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About the school

Mishina School三品派

The Mishina school (三品), one of the two dominant smithing groups of early Edo Kyoto beside the Horikawa, grew from the late-Mino workshop of Kanemichi of Seki, whose dated blades run through the Tenbun, Eiroku, and Tenshō eras. During the closing decades of the sixteenth century Kanemichi came up to the capital with his four sons and settled at Nishinotōin Ebisugawa, where the eldest, Iga no Kami Kinmichi, is recorded as having greatly raised the name of the line. The brothers, Kinmichi together with Izumi no Kami Rai Kinmichi, Tanba no Kami Yoshimichi, and Etchū no Kami Masatoshi, became known collectively as the *Sanpin* (三品) makers, and the published sources count Kinmichi head of the *Kyō go-kaji*, the five Kyoto smiths. From the second generation the house held a hereditary right to recommend smiths to the court for their titles and added that by-line to its signatures. The name continued under the same appellation to the end of the Tokugawa period, throwing off branches that included the Tango no Kami line working at Ōsaka into the Genroku years, though the published record consistently holds the founding generation the most outstanding of the line. Beneath every branch lies a shared vocabulary carried up from Mino-Seki. The *jigane* is the constant: an *itame* mixed with *mokume* that flows into *nagare-hada* and tends toward *masame* near the mune, the grain standing, with thick fine *ji-nie* and frequent *chikei*. Over it the Mino-derived *gunome* and *togariba* are refined toward a Kyoto manner, the *nie* strong and at times coarse, gathering unevenly, *kinsuji* and vigorous striped *sunagashi* running throughout. Two tells bind the house. The first is the Mishina *bōshi*, a *notare* or *midare* run-in pointed at the tip and swept with vigorous *hakikake*, the form Masatoshi shows at its clearest, described as if drawn from a picture. The second is *sudareba*, the bamboo-blind temper in which layered *sunagashi* and *yubashiri* stripe into parallel bands; Tanba no Kami Yoshimichi devised it, and the first-generation hand keeps it a free, semi-cursive disorder where his heirs would regularize it into a fixed lattice. The lines diverge from that common ground. Kinmichi and his younger brother Masatoshi both excelled in a Shizu manner, the large *midare* of Mino grafted onto Sōshū *nie*, with Masatoshi the most versatile, ranging across Shizu, Mino *sanbon-sugi*, Yamato *suguha*, and Sōshū *hitatsura*. The later Ōsaka Tanba branch held to the *sudareba* alone, opening from a straight *yakidashi*, while the second Tango no Kami Kanemichi cast off the family *chōji* for a flamboyant *tōran*-style large *gunome* in alternating two-joined and three-joined groups, and a deep-*nioi suguha* read in the manner of Inoue Shinkai. To *kantei* Mishina is to read these two house marks first. The pointed, *hakikake*-swept *bōshi* and the striped *sudareba*, set over a standing *itame* that flows to *masame*, place a blade within the line before any signature is weighed; the *sunagashi*, far heavier than on a Bizen *ji*, is the very material from which the temper is built. Within the house the founding generation sets the standard. Fujishiro grades Kinmichi and Masatoshi *Jō-jō saku*, the Ōsaka Tanba shodai *Jō-saku*, and the second Tango no Kami *Chū-jō saku*, the sources judging the later Kyoto and Ōsaka generations markedly inferior to the founders as the manner thinned toward a single uniform pattern. Provenance on record runs through samurai and collector hands rather than great museums: a Kinmichi *katana* among the cherished swords of Tani Tateki, a Yoshimichi *katana* made for Naitō Kuroemon and another now in the Kyoto National Museum, Masatoshi blades passing through Oda Urakusai and the Imperial household, and a second Tango no Kami *katana* descending from the Aoyama wardens of Ōsaka castle. The brothers' blades are signed and knowable, dated examples rare, so the manner of the *mei* joins the workmanship in placing them; for the Ōsaka and Kyoto branches the cut of the character 守 separates one hand from the next. Most designated work is held rather than traded, so a signed founding-generation Mishina blade comes to light only from time to time, and with it the temper in which one of the most recognizable hamon of the Shintō era was first being worked out.

Nihon Collection

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