Umetada Myoju (埋忠明寿) lived at Nishijin in Kyoto. The published sources give his common name as Hikojiro and an earlier name as Sokichi, and record that he later took the tonsure as Kakuho Myoju. A wakizashi signed with his age, sixty-one, and dated Genna 4 (1618), and a ken signed at seventy-four in Kan'ei 8 (1631), let them reckon his birth to Eiroku 1 (1558); he is said to have died in Kan'ei 8 at seventy-four. The Umetada were a house of metalworkers who served the Ashikaga shoguns from generation to generation, and Myoju styled himself the twenty-fifth-generation descendant of Sanjo Munechika[[c:1]]. As a swordsmith he is honoured as the founder of shinto smithing[[c:2]] and the teacher of Hizen Tadayoshi and Higo no Kami Teruhiro. As a tsuba maker he is ranked with Kaneie and Nobuie among the three masters of the Momoyama period[[c:3]]. One entry adds that the house worked closely with the Hon'ami appraisers, shortening blades, inlaying attribution signatures and making mountings, and another that the Umetada were a family of metalworkers who had served the Ashikaga shoguns for generations (「代々足利将軍家に仕えた金工の家柄」).
The published sources divide his tsuba by the metal of the plate. On iron he renders geometric patterns such as thunder-pattern and sayagata in gold nunome inlay. On brass, shakudo or suaka he lays colour-metals, gold, silver, shakudo and suaka, in a flat inlay of his own that keeps a slight relief. That flat inlay is the art the record makes his. One Juyo entry states that pictorial design, hira-zogan and the use of metals other than iron for the plate all begin with him[[c:4]], and another calls it the flat inlay he originated[[c:5]]. Brass is his usual plate; a suaka tsuba is noted as comparatively rare[[c:6]]. Rims are turned back, or twisted into the nejikaeshi-mimi that one entry calls the true essence of Myoju[[c:7]], and file-textured surfaces are used to heighten the picture.
His subjects are auspicious trees and plants: grapevine, the yuzu-like kunenbo citrus, oak, and pine with bamboo, boldly stylised into pattern with a taste the sources call extremely fresh and courtly[[c:8]]. The kunenbo, with the grapevine, is named the subject he liked to use[[c:9]]. The published sources read these designs through the Rinpa painters. Of an oak tsuba they write that its line makes one feel one is looking at Rinpa painting itself[[c:10]], and that a strong bond with Koetsu and Sotatsu can be felt[[c:11]]. Of a grapevine tsuba laid in shakudo alone they praise the flat inlay that keeps the very momentum of the brush[[c:12]]. On another oak tsuba the shakudo shows gradations like a famous ink painting[[c:13]]. On the pine-and-bamboo tsuba the straight line of the bamboo is set against the curve of the pine, and the full turned-back rim is likened to the lips of Shino and Oribe tea bowls.
His iron tsuba are a second, quieter body of work. They are thin and light in the hand, the iron well chosen[[c:14]], cut in openwork of two tomoe, a cart-wheel, a four-sided paper pattern, a well-curb or incense-game emblems, and tightened by fine gold inlay of thunder-pattern on the rim. The nunome inlay is traced to the manner of the Shoami house[[c:15]], which he probably took up at first. One iron tsuba with twin dragons and water-spots is read as showing the influence of Western culture[[c:16]] then arriving through Nagasaki. Of an openwork tsuba on hammered iron the sources write that grace can be felt even in the iron[[c:17]].
His blades are few. The only katana is the tachi dated Keicho 3 (1598), the oldest dated work under the Myoju name; beside it stand a shinogi-zukuri wakizashi and a katakiriha wakizashi, a ken, and otherwise tanto. Most tanto are katakiriha-zukuri, wide for their length in a hocho-like shape[[c:18]]. The temper is a ko-notare mixed with gunome in ko-nie, the nioiguchi tending to tightness, set as if he took Shizu and Sadamune for his ideal[[c:19]]. Carving is always on both faces, and the ascending and descending dragons chasing a jewel are what Myoju excelled at most[[c:20]], the dragon's lower jaw squared and jutting. Earlier carved signatures reading Joshu Umetada saku, dated from Tensho 16 to Bunroku 2, are debated as his early work or his father Myokin's. Some tanto were made as heirlooms for the head of the house, inscribed as such (所持埋忠彦次郎重代), and on later pieces the character Ume was erased or recut once mid-Edo readers took the name to mean burying loyalty.
Forty-five designated works stand on record: six Important Cultural Properties, seven Tokubetsu Juyo, twenty-three Juyo and nine Juyo Bijutsuhin. The Important Cultural Properties are the Keicho 3 tachi in the Kyoto National Museum, the wakizashi signed at sixty-one, two tanto of Keicho 13 (1608), and two tsuba, one of grapevine and butterflies on polished shakudo, one of oak on brass. Prewar owners include Ito Miyoji, Hosokawa Moritatsu, Furukawa Toranosuke and Kuroda Nagamichi, and a pine-and-bamboo tsuba came back from France in 1962. The Important Cultural Properties are patrimony. Of the thirty works in the Tokubetsu Juyo and Juyo tiers the greater part are tsuba, and one appears on the market only from time to time; a signed Myoju blade is rarer still.
