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About the maker

Hoki Aritsuna有綱

Aritsuna is one of the Ko-Hoki masters of the late Heian to early Kamakura period, a smith of the old Hoki school that gathered around Yasutsuna. The signature compendia record him as the son of Moritsuna of Hoki, but the published sources set that aside on the evidence of the workmanship and confirm him, together with Yasuie and Sanemori, as belonging to Yasutsuna's line, the record stating plainly that he is confirmed as one of Yasutsuna's group (安綱の一派と確認される); a parallel tradition hands him down as a son of Yasutsuna himself. His signed works are very few, and almost all of them have been shortened in later ages, so the man is most often met not under his own signature but as a den attribution (伝有綱) on a greatly shortened tachi whose make the connoisseur is asked to read back to him. That reading turns on a low, restrained temper. Over the body the published sources describe a small midare as the basis of the hamon, mixing into it ko-choji, ko-notare and small gunome, the temper kept low and the ko-ashi entering well; toward the monouchi the line tightens into a slender suguha tone. Across the whole run sunagashi and kinsuji appear frequently, the nioi lies deep, and on the unsigned katana from Ishikawa the nioiguchi is recorded sinking in a subdued, shizumi character with ko-nie attaching, the fine sunagashi and kinsuji together imparting an archaic flavor (古調がある). The boshi runs straight and turns back in a small ko-maru. It is a quiet, old manner, far from the showy choji of the later Bizen, and the low temper and the sunken habuchi are exactly what mark the work as old Hoki. The jigane carries the same antiquity. The forging is an itame that stands slightly toward hada-dachi, mixed with a nagare tendency, fine ji-nie adhering to it and fine chikei entering. On the greatly shortened katana from Tokyo the published sources note the grain standing and the chikei fine and frequent, and it is this standing, nie-laden ji, rather than any one figure in the temper, that fixes the attribution. The koshizori tachi sugata survives the shortening: the build is shinogi-zukuri with an iori-mune, and though o-suriage the curvature stays relatively high, funbari remains at the base, and a chu-kissaki closes the point, the old high-waisted profile of a late Heian tachi still legible in a blade cut down for later wear. He is met in two registers of this one early manner. The rarer is the signed tachi, where the bare two-character mei survives cut on the ha-ura: there the temper is a suguha-cho carrying ko-ashi and yo, with ko-nie adhering well, and in the notare portions choji and gunome enter and rise upward from around the middle of the omote, the bo-hi carved through both faces with a kaku-dome, while the boshi of this one blade is itself a suguha, restored. The more numerous is the o-suriage, unsigned katana handed down as Aritsuna of Hoki, and it is here that the kantei properly lives, the attribution resting on the workmanship rather than on any surviving signature. Of one such blade the published sources write that the traditional attribution to Aritsuna can be accepted, 「有綱の所伝は首肯し得る」, the ji and ha together judged good and old in tone. His standing reaches well beyond Hoki. On the Tokyo katana the published sources draw the line forward to Sagami, recording that smiths such as Masamune and Norishige took just this manner of work as their ideal and on that basis established the Soshu tradition, 「相州正宗、則重等はこうした作風を理想として相州伝を創始している」. The old Hoki hand, the standing nie-laden itame with its chikei and the small midare swept with sunagashi and kinsuji, is thus named among the acknowledged sources of the later nie-based Soshu style. He is set apart from the Bizen schools of his own age less by any borrowed comparison than by his own grounded features, the quiet ko-midare, the standing ji and the subdued nioiguchi that together carry the archaic air. For the collector, Aritsuna is among the rarest names a Hoki student could hope to encounter. The reference texts place him in the Toko Taikan but record no Fujishiro grade, and there is no National Treasure or Tokubetsu Juyo among the work on record. His two Important Cultural Properties are held as patrimony, a signed tachi preserved at Oyamazumi Jinja on the inland sea, long the great repository of early sword dedications, and a second tachi in the Tokyo Fuji Museum. Beyond these the official record runs to a small handful of Juyo blades, three in all, the o-suriage mumei den works in which his hand is read, with no provenance to daimyo houses recorded among them. A privately held Aritsuna is therefore a thing seen only rarely, and a signed one rarer still; when one does come before a collector it is a landmark, one of the few honest ways to hold the old Hoki manner from which the Soshu tradition drew its ideal.

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