
Shinshinto · Musashi
69 pieces on the market now
At Hamachō in Edo, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening ones of the nineteenth, Suishinshi Masahide[[c:1]] gathered the school that would turn Japanese swordmaking back toward its medieval models. Born Kawabe Gihachirō at Akayu in Dewa in 1750, signing first as Suzuki Takahide and then Eikoku, he studied under the Shitahara smith Yoshihide of Musashi, took the name Masahide in An'ei 3, and served the Akimoto house of Yamagata before settling in Edo, where he worked for nearly fifty years. He is the founding figure of the shinshintō and the theorist of the fukko-tō (revival-sword) doctrine, the argument that the sword ought to return to its Kamakura forms. Around that teaching he drew a large body of pupils, among them Taikei Naotane, who would give the revival its fullest practical form, the future second Masayoshi (Hosokawa Morihide), and a wider Edo and provincial following that carried the program into the Mito, Yonezawa, Tsuyama, and Tatebayashi domains. The shared vocabulary of the school is the deliberate reach back into the koto traditions, worked over a tightly forged, often muji-toned ko-itame with thick ji-nie. Masahide's own prime hand was the Ōsaka-utsushi, the surging tōran-midare of Tsuda Sukehiro opening from a long yakidashi and the broad suguha after Inoue Shinkai, betrayed on even his closest copies by a blackish, coarse nie that spills from the ha into the ji. Naotane gave the revival its Bizen and Sōshū faces: a reverse-leaning chōji-midare with angular kaku-gunome and saka-ashi, modeled on the late-Kamakura Osafune masters Kagemitsu and Kanemitsu and anchored by a consciously revived midare-utsuri that no ordinary shinshintō steel carries, set beside a Sōshū notare with its whorled uzumaki-hada and coarse, striped nie. The pupils divided this inheritance along their own lines. Jirōtarō Naokatsu, Naotane's adopted son, took a Bizen-den led by a kataochi-gunome from Kanemitsu with a pervasive saka-gakari slant and chōji- or midare-utsuri in the ji.
Suishinshi Masatsugu reproduced Naotane's two traditions, Sōshū and Bizen, down to the cut of his signature. Through Masayoshi the Bizen current passed to his heir Hosokawa Masamori of Tsuyama, whose chōji clusters mixed with gunome-chōji and togariba. The Osaka wave traveled separately into Mito through Naoe Sukemasa, who set a Shinkai-styled suguha and a Sukehiro tōran over a clear ko-itame, while Chōunsai Tsunatoshi of the Uesugi service carried a nioi-deki chōji mixed with gunome, suguha, and tōran-midare, often with carving by his own hand. To kantei the school is to weigh a tradition consciously copied against the period marks the copy cannot shed: the constant of the line is that the hamon is never the pure nioi-deki of old Bizen but carries nie throughout, a difference the NBTHK names outright as the divide between koto and shinshintō. The revived utsuri in Naotane and Naokatsu, the spilling nie in Masahide, the whorled uzumaki-hada shared across the line, and the broad, thick-kasane late-Edo sugata are the surest tells, narrowed further by the school's habit of full, dated signatures that make these smiths among the most exactly knowable of their age. Masahide stands at the head as the teacher and theorist, his finest work in his Ōsaka copies rather than the doctrine he proclaimed; Naotane stands ahead of him in execution, his Bizen-den held the finest among the shinshintō. Their pupils define the late-Edo Osafune and Sōshū revivals as practiced through Edo and the domains, with Naokatsu and Masatsugu read as the next hands after Naotane and Masayoshi. The provenance of the school runs through domain commission and bestowal (Mito blades forged at the Kōrakuen by lordly order, Tsuyama and Yonezawa fief work, Naotane's Sanada daishō and a tachi recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection) rather than ancient daimyō transmission, fitting for a movement that, within a single generation at Edo, redrew the direction of nineteenth-century swordmaking by turning it back toward the old models. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Naotane直胤 | 1801-1837 | 40 |
| Masahide正秀 | 1777-1817 | 28 |
| Sukemasa助政 | 1804-1825 | 8 |
| Jirotaro Naokatsu直勝 | 1805-1858 | 7 |
| Masayoshi正義 | 1791-1860 | 5 |
The Shinshintō revival
Around 1800 Suishinshi Masahide argued in his writings that the craft must return to the old masters’ methods: the fukkotō revival. His greatest successor Naotane worked convincingly in Bizen and Sōshū manners that had been dead for centuries.
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