At its twenty-second session the designated an whose explanation opens with the smith himself, recording that Takagi Sadamune was a man of Takagi in Goshu and "is traditionally said to be a disciple of Sadamune". He worked in Omi from the very end of the period into early , taking his name from the place he lived. The relationship to his master is the whole of his identity in the published record. An old theory once held that the two Sadamune were one man, but the published sources reject it: judging by workmanship Takagi falls a degree short of Hikoshiro Sadamune, and "seeing him as a disciple is the settled view of recent years", a pupil who, like Kyo , carried his teacher's manner faithfully. Genuine signed work is almost absent. The texts count only one or two reliable , with no and no certainly dated piece, so his hand is known from a handful of small signed and read into the the attributes to him.
His characteristic hand is a quiet one. The temper the published sources call his specialty is a shallow , often a , mixed with , and entering, the deep and the thickly adhered, and over it runs abundantly with frequent and and along the . The is or runs straight into a with , often tending to a point. Across his blades the chisel is the devotional program his master made famous: , and , with a carried through the longer pieces, and the published sources affirm that these traits in both and express the distinctive features of Takagi Sadamune. The carving is what ties the attribution to the Sadamune circle. On one prewar the connoisseur Honma judged the maker precisely from the accomplished and and the -shaped tang, ranking it "a superior work of the tradition".
The is where his hand parts from the master's. He forges an , on the better pieces mixing and well-packed with thick and entering , but the grain tends to stand a little, and the steel as a whole is calmer. The standing line states the contrast plainly. Set beside Sadamune, "the forging stands somewhat more, the are fewer in most, the temper takes as its principal tone with abundant , the workings and variation within the are comparatively simple, and the in general tends toward , the subdued quality that marks a Takagi piece". Another text puts it more shortly: "compared with Sadamune his and have less brilliance, and his are fewer". The few quietest works carry a that turns shallowly to notare with and , calm at first sight yet rich in activity, and his home province surfaces now and then as a coarse, texture in the the texts read as Goshu.
The surviving work divides cleanly into two registers, and the dates each blade by the build it shows. Most of the record is the of the grand shape: wide in body with little taper, a shallow or rather high , a or an extended , almost always with a run through, the period read from the wide construction alone. The other register is the small, format that carries his only signatures, and kata- and , wide and with thin and a three-faceted , the with a -form tip and file marks. Kata- recurs across this group, a construction that saw only a brief vogue at the end of but that the published sources name as a form favored by Sadamune and the followers said to be his, Amaro Toshinaga and Takagi Sadamune among them. Old even reproduce Takagi pieces bearing Kenmu-era dates, though none reliable and dated together survives, and Honma recorded that the genuine signed works known to him came to only two , one of them retempered.
What distinguishes him is exactly his nearness to the master, which makes him the trap in person. The published sources warn that an unsigned Takagi can at first glance be taken for Sadamune himself, and that an old on his line was even appraised as a superior work. The attribution turns not on flamboyance but on the quieter tells the judges name: the standing , the fewer , the simpler internal activity and the subdued . He stands at the - turn beside fellow Sadamune followers, carrying the perfected manner west into Omi rather than founding a manner of his own. His mark is a faithful, slightly quieter hand, distinguished within the school by his standing and where they fall short of the master's brilliance, and by the and carving that anchors the attribution there.
Fujishiro grades him Jo-jo . He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs instead through the prewar Bijutsuhin and the higher modern tiers, forty designated works on record, two at and thirty-six at , thirty-eight in the two upper tiers together. Among the prewar pieces is a signed recorded as a treasured possession of the Taiko, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and several of his rest on attributions, one bearing "an by Kochu". Provenance is recorded for only a handful, running through the Date family, the Mori family, the Hosokawa house and a set down as worn by the shogun Tokugawa Ienobu, with examples now held at the Tokugawa Art Museum and the Kurokawa Institute of Ancient Cultures. For the collector almost everything here is held rather than traded. There are no museum-locked National Treasures to set aside, but the prewar designations and the long-held provenances rarely move, and what can realistically be met is the and tier, thirty-eight blades, nearly all or resting on papers. Such a blade comes to light only from time to time, and one carrying his -form , the kata- construction or the carving is the most knowable kind of Takagi Sadamune a collector could hope to encounter.