NihontoWatchSummary This blade was signed by Manji Masatsugu (卍正次) in 1902 in Edo, Musashi province (today’s Tokyo). Although he is often called Sakurai Munetsugu (桜井正次), he is also known as Manji Masatsugu. This is because he studied Zen Buddhism and often engraved the symbol “卍” (called manji, which means good fortune) on his swords. He learned sword-making from Tairyūsai Hirotsugu (泰龍斎寛次), and later became a student of Koyama Munetsugu the second (二代固山宗次), a famous swordsmith. He also used the name Kongōsai (金剛斎) during his career. He is well known for working as a personal swordsmith for Prince Arisugawa Takehito (有栖川宮威仁) in Maiko, Hyōgo Prefecture. There, he also taught sword-forging techniques to the prince. His style followed the Bizen-den, which was the specialty of Koyama Munetsugu the Second. What is Bizen-den? Bizen-den is one of the most famous traditional styles of Japanese sword-making. It began in the Bizen Province, which is now Okayama Prefecture, and has a very long history, going back over 1,000 years. Swords made in the Bizen-den style are known for their beautiful and strong blades. The most common feature is the hamon (blade pattern), which often looks like gentle waves. This pattern is made during the tempering process and is both artistic and functional. Bizen swords were very popular with samurai because they were well-balanced, easy to use, and stayed sharp for a long time. Many famous swordsmiths in history used the Bizen-den style, and it became a standard for high-quality Japanese swords. What is Tanto? Japanese swords under the blade length of 30cm (11.6 inches) are generally called TANTO, and sometimes TSUBA(鍔; Hand-Guard) is not attached to the TANTO. It was easy to carry and convenient for close combats. It was initially used as a supplemental weapon for Samurai on horseback, who used a pole weapon or long sword in the Kamaura-Muromachi period. Samurai aimed at an unprotected area of his enemy’s armor with Tanto while having to fight with close distance. TANTO was named accordingly, depending on how you carry it, such as HUTOKORO-GATANA (懐刀; Stomach-Sword) or KOSHI-GATANA(腰刀; Waist-Sword) or elsewise. TANTO was also a gift for a bride from her family in a traditional Japanese wedding, as it is believed that TANTO would be divine protection from evil power. This blade is appraised as a Hozon Touken (保存刀剣) issued by NBTHK (Nihon Bijutsu Touken Hozon Kyokai: 日本美術刀剣保存協会). *Please keep in mind that there is a couple of Kitae Kizu on blade. Fuchi-Kashira The theme of this Fuchi-Kashira is peony (牡丹, Botan). Peony represents happiness, wealth, nobleness, and gorgeousness. This flower pattern has been treated as a kind of good-omen motif; people regarded it as a rich harvest sign. Peony is called “Botan” in Japanese. When we write this flower’s name in Japanese, its second letter means mountain hermit medicine that would give us eternal youth. Based on the meaning of this letter, the peony pattern symbolizes eternal youth and longevity. Tsuka and Menuki The motif of this Menuki is Karajishi (唐獅子). The Shishi (獅子) means a lion in Japanese, and the Karajishi is a lion brought from the Continent to Japan in the Toh period (唐, Tang dynasty, 618-907). The Karajishi typically has curly hair for its head, neck, body, and tail. In Buddhism, the Karajishi is regarded as a symbol of wisdom, and the Monju Bosatu (文殊菩薩, Manjushri Bodhisattva) rides lions. According to a theory, the Kara-Jishi originates from the Komainu (狛犬, stone guardian dogs that exorcize evil spirits). There is a Houwa (法話, Buddhist monks tell the story of Buddhism in an easy-to-understand manner) that treats the Karajishi and this flower. The lion is called the king of the beasts. However, even this invincible animal has only one fear: a bug in the lion’s body. This pest grows in the lion’s hair and eventually breaks the skin and bites the flesh. Nevertheless, it dies if it is exposed to the night dew of a peony. Therefore, the lion rests under peony flowers at night, looking for a haven. The design of these sword mountings might have been quoted from this story. Kozuka The motif of this Kozuka is the same as the Menuki: Karajishi. Saya The motif of this Saya is peony and butterflies. A larva becomes a chrysalis, and it grows up to a butterfly. As this insect changes its looks, it symbolizes reborn; therefore, Samurai loved the butterfly pattern. Also, as butterflies make a couple on good terms, this motif represents happy marriage. Authentication Paper They authenticated the blade on Feb 2nd in the 29th year of Heisei (2017). They appraised it as Hozon Touken, the blade worth preserving for Japanese society.
