Gotō Mitsuaki (後藤光晃) was the sixteenth head of the Gotō mainline (sōke), born in Bunka 13 (1816) as the third son of Shinjō Mitsuyoshi, the fifteenth master. In the seventh month of Tenpō 6 (1835), upon his father's retirement at the age of fifty-six, Mitsuaki succeeded to the family headship, took the hereditary name Shirōbei, and assumed his art name Hōjō. He served as head of the house for twenty-one years until his death from illness in the sixth month of Ansei 3 (1856), at the age of forty-one. The Gotō mainline had resided in since 2 (1662), when the tenth master Renjō — who also bore the art name Mitsuaki — relocated the family from Kyoto; the sixteenth-generation Mitsuaki thus inherited a tradition of metropolitan patronage and shogunal service. According to his own techō (work record), in Tenpō 8 (1837) he produced Tenpō five-ryō oval gold pieces by shogunal order and manufactured 1,887 ōban large gold plates, underscoring his technical command well beyond the realm of decorative metalwork.
Mitsuaki's oeuvre is distinguished by an unwavering commitment to the Gotō house carving idiom (iebori): and finely controlled on grounds, with ' gilded backs — the canonical techniques of the mainline tradition executed to an exceptional degree of finish. His chisel work is characterized by "high mountains and deep valleys," imparting vigorous movement and energetic momentum to figural subjects, while his compositional sense favors ample open space rendered with "straightforward sincerity." The repeatedly note his "rich, dense manner" and the "delicacy and richness" extending even to facial expressions. Chromatic planning is a hallmark: beyond painstaking gold and silver , he employs with deliberate effect to introduce what the terms a "rustic, natural flavor" (yashū). His and are constructed by the jiita inlay-fitting method with characteristically long warabite feet, and the reverse of his is finished with thick gold backing (atsugane-dashi). Several observe the influence of (town-carver) aesthetics and the "brilliant, decorative manner favored from the late period into the Bakumatsu era," suggesting what the calls "a new style of official Gotō carving" emerging after the family's long establishment in .
Across the designated corpus, the consistently accords Mitsuaki a singular evaluative standing: he "possessed the finest technical skill among the successive generations from the twelfth master onward" — a formulation repeated virtually without variation across fifteen and constituting the defining institutional assessment of his place within the lineage. His works are praised as possessing "elevated dignity," "lofty dignity," and "a dignified, refined overall unity," with individual pieces called "excellent" (yūhin) and "masterpiece" (meisaku). That the long, unbroken line of the Gotō metalworking house would end after only one more generation lends his achievement a valedictory weight: as the observes of one spirited , the work is "bracing, betraying not the slightest hint of such an approaching conclusion." Mitsuaki's legacy thus stands as the final flowering of mainline Gotō craftsmanship at its technical zenith — the last master in whom institutional consensus recognizes the house tradition carried to its highest degree of realization.