Chikakage is the smith who stands closest of all to Kagemitsu, and the published sources frame him exactly that way: traditionally a pupil of Nagamitsu, his dated work running from late into the opening years of , and so near the third master that pieces in Kagemitsu's own oeuvre are read as Chikakage . The record returns again and again to the judgment, that the relationship between the two was an extremely close one. To learn Chikakage is therefore first to learn how, within a hair, he parts from the master he served.
The shape is the late- the eye expects of this generation. Even shortened, the blades keep a high with the curvature carried toward the tip and a , the standard to somewhat wide; the later, -leaning pieces broaden into longer, wider forms and , one such carrying an on a thinned . It is a body that reads as both old and dignified, and on the best of them the is the quiet surprise the appraisers single out, a steel that comes up finer and more minutely worked than is usual for the line.
The itself is an mixed with and a touch of flowing , inclining to stand a little open. Fine gathers thickly, enter, and a vivid rises across the surface; in places the steel takes on a mottling. This is the first quiet separation from Kagemitsu, whose tightly refined, well-packed is the comparand the published sources hold up: against it Chikakage's grain stands more openly, sometimes mixing larger patches into a slightly uneven forging, even as his finest can be, in the record's own words, fine and minutely worked.
The sits on a or base carrying small , small and the angular, -leaning of the line, the whole tending to slant in . and enter busily, with reversed among them, the bright, adhering, and and playing through the and ; the temper can also open into a fuller on the most ambitious blades. The slanting and reversed , present on roughly two of every five of his swords against barely one in twenty-five elsewhere in the line, are shared with Kagemitsu, so on the and alone the two are genuinely hard to part.
The is where the older profile went wrong, and where the corpus is in fact unambiguous. The dominant return is a (小丸), often rising at the and then settling shallow, with a strong secondary tendency for the tip to run pointed (尖, the record's repeated note that the tip becomes pointed) and, on a notable share, to finish as or to enter in (one recorded with the entering in and becoming -like). What the older commentary called a single, exaggerated Sansaku turnback is at most a flourish on some pieces; the section-level truth is a -led with pointed, and variants, and that is what a working should carry.
For the collector the recognition runs in this order: a late- shape, an that stands a little open with thick fine and vivid , a -to- with busy reversed , and , and above it a that tends to point, with and seen. Two further tells close the identification: the stronger , the record's note of beyond what is seen in Kagemitsu, and the documentary fingerprint of his signing, the reverse chisel whose heavy use the sources call typical of his hand. Fujishiro grades him Jo-jo . The designated work is real and deep, with one National Treasure and three Important Cultural Properties on record beyond the seventy-eight blades carried at the Tokuju and tiers, and the named provenances reach the first houses of the realm, Uesugi Kenshin and the Uesugi, the Tokugawa shogunal house, and the Date among them. He is the indispensable shadow of Kagemitsu, the hand whose near-perfect echo of the master is itself the best measure of how tightly that great workshop worked.
