NihontoWatch直正は、宮崎姓、大慶直胤門、相馬中村藩の藩工で、越前守を受領、慶心斎と号しました。 相馬中村藩は、陸奥国中村(現在の福島県相馬市)を拠点とし、相馬家が藩主を務めました。 活躍期は、幕末から明治初期、明治維新後は脱刀令、廃刀令が出される世の中となり、刀剣の需要は全く無くなりました。職を奪われた直正は、明治十二年、失意のあまり自死したと云います。 銘は、『慶心斎直正』、『越前守直正作之』、『宮崎越前守直正』などと切ります。 本作は、寸法二尺三寸五分弱、切っ先やや鋭角に延び心、身幅、重ねしっかりとした勇壮な姿、地刃健全、鞘を払って1,226g、ズシッと重いです。 小板目に杢目交じりで良く詰んだ地鉄は、腰元のみ太い地景を交えて大模様となり、互の目乱れ主体の刃は、刃縁明るく冴え、刃中互の目足、小足、葉頻りに入り、金筋、砂流しが烈しく掛かっています。 師直胤の備前伝乱れ刃を踏襲した覇気溢れる出来映え、激生ぶ品のため、現状は昭和四十七年の特別貴重のみですが、銘は全く問題ありません。 地に少し鍛え肌もありますが、良く出来ていますので、特別保存までは問題ないかと思います。 現状小サビもありますので、ピシッと研いで白鞘を新調するのも良いでしょう。
NihontoWatchOffered by Samurai Nippon
This piece has sold
Get an email when a new Suishinshi Masahide Naomasa piece hits the market.
Shinshinto · Mutsu · around 1864-1865
Tōken Taikan top 95%
3 pieces on the market now
Shinshinto · Musashi
69 pieces on the market now
At Hamachō in Edo, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening ones of the nineteenth, Suishinshi Masahide[[c:1]] gathered the school that would turn Japanese swordmaking back toward its medieval models. Born Kawabe Gihachirō at Akayu in Dewa in 1750, signing first as Suzuki Takahide and then Eikoku, he studied under the Shitahara smith Yoshihide of Musashi, took the name Masahide in An'ei 3, and served the Akimoto house of Yamagata before settling in Edo, where he worked for nearly fifty years. He is the founding figure of the shinshintō and the theorist of the fukko-tō (revival-sword) doctrine, the argument that the sword ought to return to its Kamakura forms. Around that teaching he drew a large body of pupils, among them Taikei Naotane, who would give the revival its fullest practical form, the future second Masayoshi (Hosokawa Morihide), and a wider Edo and provincial following that carried the program into the Mito, Yonezawa, Tsuyama, and Tatebayashi domains. The shared vocabulary of the school is the deliberate reach back into the koto traditions, worked over a tightly forged, often muji-toned ko-itame with thick ji-nie. Masahide's own prime hand was the Ōsaka-utsushi, the surging tōran-midare of Tsuda Sukehiro opening from a long yakidashi and the broad suguha after Inoue Shinkai, betrayed on even his closest copies by a blackish, coarse nie that spills from the ha into the ji. Naotane gave the revival its Bizen and Sōshū faces: a reverse-leaning chōji-midare with angular kaku-gunome and saka-ashi, modeled on the late-Kamakura Osafune masters Kagemitsu and Kanemitsu and anchored by a consciously revived midare-utsuri that no ordinary shinshintō steel carries, set beside a Sōshū notare with its whorled uzumaki-hada and coarse, striped nie. The pupils divided this inheritance along their own lines. Jirōtarō Naokatsu, Naotane's adopted son, took a Bizen-den led by a kataochi-gunome from Kanemitsu with a pervasive saka-gakari slant and chōji- or midare-utsuri in the ji.
Suishinshi Masatsugu reproduced Naotane's two traditions, Sōshū and Bizen, down to the cut of his signature. Through Masayoshi the Bizen current passed to his heir Hosokawa Masamori of Tsuyama, whose chōji clusters mixed with gunome-chōji and togariba. The Osaka wave traveled separately into Mito through Naoe Sukemasa, who set a Shinkai-styled suguha and a Sukehiro tōran over a clear ko-itame, while Chōunsai Tsunatoshi of the Uesugi service carried a nioi-deki chōji mixed with gunome, suguha, and tōran-midare, often with carving by his own hand. To kantei the school is to weigh a tradition consciously copied against the period marks the copy cannot shed: the constant of the line is that the hamon is never the pure nioi-deki of old Bizen but carries nie throughout, a difference the NBTHK names outright as the divide between koto and shinshintō. The revived utsuri in Naotane and Naokatsu, the spilling nie in Masahide, the whorled uzumaki-hada shared across the line, and the broad, thick-kasane late-Edo sugata are the surest tells, narrowed further by the school's habit of full, dated signatures that make these smiths among the most exactly knowable of their age. Masahide stands at the head as the teacher and theorist, his finest work in his Ōsaka copies rather than the doctrine he proclaimed; Naotane stands ahead of him in execution, his Bizen-den held the finest among the shinshintō. Their pupils define the late-Edo Osafune and Sōshū revivals as practiced through Edo and the domains, with Naokatsu and Masatsugu read as the next hands after Naotane and Masayoshi. The provenance of the school runs through domain commission and bestowal (Mito blades forged at the Kōrakuen by lordly order, Tsuyama and Yonezawa fief work, Naotane's Sanada daishō and a tachi recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection) rather than ancient daimyō transmission, fitting for a movement that, within a single generation at Edo, redrew the direction of nineteenth-century swordmaking by turning it back toward the old models. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Naotane直胤 | 1801-1837 | 40 |
| Masahide正秀 | 1777-1817 | 28 |
| Sukemasa助政 | 1804-1825 | 8 |
| Jirotaro Naokatsu直勝 | 1805-1858 | 7 |
| Masayoshi正義 | 1791-1860 | 5 |
The Shinshintō revival
Around 1800 Suishinshi Masahide argued in his writings that the craft must return to the old masters’ methods: the fukkotō revival. His greatest successor Naotane worked convincingly in Bizen and Sōshū manners that had been dead for centuries.
For one-of-a-kind items such as swords, sword fittings and antiques, other customers may be waiting for the item, so please contact us about a return within 3 days of its arrival and ship it back within 8 days. Refunds are made on the day the returned item arrives.