Shigezane is an swordsmith of the Motoshige line, working from the close of the period into the , whose earliest dated work is a slightly elongated of Karyaku 2 (1327) and whose latest reaches Enbun 4 of the , a documented span of thirty-three years. The published sources record him by old tradition as the younger brother, or in another account a pupil, of the first-generation Motoshige, and they place his hand squarely within the of the late workshop. His is not the brilliant clove-flower of the older ; it is the quieter, more angular manner of the Motoshige group, read by the published commentary as close to Motoshige with the character of mixed in. Authenticated signed examples are exceedingly few, so much of what survives under his name is judged from the bearing of the blade and the structure of its temper rather than from a signature.
The feature that most distinguishes his work is the temper. Over a -toned base he sets angular , the squared shoulder that reads as Motoshige-line rather than the rounded clove of Fukuoka, joined by the that is the structural tell of the group, the asymmetric saw-tooth slanting toward the base. The line frequently leans , the elements inclining in reverse, and into it run and with gathering and fine and passing through. The tends to sink to a subdued , the calm, slightly dimmed temper that the published sources name again and again as the mark of the Motoshige hand. The enters in and turns back pointed, at times a or a sweep.
The keeps the attribution in even where the temper alone might read as . He forges a standing , often run through with and mixed with and patches of , the thick and entering, the grain a little raised. Across it rises a clear , the bright reflection of old steel, sometimes a fainter along the edge. The steel on his finest pieces takes a bluish-black tonality with a cold clarity, the bright and the activity within the abundant, with places where coarse glitters strongly.
His record divides into three registers. The mainstream is the -toned, angular- work that the published sources read as close to Motoshige, the manner that anchors his many attributions. Against it stands a rare exception, the signed dated Enbun 3, of which the commentary remarks that the workmanship 'is not in a Motoshige-like manner', opening instead into a frank with pointed at the . The third register is the body of his surviving work, the greatly shortened , several originally large exceeding three , wide in body and shallow in in the mode. As with Motoshige, the published sources propose a first and a second generation across his dated span, the bold two-character signature taken for the first and the smaller signature cut 'Saemon-no-jo Shigezane' for the second, a question still left for further study.
What sets him apart within the late is exactly what the judges name. His angular and , his temper and subdued , and the bright over his standing place him with Motoshige and apart from the rounder, showier of Fukuoka and Yoshioka, while the published sources read into his forging a manner that incorporates the character of , the workmanship they call 'a hand with character mixed in'. On a judged to him the commentary allows that views of 'Unrui or Chikakage' are possible, the panel narrowing it to Shigezane only on close reading of the whole together with the detail of and , the clear leaving no doubt of .
For the collector Shigezane is a scarce signed name. Fujishiro grades him Jo-jo , and his record runs not through National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties, of which he has none, but through a single and many , forty-five blades across the two tiers. The value of his best pieces lies in their documentary weight: the with its folded-back long signature, called 'a representative work of this smith'; the Karyaku 2 , the earliest of his dated works and a foothold for his study; and a preserved in its original form, 'a precious example that survives as a without having been reshaped into a sword'. Of recorded whereabouts a few are held in public collections, among them the Hayashibara Museum of Art and the Sword Museum, and the of his blades passes through and old houses, the Matsudaira family with Matsudaira Ukon-no- Terusada and the Takasaki domain, and the Niwa family on to Tokugawa Yoshinobu. A signed Shigezane comes to light only seldom, and a privately held example, especially an or dated one, is a notable thing for a collector to encounter, a document of how the Motoshige hand carried into the .
