The Date Yukimitsu

The sword is a katana of the end of the Kamakura period, cut down from a much longer blade to 71.5 cm. Its back is rounded, a maru-mune, where Sōshū blades usually have a peaked one, and a groove runs down each face and on through the tang. Whatever signature it had went with the shortening. On the tang now stand two characters inlaid in gold, 行光, Yukimitsu, and on the other face the name and seal mark of the appraiser who set them there, Hon’ami Kōyū.¹

The surviving signed works of Yukimitsu of Sagami are all tantō.¹ Every long sword that bears his name does so by someone’s judgement. This one has carried the name for almost three hundred years. The documents record the occasion on which it was given and the value set on it; the question is whether the steel bears the name out.

Kōyū’s certificate for the sword, his origami, is dated the third day of the fourth month of Kyōhō 20 (1735) and values it at 200 gold mai.² Twenty-four days later, on the twenty-seventh, the shōgun Tokugawa Yoshimune announced the marriage of his adopted daughter Princess Tone to Date Munemura, heir to the domain of Sendai.³ On the nineteenth day of the sixth month he gave the Date this sword.

Before the gift the sword belonged to the shōgun and was kept, it appears, in the shogunal sword store, the o-koshimono, where at least one unsigned blade is recorded under Yukimitsu’s name; in 1693 a Yukimitsu from the store was used in a cutting test.⁴ The sequence suggests that the attribution, the gold inlay and the valuation were made together that spring, for the occasion: an unsigned, much-shortened katana from the store made ready to be given. In the Date register the entry after this sword is a katana by Sadamune, also from Yoshimune, whose origami, at 250 mai, is dated the third day of the eighth month, after the gift.⁵

The Date recorded the gift in their own register. Their sword records, which Fukunaga Suiken judged the best kept of all the three hundred lords,⁶ include the Kensō hiroku, compiled in 1789 by the domain’s sword magistrate, Satō Tōzō; the sword is its entry 50, and every particular the entry gives fits this blade.²

Princess Tone, 利根姫, was born in 1717, a daughter of Tokugawa Munenao, lord of Kii, the house from which Yoshimune himself had come. Yoshimune adopted her on the twenty-third day of the fourth month of Kyōhō 20, four days before the marriage was announced. After her death early in 1746 she was known as Unshōin.⁷

The betrothal ceremony, the nōsai, was held on the nineteenth day of the sixth month. Yoshimune came out to the Kuro-shoin, the inner hall of audience, where Date Yoshimura, lord of Sendai, and his son Munemura came to give thanks for the match. Gifts passed both ways. Yoshimura presented a tachi, twenty rolls of silk and thirty pieces of silver; Munemura a tachi, fifty pieces of silver and twenty rolls. Each was given the shōgun’s cup. The shogunate’s daily record of the audience then lists the shōgun’s gifts, and the first is this katana, at 代金弐百枚, two hundred gold mai, the figure Kōyū had written some eleven weeks before.⁸

Father and son each received a sword with a set of mitokoromono: this Yukimitsu, with fittings by Gotō Tsūjō, and a short sword by Sa Kunihiro of the Chikuzen school of Samonji, with fittings by Gotō Renjō. The sources disagree on which lord received which, the Tokugawa jikki giving the Yukimitsu to Yoshimura and the Sa Kunihiro to Munemura, the Kansei genealogies and the house ledger quoted in the Date register giving the Yukimitsu to Munemura.⁹ The gift itself is recorded in at least six independent lines of transmission.¹⁰

The princess entered the Date house on the twenty-eighth day of the eleventh month. On the first day of the twelfth, Yoshimura came to the castle to give thanks and received a short sword by Awataguchi Norikuni, valued at 100 mai.⁵

Yukimitsu was a sword the shōgunate gave and received. In 1624 a Yukimitsu katana was among the swords presented to the retired shōgun Hidetada at the Mito residence. About 1656 the Sakai of Obama presented a Yukimitsu short sword at 200 mai when the shōgun Ietsuna visited their residence at Ushigome; in 1722 a tantō at 200 mai came to Yoshimune as the bequest of Matsudaira Yoshikuni of Echizen; and in 1729, on the day of another shogunal marriage, Matsudaira Kazusa-no-suke presented a third at 200 mai. Iemitsu gave a Yukimitsu katana to the Kuroda in 1648; Tsunayoshi, as shōgun, received a Yukimitsu wakizashi from Yanagisawa Yoshisato in 1695 and gave him another in 1701.¹¹ The Yukimitsu named in the meibutsu-chō of 1719 whose lengths it records, the Satō, the Gotō and the Ōshima, are all short swords.¹²

The recorded valuations of Yukimitsu that the museum has found are set out in Annex A, with what is left out and why. Among the long swords, this sword’s 200 mai stands highest in gold. Next come two katana at 100 mai: one in the Tachibana house of Yanagawa, its attribution also inlaid and almost the same length, the other in the Satake house, first papered as Norishige. Kōchū valued an unsigned katana at 70 mai in 1721. Of Yukimitsu of any length, three reach the same figure, all short swords presented to the shōgun.

