The Shintō era was largely invented in Kyōto: Umetada Myōju’s workshop trained the movement, Horikawa Kunihiro raised a generation, and the Hon’ami appraisers, who held no forge, governed the meaning of famous blades.
This is a katana by Kawachi Kami Fujiwara Kunisuke, made in the early Edo period around the Kan'ei era (1624-1644). The blade features a wide base, deep curvature, fine Ko-itame hada with Utsuri, and a Niedeki pointed Gunome-midare hamon with Ashi. It is certified as the 39th Juyo Token by NBTHK.
NihontoWatchmei · Genna-Shoho (1615-1647) · nagasa 75.6cm · sori 2cm
Horikawa school, Osaka Shinto (Settsu); Ishido-derived · Settsu · around 1624-1650
Fujishiro Jo-jo saku · Tōken Taikan top 17%
9 pieces on the market now
Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke is an Osaka Shintō name carried by two hands, and the published sources keep the two carefully apart. The first generation went up to Kyoto and entered the school of Horikawa Kunihiro as a late disciple; when Kunihiro died in Keichō 19 he moved to Ōsaka together with Izumi no Kami Kunisada, the elder Kunisada, and the two became pioneers of the Ōsaka Shintō tradition. He was, by tradition, from Kanbe in Ise Province and of Ishidō descent, and the published record makes that descent the key to his hand: among Kunihiro's pupils he was, in their words, the one who 'most excelled at chōji'[[c:1]], so that some trace of clove pattern always surfaces somewhere within his irregular temper. Several of the same entries judge from his style and the manner of his signature that his real teacher in practice was the senior fellow-disciple Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, rather than Kunihiro alone.
His recognized hand is a shinogi-zukuri katana of standard width with shallow sori and a chū-kissaki, forged in a tightly packed ko-itame with abundant ji-nie. From a straight yakidashi at the base the temper opens into a chōji-midare mixed with gunome and a small notare, deep in nioi with ko-nie well adhered, ashi and yō entering, sunagashi and kinsuji running through, the bōshi turning sugu into a ko-maru. The prominence of clove within the midare is the very point on which the appraisal turns: where another Horikawa blade might pass without a name, the published sources note that within the Horikawa group the conspicuous chōji is what marks the work as Kunisuke's. His manner stands extremely close to that of the elder Kunisada with whom he came south, the two reading as companions of one Ōsaka beginning.
The jigane is where the second register declares itself. On a number of his blades, and most plainly on his wakizashi, the itame stands and turns zanguri, the loose rustic jigane of his master Kunihiro's school carried into Ōsaka, with thick ji-nie and chikei. Over that jigane the temper centres on a ko-notare mixed with gunome, the ko-nie deep within the edge, sunagashi running well and kinsuji entering, with muneyaki appearing at times. One katakiriba wakizashi the published sources read as 'a style of strong Horikawa colour'[[c:2]], the standing zanguri hada and the nie-laden ko-notare an accomplished demonstration of what he learned; a relief naginata-hi with a companion groove and, on his finest blades, goma-bashi carving accompany this manner. This is the hand of a Horikawa pupil who never quite set down the Ishidō clove he was born to.
The second generation, son of the first and known to the world as Naka-Kawachi, turns the other way. He forges a tightly knit, beautiful ko-itame and tempers a flamboyant clove centred on his own fist-shaped kobushi-gata chōji, mixed with gunome and varied so as never to fall into monotony, often opening from a long straight yakidashi, the nioiguchi tight, bright and clear, the bōshi sugu to ko-maru. The published sources call this 'the Ishidō house's own chōji'[[c:3]] and note that the Horikawa manner of his father is scarcely seen in it; his forte, they say, 'lies in a chōji-midare of fist-shaped clove, the well-ordered, beautiful jigane its point of appreciation'[[c:4]]. His work was 'praised as a shintō Ichimonji'[[c:5]] in its own day, and the sources add, with candour, that some pieces tempered motifs such as Mount Fuji or jewels and ran too far into technical display.
