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About the maker

Shimosaka Shigetaka重高

Shigetaka signed his blades Harima Daijo Fujiwara Shigetaka and worked in Echizen in the first decades of the Edo period, a pupil of the first-generation Echizen Yasutsugu whose activity a surviving wakizashi dated in the Genna era fixes to the Keicho and Genna years. The published sources describe him as a man who took after his master and was a fine hand in his own right, calling him simply skilled in the manner of his teacher. The name Shigetaka then ran on through several generations to the close of the Edo period, but the published record is consistent that the shodai stood highest among them in skill, and that his best work reached an order that approaches the first Yasutsugu himself. He belongs to the Shimosaka group of Echizen, the new-sword tradition that grew up around Yasutsugu, and his ji and ha keep that group's Soshu-leaning character: a darkish steel, deep nie, and a quiet, subdued temper rather than the bright flamboyance of the contemporary Bizen and Mino makers. The surest way his hand is known sits in the nakago rather than the temper. Where Yasutsugu and the great majority of Echizen smiths finish the tang to a sword-shaped point, Shigetaka cuts a chestnut-shaped tip across every generation of the name, and the published sources single this out as the feature most worth noting in him. On the shodai's own blades that chestnut tail tends to run a little shallow, paired with a long signature cut in a squat, thick-chiseled hand, while the second and third generations sign in slightly elongated, squared characters with a thinner chisel. The other mark of his best work is the carving. On his finest blades he sets the deep, powerful Kinai-school relief the published sources name in him directly, a Kurikara dragon, a Fudo Myo-o flanked by the two attendant child-deities, long bonji and paired gomabashi, cut so cleanly that on his masterwork tanto the carving is judged to stand level with the blade itself. His forging is an itame mixed with mokume and a flowing grain, in places standing a little, over which the ji-nie gathers finely and the chikei runs delicately, the steel taking on a blackish cast that the published sources count as the Echizen character of the jigane. The temper is built on a suguha base that grows shallowly undulating, ko-gunome and pointed elements mixed into it, with ashi and yo entering, the nioi deep, and the nie laid on thickly. Here and there those nie turn coarse and cluster, standing up into the ji and making the habuchi waver, while sunagashi runs across the whole and fine kinsuji enter through it, the nioiguchi tending to sink rather than to glitter. The boshi resolves either straight or with a shallow undulation into a small round, often rising in a thrusting motion to a pointed tip before it brushes into hakikake and turns back deeply. Read together, the darkish standing jigane, the deep thick nie, and the sinking nioiguchi give his work the muted, weighty quality the published sources read as Yasutsugu-approaching. The six designated blades that survive divide cleanly into two registers of the one hand. On the broad Keicho-shinto wakizashi and the katana he works the prime Soshu-leaning manner: wide in the mihaba, thick in the kasane, sun-nobi with a shallow curvature, the suguha shallowly notare with deep nie, the carving worked at its boldest. The published sources call the katana close-grained and refined beyond the run of Echizen work, judge it a calm piece, and say plainly that it brings the first Yasutsugu to mind, holding that the broad wakizashi shows a workmanship that closes on the master. The tanto carry a second, quieter idea. On the kanmuri-otoshi and hira tanto the construction and the workmanship of the ji and ha are read as aimed at old work; of one the published sources judge that it was made looking to the older Yamato makers, an archaic character carried in a fine suguha narrowed to a thread, with ko-sunagashi, kinsuji, and the habuchi burned in hard at the machi. This is not a separate manner but the same smith turning to a classical model, where the older bearing and the conspicuous carving set his best tanto apart from the broad wakizashi. Within Echizen his distinction is best drawn through his own grounded traits rather than by contrast. His Soshu-leaning suguha-notare, his blackish standing jigane, and above all his chestnut-tailed nakago mark him off from his fellow Shimosaka smiths, and the published sources repeatedly measure him against his teacher rather than against any later school: his finest blades, they say, approach the first Yasutsugu, and one calm wakizashi is held to call the master directly to mind. He stands in the record as the most skilled bearer of his name, the only generation reckoned to reach near that level, and the line that followed him is distinguished from his work chiefly by the slighter, squared signatures of the second and third hands. His range is narrow but coherent: one Echizen Soshu manner worked through two registers, the broad Keicho wakizashi and the classically aimed tanto, bound together by the carving and the tang. Shigetaka is known through a small but uniformly high body of work, six blades all raised to the Juyo rank, with no National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties among them and his designation factor accordingly modest; his rating in the reference texts is a chu-jo saku, an upper-middle master. The single most celebrated piece is the wakizashi that copies the meibutsu Hossho Fujishiro tanto, the bone-gnawing Yoshimitsu whose long history the published sources recount, and which they hold faithful to its model in both blade and carving and rate his finest surviving work. To it stand the two kanmuri-otoshi tanto, the hira tanto with its superb Kinai carving, the broad Keicho-shinto wakizashi that descended in the Takizawa family of the Akita Honjo domain, and the refined katana. For a private collector this is a name encountered rarely. The six designated blades are held, not traded, and most of his work that survives is fixed in long-held collections; one in the Tokuju or Juyo range comes to market only from time to time and with patience, a substantial Echizen shinto piece when it does, valued as much for the chestnut-tail tang and the Kinai carving that name the maker as for the quiet Yasutsugu-approaching hand behind them.

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