SOLD

Tracked across 76 dealers worldwide · price history · sold archive

Specifications

About the maker

Sukesada祐定

A katana dated Daiei 3 (1523), made in the smith's fifty-seventh year and signed in full as Bizen no Kuni resident, Osafune Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada, descends in the Hachisuka family and is the highest-papered blade in this record. Sukesada is less a man than a house. The name belongs to the Osafune forges of the late Muromachi that scholars group together as Sue-Bizen, and of these the published sources are blunt about its scale: "of the Osafune smiths of the late Muromachi, the most prosperous was the Sukesada family" (この中で最も繁栄したのが祐定の一門である). The early-modern reference Hayami-dashi, the published commentary notes, "lists as many as twenty-one Sukesada smiths who add a personal name to the signature" (銘に俗名を冠している者を二十一人と数多くあげている). Within that crowd one branch stands first by name and by hand, the Yosozaemon no Jo line, of whom the first generation, born in Onin 1 by back-count from a tanto inscribed made at age seventy-one in Tenbun 6, is the apex of the name. The published record states the ranking plainly: "among the Sukesada of the same name, the one who styles himself Yosozaemon no Jo is the most famous, and the most skilled" (与三左衛門尉を冠するものが最も有名で、また上手である). His characteristic hand is the temper the late Bizen workshops made their own. Over the body runs an open-waisted gunome that builds into a double-structured midare, the koshi-biraki fukushiki-gunome that more than any other feature marks a Sue-Bizen blade, mixed with ko-gunome-choji and pointed togariba, ashi and yo entering richly, the nioiguchi tending to tighten, ko-nie adhering, small tobiyaki interspersed and the nioiguchi bright. The published sources call the dated uchigatana that carry it the representative work not of one smith only: one Jubi-era piece they describe as "a typical work among Sue-Bizen blades, and among works of the same hand the most excellent representative example" (末備前作中の典型的の作であり、同作中の最も優秀な代表作である). It is a temper of breadth rather than of a single flourish, the wide, complex line answering the broad mihaba and sakizori of the late-Muromachi uchigatana on which it most often appears. The jigane is the foil to that animated edge. It is a ko-itame forged tight and well packed, fine ji-nie laid over it like dust and a fine, dense chikei woven through, the surface refined and high in quality. On the best signed pieces a faint midare-utsuri rises along the shinogi-ji, the last trace of the bright reflection that filled the school's Kamakura prime, here grown thin in the steel of a later, busier age. The boshi most often runs into a small round or enters as a midare-komi, slightly pointed, with hakikake and a turnback that runs a little long. Across the corpus the activity is carried in abundant ashi and yo, with kinsuji and sunagashi frequent, the temper deep in nioi and ko-nie rather than in towering clusters of clove. What lifts Yosozaemon above the run of the house is the breadth the judges keep naming. Beyond the double-structured gunome he commands two further registers. One is the flamboyant face: a temper that climbs the body into full hitatsura with frequent tobiyaki and muneyaki, deep in nie, the standing itame and the gathered nie answering each other. The published sources note that hitatsura is apt to lack refinement, yet single out his examples as well made, and one such blade is a collaboration signed jointly with Genbei no Jo Sukesada, the two foremost personal names of the family on one nakago. The other is the calm face, the deliberately quiet suguha and hiro-suguha, broad and shallowly undulating, sometimes mixed with ko-gunome and fushi; of these the commentary remarks that even "when he tempers a suguha he is skilled" (直刃を焼いても上手である), and elsewhere that he is "a master among the Sue-Bizen smiths, accomplished alike in suguha and in midare" (末備前刀工中の名工であり、直刃、乱刃共に上手である). One unusual blade divides the temper into double-structured gunome at the koshimoto and monouchi and bridges the span between with suguha, a hamon the judges call rare. Beneath all of this sits the chronology of the name itself, the central scholarly question around Sukesada: a second generation shares the Yosozaemon signature, the Meikan records two Yozaemon smiths a generation apart, and a body of blades carries the Sukesada name with no personal name at all, judged to the house by era and quality. What sets him apart within his own school he is given by the same judges who place him there. His bright, well-packed ko-itame and the wide, double-structured gunome distinguish him from the plainer mass of late-Bizen production, while the faintness of his utsuri and the busy complexity of his edge separate him from the classical Osafune of two centuries before. The published commentary names "the Sue-Bizen-particular double-structured gunome he tempers" (末備前特有の複式互の目を焼いた) as the signature of his typical work, and ranks his finest dated uchigatana as representative of all Sue-Bizen, not of Sukesada alone. He stands beside his fellow late-Osafune master Kiyomitsu as one of the two great names of the workshop's final age, and his hand is the standard against which the school's unsigned blades are measured. For the collector Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada is the most attainable of the great Bizen names, which is to say attainable in a way the Kamakura masters are not, never that he is common at the top. Fujishiro grades the first generation Jo-jo saku, and the Toko Taikan values his work at 1,000 yen. He has no National Treasures; his record on this evidence runs through one Important Cultural Property and one Tokubetsu Juyo blade among fifty-nine Juyo and a long file of prewar Juyo Bijutsuhin, so the higher tiers number a little over sixty designated works on record and reach the market only rarely, a notable event when one does. His blades are kept in long-held collections and daimyo houses grounded in their own provenance: the Tokubetsu Juyo katana, made in his fifty-seventh year, is "a single blade of excellent workmanship transmitted in the Hachisuka family" (蜂須賀家に伝来した優れた出来映えの一口である), while the Mori and Ii houses, the Imperial collection, and a wakizashi recorded as having belonged to the warrior Yamanaka Shikanosuke carry others. A signed and dated Yosozaemon Sukesada, broad, healthy and bright, with the open-waisted gunome reading clearly down its edge, is the late-Bizen blade a serious collector can realistically hope to encounter, and the surest single document of how Osafune worked in its last great generation.

World Seiyudo

world-seiyudo.com