What separates the line from its neighbours is exactly what the judges name. Set against the Tsuda smiths, who tempered the brilliant billowing tōran, Naka-Kawachi stood as a standard-bearer of the Ishidō lineage's original clove, his bright, fist-shaped chōji over a beautifully ordered jigane the counter to that wave. The first generation, for his part, is distinguished within his own school by his clove rather than against it, the one Horikawa pupil whose midare carries the old Bizen-derived clove of the Ishidō stock somewhere inside it. Father and son thus close the name from both sides: the shodai a Horikawa hand who kept the Ishidō clove, the nidai an Ishidō hand who put the Horikawa manner down.
For the collector Kunisuke is one of the leading Ōsaka Shintō names, graded Jō-jō saku by Fujishiro. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs instead through the Jūyō rank, forty-eight blades across the two generations, with one katana carried in the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin, and the published commentary calls the shodai's finest signed work 'the outstanding one among his works'[[c:6]]. Provenance is recorded for only a few: the Itakura daimyō house and the Imperial Family appear among the holders of his blades, the rest in private hands of unrecorded whereabouts. Extant works by the shodai are comparatively few, katana especially scarce, while Naka-Kawachi's survive in rather greater number. Only a handful fall in the tradeable tiers at any one time, so a signed Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke comes to market only from time to time, a well-made example of either generation a satisfying thing for a collector of Ōsaka Shintō to encounter and hold.
Where Kunisuke 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.
Select a lens to see how it's measured.
Years he was demonstrably active, proven by signed-and-dated blades
Shinto · Yamashiro
79 pieces on the market now
At Ichijo Horikawa in Kyoto, from Keicho 4 (1599), Horikawa Kunihiro gathered the pupils whose work the published sources name with his own as the opening of the shinto age. Kunihiro himself reached forging late and by a roundabout road. Born Tanaka and serving as a warrior under the Ito of Obi castle in Hyuga, he wandered the provinces after that house fell, forging where he stopped, his earliest dated blade cut in Hyuga in Tensho 4 (1576); his itinerant Tensho-uchi looked to late Soshu and late Seki, often run toward a hitatsura-like effect over devotional carving. The settlement in Kyoto changed that. There his stated aim, the sources write, lay in the revival of the Soshu-den tradition, the leaning strongest toward Shizu, and around that ideal he trained the men who carried his manner forward: Dewa no Kami Kunimichi, Kuniyasu, Osumi no Jo Masahiro, Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, the elder Kunisada and Kunisuke, with later and minor hands reaching Settsu, Echizen and Edo. Many of them, born like the master at Obi, followed him from Hyuga to the capital. The shared vocabulary is read first in the steel. The school forges an itame mixed with mokume that stands up, the grain raised into the loose, granular surface the commentaries name outright, the zanguri hada particular to Horikawa work, with ji-nie lying thick and chikei entering; on many blades a mizukage rises obliquely from the machi. Over that ground the prime manner is the Keicho-shinto sugata, wide with little taper and an extended chu-kissaki or o-kissaki, the build likened to a Nanbokucho odachi cut down, tempered in a notare and gunome with thick nie, sunagashi and long kinsuji, the nioiguchi often sinking into shizumi. Within that frame the pupils diverge sharply.