Offered by Samurai Museum
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Suishinshi Masahide line (Shinshinto), Edo · Musashi · around 1844-1848
Fujishiro Jo saku · Tōken Taikan top 60%
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A katana dated Tenpō 12, mid-autumn of 1841 and signed Suishinshi Masatsugu carries, on the reverse of its tang, the name of the man who commissioned it, and the published commentary on it sets out the whole of what is known of the smith. Masatsugu, also called Kawabe Kitaji, was a late-Edo shinshintō maker of Edo who took the art-name Suishinshi and so, in substance, succeeded as the third head of the Kawabe house. The line was that of Suishinshi Masahide, the father of shinshintō, but Masatsugu's own hand came by a more particular descent: he trained under Taikei Naotane, Masahide's foremost pupil, and is recorded to have become Naotane's son-in-law, with a further tradition that he was a son of the second-generation Masahide. He lived in Okachimachi, Shitaya, pursued a life given to swordmaking, and is said to have died on the eleventh day of the third month of Man'en 1, 1860. Of his manner the published sources are emphatic and exact, holding that down even to the cut of his signature his workmanship is wholly Naotane's rather than the broader Suishinshi style[[c:1]], and that he excelled in the two traditions Naotane himself worked, Sōshū-den and Bizen-den[[c:2]].
His representative manner is the Sōshū-den one, and three of his Jūyō katana are read by the judges as exemplars of it. Over a tightly forged ko-itame the hamon runs as a ko-notare broken by gunome and small gunome with chōji-like heads mixed in, the nioi deep and the nie thick, with patches of coarse nie intermingled. Along the habuchi the line frays into hotsure, sunagashi and nie-suji stream vigorously, a nijūba effect appears, kinsuji enter and slight tobiyaki detaches from the temper. These activities are not occasional but constant, running through every blade in the group, so that the swept boshi, turning round with frequent hakikake, and the kinsuji and sunagashi crossing the ji and ha are the connective tissue of his work rather than its highlights. The temper sits on a build that is large and robust, the mihaba wide, the kasane thick, the sori rather deep and the point carried out to an extended chū-kissaki, in one late piece to a full ō-kissaki. The published sources call the best of these large works free of any breakdown and outstanding among his oeuvre[[c:3]], a katana in which his true strengths are fully brought to bear[[c:4]].
The jigane is a closely packed ko-itame, well forged, on one blade running into a moist, clinging texture with chikei-like shining lines entering frequently, on another mixing ō-mokume into the lower body, and on the latest mixing in somewhat larger mokume throughout. Over it the ji-nie lies thick and fine chikei enter, the steel on his clearest pieces notably bright, so that both ji and ha shine with a clear quality. In one work of Tenpō 8 the nioiguchi takes on a subdued, sinking character, but elsewhere the keynote is brightness; on the Tenpō 12 katana now in an American collection the published sources single out the way both ji and ha are richly covered in nie and brilliantly clear, calling it a piece that recalls the manner of his teacher Naotane[[c:5]]. The Sōshū-den hand he favored is therefore read first in this combination of a thick, bright nie ji and a nie-worked midareba, the activity gathered as much in the ji as along the edge.
