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About the maker

Omura Kaboku加卜

On a katana now in Osaka, dated the eighth month of Shōhō 2 (1645), Ōmura Kaboku cut not only his signature but a small manifesto: the construction, "true fifteen-plate kabuse" (真十五枚甲伏), the proud disclaimer "I am no smith" (予非鍛冶), and a line that the blade was forged to be heard of nine hundred years hence. The man behind that inscription was Ōmori Jibuzaemon, a physician born at Anzai on the outskirts of Sunpu in Suruga, who took up the forge as an avocation alongside his medical practice. By his own account in the *Tōken Hihō*, his treatise on swords, he began forging in the third month of Shōhō 1 (1644) and over the forty-one years to Jōkyō 1 (1684) made about a hundred blades. He served Matsudaira Mitsunaga, lord of Takada in Echigo, by virtue of his medicine; after that house was dispossessed he became a *rōnin*, went up to Edo, and entered the attendance of Tokugawa Mitsukuni of the Mito domain. His teacher is not clearly known, and his small signed corpus is prized by the published sources as much for the documentary value of its long inscriptions as for the blades themselves. Kaboku worked in two distinct manners, and the gunome that runs through both is the thread that ties his hand together. The first is a brilliant Bizen tradition. Over an *itame* mixed with *mokume*, densely forged and carrying a standing *midare-utsuri*, he tempers a large *chōji* mixed with *gunome*, into which *ashi* and *yō* enter frequently; the *nioi* is deep and the *nioiguchi* clear, and the *bōshi* runs slightly *midare-komi* before turning in *ko-maru*. The published sources liken this work to the splendid *chōji* of the Ishidō current, calling it "the fine Ishidō-style chōji workmanship" (石堂風の見事な丁子出来), and judge his masterpieces to lie among these Bizen-tradition pieces. His other manner is Sōshū. There the temper is a broad *suguha* or a *notare*-based large *gunome-midare* worked deep in *nie*, with thick *ashi*, *hotsure* and *yubashiri*, and *kinsuji* and *sunagashi* coursing freely through the edge. The *jigane* shifts with the manner, and reading it is the surest way into his work. In the Bizen mode the forging is a dense *itame* with *mokume*, the grain tightly closed beneath the bright *midare-utsuri* that rises in the old Bizen *jigane*. In the Sōshū mode the same *itame* stands a little more openly, here mixed with *moku* and flowing *nagare-hada*, and carries fine *ji-nie* together with a *chikei* that enters well though subdued; on the latest of the surviving blades the steel color is described as somewhat blackish, a strong, clearly textured *jigane*. His shapes are those of an early-Edo *shintō* katana: *shinogi-zukuri* with *iori-mune*, a thick *kasane* and a somewhat high *shinogi*, the *sori* shallow and the *chū-kissaki* extended. The published sources praise the proportions of the sixty-second-session blade as "robust and stalwart" (頑健で屈強), an ordinary width carried with abundant *nikuoki*. The surviving Jūyō blades let his two registers be set against one another. The eleventh-session katana is the Bizen voice at its clearest, its large *chōji* and *gunome* over a bright *utsuri* judged probably his finest, the published sources calling it "likely his crowning achievement" (恐らくその白眉であろう). The nineteenth and twenty-third pieces lean to Sōshū, the one a wide *suguha* with *gunome* and *sunagashi*, the other a *notare*-based large *gunome-midare* in deep *nie*. The sixty-second-session katana, designated in 2016 and the most fully described of the four, is the strongest statement of that manner: a broad *suguha* base mixed with *gunome*, *chōji*-like elements and shallow *notare* in a companion arrangement, *kinsuji* and *sunagashi* frequent, and the *bōshi* tempered so deeply that it becomes *ichimai*-like with *tobiyaki* on the reverse. The published sources read it as a work "plainly made with a keen awareness of Gō Yoshihiro" (郷義弘を強く意識して制作された), and note that he also left a broad *suguha* in the manner of Shinkai. Across his nakago he cut unusually full long inscriptions, recording the *kabuse* plate count on nearly every blade and styling himself at times Yasuhide, which is why his dated, self-named pieces are treated as valuable source material. What distinguishes Kaboku is the breadth of an amateur who answered to no school line and ranged freely between Bizen and Sōshū. His Bizen *chōji* sets him among the Ishidō-influenced smiths of the early *shintō* without binding him to them, while his Sōshū work, looking past his own century to Gō, gives him an *ichimai*-tempered *bōshi* and a thick *nie* activity that few of his contemporaries pursued so deliberately. The published sources name Bandō Tarō Toden among his disciples, but his line did not carry far; he is remembered less as the head of a tradition than as a singular figure, a doctor of letters who forged a hundred blades and wrote a book about it, and whose surviving swords are read off their own long signatures rather than off any documented descent. For the collector Kaboku is a rare and particular name rather than a famous one. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs through the Jūyō rank, with four blades on official record, all of them katana and all signed. None carries a documented daimyō provenance in the surviving papers, and current holders are largely unrecorded, the blades having passed into private hands in Shizuoka, Tottori and Osaka among others. His total output was small to begin with, about a hundred swords across a working life that was never his principal occupation, and the designated pieces are held rather than traded; a signed Ōmura Kaboku comes to the open market only seldom. A privately held example is a notable thing for a collector to encounter, valued the more for the long inscriptions in which a seventeenth-century physician set down, in his own hand and his own words, exactly how and why he made the blade.

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