Kunimichi runs the flamboyant Shizu copy fully out and turns his boshi pointed in the Mishina manner, the Sanpin boshi the school otherwise does not show. Masahiro keeps the same Soshu-den worked at lower temperature, his temper calm and his mokume conspicuous; Kuniyasu and Kunitsugu stand closest of all to the master and signed for him. Kunitomo turns alone toward late Seki, his gunome round-headed and his chisel the finest in the group, and the elder Kunisada and Kunisuke carry the zanguri steel south into Osaka, the latter keeping the Ishido clove he was born to. Hiroyuki holds suguha over a blackish steel that recalls old Yamato, and the two Echizen Kunikiyo forge a dark, dense hokkoku-gane under a calm chu-suguha. A collector seeks Horikawa because the school stands at a hinge: Kunihiro is read as the first hand of the new-sword age, and the line he taught runs forward into the Osaka tradition through Kunisada and Kunisuke and into Echizen through Kunikiyo. To kantei the work, read the steel first, the standing zanguri surface and the oblique mizukage, then the sinking nioiguchi and the Soshu-revival notare with its sunagashi and kinsuji; the individual hand declares itself in the departures, Kunimichi's pointed boshi, Kunitomo's Seki gunome and compact tang, Kuniyasu's reversed file marks and two-character mei, Hiroyuki's kiri-yasuri. The founder and his closest pupils sit at the top of the line, Kunihiro signing almost everything he made, the large kata-ochi two-character mei beside his long residence signatures; because Kuniyasu, Masahiro, Kunitsugu and Hiromi worked as his daisaku, a share of the blades signed Kunihiro are in fact theirs. Provenance runs through the houses of the founder's own story and of the country, the Hyuga Ito he had served, the Shimazu of Kagoshima, the Imperial Family and Toyotomi Hideyori, with the tachi Kunihiro dedicated to the Hataeda Hachimangu still in the shrine's keeping. A signed Horikawa blade reaches a private collection only from time to time, carrying on its nakago the hand with which the new sword begins. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Kunihiro國廣 | 1573-1613 | 148 |
| Kunimichi國路 | 1615-1624 | 74 |
| Kunisada國貞 | 1624-1646 | 88 |
| Masahiro正弘 | 1596-1615 | 14 |
| Kunitomo國儔 | 1596-1615 | 27 |
Kyōto: the revival workshop
The Shintō era was largely invented in Kyōto: Umetada Myōju’s workshop trained the movement, Horikawa Kunihiro raised a generation, and the Hon’ami appraisers, who held no forge, governed the meaning of famous blades.
A blade of top-grade workmanship and condition, formally judged to rank with a nationally recognized Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin). Awarded only at the NBTHK’s competitive annual examination.
Of Japan’s roughly 2.5 million registered swords, only 12,307 (about 1 in 203) have ever attained Jūyō.
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.
NBTHK official siteIf you wish to return an item, please notify us within 3 days of receipt. After this period we cannot accept cancellations. Please ship the return to us within 5 business days. Cancellation is conditional on the item being kept in the same condition as at the time of sale, so please handle it with care.
This is a katana by Kawachi Kami Fujiwara Kunisuke, made in the early Edo period around the Kan'ei era (1624-1644). The blade features a wide base, deep curvature, fine Ko-itame hada with Utsuri, and a Niedeki pointed Gunome-midare hamon with Ashi. It is certified as the 39th Juyo Token by NBTHK.
NihontoWatchmei · Genna-Shoho (1615-1647) · nagasa 75.6cm · sori 2cm
Horikawa school, Osaka Shinto (Settsu); Ishido-derived · Settsu · around 1624-1650
Fujishiro Jo-jo saku · Tōken Taikan top 17%
9 pieces on the market now
Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke is an Osaka Shintō name carried by two hands, and the published sources keep the two carefully apart. The first generation went up to Kyoto and entered the school of Horikawa Kunihiro as a late disciple; when Kunihiro died in Keichō 19 he moved to Ōsaka together with Izumi no Kami Kunisada, the elder Kunisada, and the two became pioneers of the Ōsaka Shintō tradition. He was, by tradition, from Kanbe in Ise Province and of Ishidō descent, and the published record makes that descent the key to his hand: among Kunihiro's pupils he was, in their words, the one who 'most excelled at chōji'[[c:1]], so that some trace of clove pattern always surfaces somewhere within his irregular temper. Several of the same entries judge from his style and the manner of his signature that his real teacher in practice was the senior fellow-disciple Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, rather than Kunihiro alone.
His recognized hand is a shinogi-zukuri katana of standard width with shallow sori and a chū-kissaki, forged in a tightly packed ko-itame with abundant ji-nie. From a straight yakidashi at the base the temper opens into a chōji-midare mixed with gunome and a small notare, deep in nioi with ko-nie well adhered, ashi and yō entering, sunagashi and kinsuji running through, the bōshi turning sugu into a ko-maru. The prominence of clove within the midare is the very point on which the appraisal turns: where another Horikawa blade might pass without a name, the published sources note that within the Horikawa group the conspicuous chōji is what marks the work as Kunisuke's. His manner stands extremely close to that of the elder Kunisada with whom he came south, the two reading as companions of one Ōsaka beginning.