The second of his two traditions, the Bizen-den, leads instead with chōji. On the katana in the American collection the hamon is chōji mixed with gunome, the ashi long and entering well, the nioi deep and the nie thick, with small tobiyaki mingling in the yakigashira and a nioiguchi that runs bright and clear; the forging beneath keeps the same tightly packed ko-itame with its ji-nie and chikei. The latest of the dated katana, of Tenpō 6, shows how close the two traditions stood in his hand: over a forging that mixes mokume recalling Naotane's whirlpool-like uzumaki-hada[[c:6]] runs a notare-toned midareba centered on gunome with chōji and pointed elements, frequent tobiyaki, long ashi and the nie thickly adhering. That blade carries on the omote, set toward the mune, the divine title Hachiman Daijin, a votive inscription, while the date and the smith's name with kaō are cut at the center of the reverse. Both registers, the judges insist, descend alike from Naotane, and the difference between them is the difference between the two manners Naotane himself taught rather than two phases of Masatsugu's career.
What sets his work apart is therefore best read by his own grounded traits and by the closeness of his hand to his teacher's. The published sources describe his domain as one inherited whole from Naotane, in workmanship and in the very chisel-cut of his characters, so that the heavy-in-hand, grand and powerful taihai of his katana, thickly covered in nie and bright[[c:7]], reads as the faithful continuation of his master's art rather than as an independent invention. His signature is itself part of the kantei: a bold, slightly thick-chiseled five-character mei with kaō on the omote of an ubu tang finished with large ō-sujikai kesshō yasurime, the date and frequently a commissioner's name added on the reverse, the cut following Naotane in every particular. Against the broader Suishinshi school, which after Masahide's Bizen-den revival ran in many directions, Masatsugu's distinction is precisely his fidelity to the one teacher whose two traditions he reproduced with such evenness of quality.
Masatsugu's record on the books is modest in extent and consistent in level. Four of his katana have passed Jūyō Tōken, all of them signed, dated work spanning Tenpō 6 to Tenpō 12, and the reference texts rate him Jō saku in skill, with a Tokō Taikan valuation in the middle range for a shinshintō smith. None of his blades carries a recorded provenance of named houses, and his designations stay at the Jūyō tier; his is a body of designated Jūyō katana rather than of museum-held heritage, and the holders entered on his blades are private collectors in Tochigi, Tokyo and the United States. For a collector this places him within reach in a way the great Kamakura names are not: a signed, dated Masatsugu katana in full Sōshū-den, large and bright and unmistakably of Naotane's school, is the kind of shinshintō work that comes to the serious market from time to time rather than once in a generation, and one of his four Jūyō blades appearing is a real but not unattainable opportunity. He is best had as what the published sources make him, a faithful and skilled inheritor of Taikei Naotane in whom the Sōshū-den of the shinshintō revival is carried at full strength.
Where Masatsugu stands among comparable artisans: across all of nihontō, and within tradition, era, and period. The tiers (Foremost · Leading · Major · Notable) weigh official designations from the NBTHK and Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, together with historical honors of lasting repute such as the Sansaku and Meibutsu-chō.
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Shinshinto · Musashi
70 pieces on the market now
At Hamachō in Edo, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening ones of the nineteenth, Suishinshi Masahide[[c:1]] gathered the school that would turn Japanese swordmaking back toward its medieval models. Born Kawabe Gihachirō at Akayu in Dewa in 1750, signing first as Suzuki Takahide and then Eikoku, he studied under the Shitahara smith Yoshihide of Musashi, took the name Masahide in An'ei 3, and served the Akimoto house of Yamagata before settling in Edo, where he worked for nearly fifty years. He is the founding figure of the shinshintō and the theorist of the fukko-tō (revival-sword) doctrine, the argument that the sword ought to return to its Kamakura forms. Around that teaching he drew a large body of pupils, among them Taikei Naotane, who would give the revival its fullest practical form, the future second Masayoshi (Hosokawa Morihide), and a wider Edo and provincial following that carried the program into the Mito, Yonezawa, Tsuyama, and Tatebayashi domains. The shared vocabulary of the school is the deliberate reach back into the koto traditions, worked over a tightly forged, often muji-toned ko-itame with thick ji-nie. Masahide's own prime hand was the Ōsaka-utsushi, the surging tōran-midare of Tsuda Sukehiro opening from a long yakidashi and the broad suguha after Inoue Shinkai, betrayed on even his closest copies by a blackish, coarse nie that spills from the ha into the ji. Naotane gave the revival its Bizen and Sōshū faces: a reverse-leaning chōji-midare with angular kaku-gunome and saka-ashi, modeled on the late-Kamakura Osafune masters Kagemitsu and Kanemitsu and anchored by a consciously revived midare-utsuri that no ordinary shinshintō steel carries, set beside a Sōshū notare with its whorled uzumaki-hada and coarse, striped nie. The pupils divided this inheritance along their own lines. Jirōtarō Naokatsu, Naotane's adopted son, took a Bizen-den led by a kataochi-gunome from Kanemitsu with a pervasive saka-gakari slant and chōji- or midare-utsuri in the ji.
