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About the school

Hasebe School長谷部派

The Hasebe school (長谷部) took its base in Kyoto, at Gojo-bomon Inokuma in Yamashiro, where it settled during the Nanbokucho period after a longer migration that the published sources now read as a movement out of Yamato, through maturation in Sagami, and at last into the capital. Its founder, Hasebe Kunishige, carried the *Soshu-den* learned in the orbit of Masamune, counted in the old reckoning among the Masamune-juttetsu, and his Yamato substrate shows through the Soshu manner in his steel. With the Nobukuni school, the Hasebe smiths are named as the pair that represent the Yamashiro workshops of the mid-Nanbokucho, and within the line itself Kunishige and his close successor Kuninobu (transmitted variously as younger brother or pupil) stand as the two principal hands, beside whom Kunihira, Munenobu and Shigenobu survive in a small body of signed work. The collective manner is set, blade after blade, against the Sagami smiths Hiromitsu and Akihiro, who worked the same flamboyant *hitatsura* in the same years. The forging is *itame* with the grain standing across the surface, tending toward *nagare* and *masame* toward both the edge side and the ridge side, with thick *ji-nie* and *chikei* entering, and on the broadest pieces a *jifu*-like tone; the *masame* strain near the *ha-yori* and *mune-yori*, uncommon in Sagami work, is the surest hallmark the school owns, the Yamato grain surfacing where the Soshu pair show none. Over this the temper builds from *notare* mixed with *gunome* rather than the Soshu base of *choji* and *gunome*, the *nioiguchi* deep, *ko-nie* thick, *kinsuji* and *sunagashi* running frequently and long, until *tobiyaki*, *yubashiri* and *muneyaki* worked over *ji* and *mune* carry the whole into full *hitatsura*. The *boshi* runs large and round, the return burned far down the *mune* as *yakisage* until it joins the *muneyaki*, a separation from the pointed, thrusting *boshi* of the Sagami pair. An extremely thin *kasane* is a habitual trait of the construction, and the carvings (*bonji*, *suken*, *kurikara*, *gomabashi* and grooves near the mune) recur throughout. The recurring divergences are individual: Kunishige holds to the grounded mainstream and a quieter, rarer pole of *suguha* or shallow *notare*, while Kuninobu turns his *gunome* angular toward an arrow-nock (*yahazu*) shape and carries the richest carving in the group. To *kantei* a Hasebe blade, one reads first the form, which is the period itself: *hira-zukuri* with *mitsu-mune*, wide in *mihaba*, thin in *kasane*, *sun-nobi* with a shallow *sori*, the build of a Nanbokucho hira-zukuri wakizashi or tanto carrying the full *hitatsura* over *notare-gunome*, the round long-returning *boshi*, and the diagnostic *masame* at edge and back. Tachi-length work is scarce across the line and survives largely as *o-suriage mumei* katana, the attribution carried by build or by *kinzogan-mei*; reliably signed tachi are the rarest of all, and signed Hasebe Kunishige in five characters near the centre of the nakago, the *kuni-gamae* at times enclosing *gyoku* or *o*, marks the bulk of the founder's surviving pieces. Kunishige is graded *Jo-jo saku* by Fujishiro and stands at the head of the tradition, his National Treasure the *meibutsu* Heshikiri Hasebe, an *o-suriage* wakizashi whose original signature survives as a *gaku-mei*, long held by the Kuroda of Chikuzen and cited again and again as the work whose quality confirms the Masamune connection. Other named works anchor the school: the Atsuta Kuninobu at Atsuta Jingu, the signed Karakashi tachi that descended in the Uesugi house among the swords selected by Uesugi Kagekatsu, and the *o-suriage kinzogan* katana of the Tokugawa shogunal house. The *denrai* roll runs through the daimyo families (Honda, Naruse, Owari Tokugawa, Ikeda), several pieces carry Hon'ami origami, and the *kinzogan* attributions are read as the brush of Hon'ami Mitsutsune. The patrimonial National Treasure and Important Cultural Properties are held by shrine and museum and do not trade; what a private collector may realistically encounter is one of the signed wakizashi or tanto of the tradeable tier, and even those appear only from time to time, a secure Hasebe a landmark when one does.

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