The jigane is where the second register declares itself. On a number of his blades, and most plainly on his wakizashi, the itame stands and turns zanguri, the loose rustic jigane of his master Kunihiro's school carried into Ōsaka, with thick ji-nie and chikei. Over that jigane the temper centres on a ko-notare mixed with gunome, the ko-nie deep within the edge, sunagashi running well and kinsuji entering, with muneyaki appearing at times. One katakiriba wakizashi the published sources read as 'a style of strong Horikawa colour'[[c:2]], the standing zanguri hada and the nie-laden ko-notare an accomplished demonstration of what he learned; a relief naginata-hi with a companion groove and, on his finest blades, goma-bashi carving accompany this manner. This is the hand of a Horikawa pupil who never quite set down the Ishidō clove he was born to.
The second generation, son of the first and known to the world as Naka-Kawachi, turns the other way. He forges a tightly knit, beautiful ko-itame and tempers a flamboyant clove centred on his own fist-shaped kobushi-gata chōji, mixed with gunome and varied so as never to fall into monotony, often opening from a long straight yakidashi, the nioiguchi tight, bright and clear, the bōshi sugu to ko-maru. The published sources call this 'the Ishidō house's own chōji'[[c:3]] and note that the Horikawa manner of his father is scarcely seen in it; his forte, they say, 'lies in a chōji-midare of fist-shaped clove, the well-ordered, beautiful jigane its point of appreciation'[[c:4]]. His work was 'praised as a shintō Ichimonji'[[c:5]] in its own day, and the sources add, with candour, that some pieces tempered motifs such as Mount Fuji or jewels and ran too far into technical display.
What separates the line from its neighbours is exactly what the judges name. Set against the Tsuda smiths, who tempered the brilliant billowing tōran, Naka-Kawachi stood as a standard-bearer of the Ishidō lineage's original clove, his bright, fist-shaped chōji over a beautifully ordered jigane the counter to that wave. The first generation, for his part, is distinguished within his own school by his clove rather than against it, the one Horikawa pupil whose midare carries the old Bizen-derived clove of the Ishidō stock somewhere inside it. Father and son thus close the name from both sides: the shodai a Horikawa hand who kept the Ishidō clove, the nidai an Ishidō hand who put the Horikawa manner down.
For the collector Kunisuke is one of the leading Ōsaka Shintō names, graded Jō-jō saku by Fujishiro. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs instead through the Jūyō rank, forty-eight blades across the two generations, with one katana carried in the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin, and the published commentary calls the shodai's finest signed work 'the outstanding one among his works'[[c:6]]. Provenance is recorded for only a few: the Itakura daimyō house and the Imperial Family appear among the holders of his blades, the rest in private hands of unrecorded whereabouts. Extant works by the shodai are comparatively few, katana especially scarce, while Naka-Kawachi's survive in rather greater number. Only a handful fall in the tradeable tiers at any one time, so a signed Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke comes to market only from time to time, a well-made example of either generation a satisfying thing for a collector of Ōsaka Shintō to encounter and hold.
Where Kunisuke 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.
Select a lens to see how it's measured.