Suishinshi Masatsugu reproduced Naotane's two traditions, Sōshū and Bizen, down to the cut of his signature. Through Masayoshi the Bizen current passed to his heir Hosokawa Masamori of Tsuyama, whose chōji clusters mixed with gunome-chōji and togariba. The Osaka wave traveled separately into Mito through Naoe Sukemasa, who set a Shinkai-styled suguha and a Sukehiro tōran over a clear ko-itame, while Chōunsai Tsunatoshi of the Uesugi service carried a nioi-deki chōji mixed with gunome, suguha, and tōran-midare, often with carving by his own hand. To kantei the school is to weigh a tradition consciously copied against the period marks the copy cannot shed: the constant of the line is that the hamon is never the pure nioi-deki of old Bizen but carries nie throughout, a difference the NBTHK names outright as the divide between koto and shinshintō. The revived utsuri in Naotane and Naokatsu, the spilling nie in Masahide, the whorled uzumaki-hada shared across the line, and the broad, thick-kasane late-Edo sugata are the surest tells, narrowed further by the school's habit of full, dated signatures that make these smiths among the most exactly knowable of their age. Masahide stands at the head as the teacher and theorist, his finest work in his Ōsaka copies rather than the doctrine he proclaimed; Naotane stands ahead of him in execution, his Bizen-den held the finest among the shinshintō. Their pupils define the late-Edo Osafune and Sōshū revivals as practiced through Edo and the domains, with Naokatsu and Masatsugu read as the next hands after Naotane and Masayoshi. The provenance of the school runs through domain commission and bestowal (Mito blades forged at the Kōrakuen by lordly order, Tsuyama and Yonezawa fief work, Naotane's Sanada daishō and a tachi recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection) rather than ancient daimyō transmission, fitting for a movement that, within a single generation at Edo, redrew the direction of nineteenth-century swordmaking by turning it back toward the old models. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Naotane直胤 | 1801-1837 | 40 |
| Masahide正秀 | 1777-1817 | 28 |
| Sukemasa助政 | 1804-1825 | 8 |
| Jirotaro Naokatsu直勝 | 1805-1858 | 7 |
| Masayoshi正義 | 1791-1860 | 5 |
The Shinshintō revival
Around 1800 Suishinshi Masahide argued in his writings that the craft must return to the old masters’ methods: the fukkotō revival. His greatest successor Naotane worked convincingly in Bizen and Sōshū manners that had been dead for centuries.
Certifies a genuine blade worth preserving: a signature confirmed correct, or, if unsigned, an era, province, and school that the NBTHK can reliably identify.
The NBTHK (Nihon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai, the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords) is a public-interest incorporated foundation founded in 1948 and supervised by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō); it is based at the Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo. Its expert panels physically examine each submitted work (shinsa) and issue a certificate (kanteishō) ranking it by artistic and historical merit. NBTHK papers are the most widely recognized standard of authentication for Japanese swords and fittings.
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