Kōyū issued origami from the later Kyōhō years, when, in the judgement of the Dai Nihon tōken-shi, Yoshimune’s reform of the sword world had restored a measure of trust to the family’s papers; the Kenwaroku finds them loosening from the middle of his tenure.¹³ Valuations were not prices, and they rose over the eighteenth century, though not evenly. The famous swords recorded in the meibutsu-chō that Kōchū compiled in 1719 already stood high: more than half at 200 mai or more, the Wakasa Masamune at 1,000. Among the swords the NBTHK has since designated, no valuation in gold before 1730 exceeds 200 mai (Kōjō’s for a Gō Yoshihiro in 1672; a Sadamune in 1701); from 1750 Kōyū wrote 700 and 300 mai for Masamune and 500 for Gō, the level of the catalogue’s famous pieces, and one description reads its old scabbard as recording him raising a Rai Kunitoshi to 100 mai in 1734.¹⁴ Kōyū’s figure for this sword belongs to his early years, fifteen years before the highest of them; the origami are plotted in Annex B.

Yukimitsu’s surviving signed works are tantō, and the long swords given to him are attributions, made over three centuries by the Hon’ami and since by the NBTHK. The attribution has always been broad. The old sword books credit him with suguha, with midare and at times with hitatsura; most unsigned katana given to him are suguha or a gentle, shallow midare.¹

The rounded back is rare in Sōshū work. Among the Yukimitsu katana the NBTHK has designated, one other has it: a sword designated Jūyō in 1971, 70.0 cm, with a rather wide blade and a shallow curve, a groove cut through the tang, a straight bōshi turning in a small curve, and the same file marks on the tang. Its temper line is a suguha.¹⁵ This sword shares its rounded back, its grooves and its shallow curve, though it tapers a little more and ends in a medium point, and its temper line is of mixed, irregular elements.

Under a point of light the ground shows a dense, fine scatter of ji-nie throughout, and through it run darker lines of chikei, following the grain of a close itame.

In the museum’s film, as the light moves along the blade, the temper line reads as a band of nie that rises and falls in small, uneven waves. It does not keep to one line: strands and grains of nie leave it and run out into the ground, and bright threads run along the grain beside it.

Towards the point the temper line keeps close to the edge and breaks into small, angular steps below the yokote; beyond it, the description of 2024 records the bōshi running straight and turning back in a small curve.¹

On 6 November 2024 the NBTHK designated the sword Jūyō Tōken at its 70th shinsa.¹ Two modern descriptions of the work are quoted here. The NBTHK’s description finds “a fascination of changing effects”, 変化の妙味, a phrase found in this description alone among its descriptions of Yukimitsu. The sword scholar Tanobe Michihiro, writing on the scabbard in 2025, speaks of “the fascination of crumbling nie and of change”, 沸ノ崩レト変化ノ妙.¹⁶ In the NBTHK’s descriptions the crumbling of nie, 沸崩れ, is common, said of Yukimitsu as well as of Masamune, Shizu and Gō; “the fascination of the nie’s changes” is otherwise said only of Masamune.¹⁷ Both conclude for Yukimitsu: the NBTHK that Kōyū’s attribution may be accepted, Tanobe that the old attribution is appropriate.

The museum reads the sword as belonging to the dynamic end of Yukimitsu’s range: the rounded back of the one other such katana given to him, steel the NBTHK finds finely forged, and a temper line livelier than most of the long swords given to him. It holds the attribution to Yukimitsu as the most probable.

The NBTHK’s description closes with a note on the rounded back, naming among its few parallels the Kōsetsu Samonji, the one signed tachi of Sa of Chikuzen, who is counted among the pupils of Masamune.¹⁸ The rounded back and the pointed and angular elements of the temper line recall Sa. On the evidence of the steel the museum holds with Kōyū’s attribution to Yukimitsu, and keeps Sa in view as a possibility, though the less probable one.

The sword stayed, it appears, with the Date for two centuries. Between 1883 and 1893 the house moved 370 swords from Sendai to its residence in Tokyo, and in 1933 and 1934 swords of the collection were certified Jūyō Bijutsuhin while it was still largely together.¹⁹

It left the family, it appears, in the dispersal of the collection that followed the war.

A sayagaki by Hon’ami Nisshū is reported, in a published description of the sword, to record it as an heirloom of the Date of Ōshū (奥州伊達家伝来).²⁰