Years he was demonstrably active, proven by signed-and-dated blades
Shinto · Yamashiro
79 pieces on the market now
At Ichijo Horikawa in Kyoto, from Keicho 4 (1599), Horikawa Kunihiro gathered the pupils whose work the published sources name with his own as the opening of the shinto age. Kunihiro himself reached forging late and by a roundabout road. Born Tanaka and serving as a warrior under the Ito of Obi castle in Hyuga, he wandered the provinces after that house fell, forging where he stopped, his earliest dated blade cut in Hyuga in Tensho 4 (1576); his itinerant Tensho-uchi looked to late Soshu and late Seki, often run toward a hitatsura-like effect over devotional carving. The settlement in Kyoto changed that. There his stated aim, the sources write, lay in the revival of the Soshu-den tradition, the leaning strongest toward Shizu, and around that ideal he trained the men who carried his manner forward: Dewa no Kami Kunimichi, Kuniyasu, Osumi no Jo Masahiro, Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, the elder Kunisada and Kunisuke, with later and minor hands reaching Settsu, Echizen and Edo. Many of them, born like the master at Obi, followed him from Hyuga to the capital. The shared vocabulary is read first in the steel. The school forges an itame mixed with mokume that stands up, the grain raised into the loose, granular surface the commentaries name outright, the zanguri hada particular to Horikawa work, with ji-nie lying thick and chikei entering; on many blades a mizukage rises obliquely from the machi. Over that ground the prime manner is the Keicho-shinto sugata, wide with little taper and an extended chu-kissaki or o-kissaki, the build likened to a Nanbokucho odachi cut down, tempered in a notare and gunome with thick nie, sunagashi and long kinsuji, the nioiguchi often sinking into shizumi. Within that frame the pupils diverge sharply.
Kunimichi runs the flamboyant Shizu copy fully out and turns his boshi pointed in the Mishina manner, the Sanpin boshi the school otherwise does not show. Masahiro keeps the same Soshu-den worked at lower temperature, his temper calm and his mokume conspicuous; Kuniyasu and Kunitsugu stand closest of all to the master and signed for him. Kunitomo turns alone toward late Seki, his gunome round-headed and his chisel the finest in the group, and the elder Kunisada and Kunisuke carry the zanguri steel south into Osaka, the latter keeping the Ishido clove he was born to. Hiroyuki holds suguha over a blackish steel that recalls old Yamato, and the two Echizen Kunikiyo forge a dark, dense hokkoku-gane under a calm chu-suguha. A collector seeks Horikawa because the school stands at a hinge: Kunihiro is read as the first hand of the new-sword age, and the line he taught runs forward into the Osaka tradition through Kunisada and Kunisuke and into Echizen through Kunikiyo. To kantei the work, read the steel first, the standing zanguri surface and the oblique mizukage, then the sinking nioiguchi and the Soshu-revival notare with its sunagashi and kinsuji; the individual hand declares itself in the departures, Kunimichi's pointed boshi, Kunitomo's Seki gunome and compact tang, Kuniyasu's reversed file marks and two-character mei, Hiroyuki's kiri-yasuri. The founder and his closest pupils sit at the top of the line, Kunihiro signing almost everything he made, the large kata-ochi two-character mei beside his long residence signatures; because Kuniyasu, Masahiro, Kunitsugu and Hiromi worked as his daisaku, a share of the blades signed Kunihiro are in fact theirs. Provenance runs through the houses of the founder's own story and of the country, the Hyuga Ito he had served, the Shimazu of Kagoshima, the Imperial Family and Toyotomi Hideyori, with the tachi Kunihiro dedicated to the Hataeda Hachimangu still in the shrine's keeping. A signed Horikawa blade reaches a private collection only from time to time, carrying on its nakago the hand with which the new sword begins. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Kunihiro國廣 | 1573-1613 | 148 |
| Kunimichi國路 | 1615-1624 | 74 |
| Kunisada國貞 | 1624-1646 | 88 |
| Masahiro正弘 | 1596-1615 | 14 |
| Kunitomo國儔 | 1596-1615 | 27 |
Kyōto: the revival workshop
The Shintō era was largely invented in Kyōto: Umetada Myōju’s workshop trained the movement, Horikawa Kunihiro raised a generation, and the Hon’ami appraisers, who held no forge, governed the meaning of famous blades.
A blade of top-grade workmanship and condition, formally judged to rank with a nationally recognized Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin). Awarded only at the NBTHK’s competitive annual examination.
Of Japan’s roughly 2.5 million registered swords, only 12,307 (about 1 in 203) have ever attained Jūyō.
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.
NBTHK official siteIf you wish to return an item, please notify us within 3 days of receipt. After this period we cannot accept cancellations. Please ship the return to us within 5 business days. Cancellation is conditional on the item being kept in the same condition as at the time of sale, so please handle it with care.
