This listing features a rare and beautiful katana/tachi by Ko-Bizen Kageyasu, dating back to the Heian period (circa 1184 AD). It is certified Juyo, indicating its high historical and artistic significance. More details and pictures are expected soon.
NihontoWatchKo-Bizen · Heian
Ko-Bizen (Bizen) · Bizen · around 1222-1224
Tōken Taikan top 8%
The Meikan record Kageyasu (景安) under "Bizen, around Genryaku"[[c:1]], the era of 1184 to 1185, and the NBTHK counts him among the smiths of the Ko-Bizen stream at the opening of the Kamakura period. His record divides into two signature registers: a rare group cut with the small, long signature Bizen no kuni Kageyasu[[c:2]], and a comparatively numerous group signed with two large characters in a thick chisel. The Kokon Meizukushi (古今銘尽) makes him an Osafune smith and a son of Kagehide, but the published sources reject the claim on the work itself, finding that the jiba and the manner of the utsuri are in the Ko-Bizen mode, so that the Osafune theory does not hold. Whether he belongs to Ko-Bizen or to the earliest Ichimonji is left open; that he does not descend later than the early Kamakura period is held firm. One tradition makes him a pupil of Yoshinori (義憲の門).
His hallmark the NBTHK names outright. The yakiba mixes, somewhere within an overall suguha-toned line, angular ha of gunome character[[c:3]], and between widely spaced gunome and choji it shows tobiyaki and yubashiri[[c:4]], traits the published sources call clearly distinctive. The commentary on his kodachi presses the point, observing that in most of the surviving works angular elements invariably accompany the temper somewhere along the edge. Honma Junji adds that even in the flamboyant pieces "an angular hamon mixes in somewhere in almost every case"[[c:5]]. The squared edge is matched by an unusual weighting of the temper. Where the habit of the old Bizen masters is ko-midare, gunome leads in his work, and choji stands further forward in his yakiba than in the Ko-Bizen peers Tomonari, Masatsune and Kanehira, in whose recorded blades the squared gunome does not appear at all.
The tachi form is slender, the koshizori high with pronounced funbari, the blade gathered into a ko-kissaki; of one long-signed tachi the published sources write that the figure is "beautiful and unmistakably refined"[[c:6]]. The jigane is itame, mixed in places with mokume and flowing hada, with a slight tendency to stand. Ji-nie adheres well, chikei enter, and a midare-utsuri rises, with jifu mixing on some blades. The temper works in ko-nie, either a suguha-toned ko-midare or a choji-midare mixed with gunome. Ashi and yo enter well, kinsuji and sunagashi appear, and the nioiguchi runs deep on some blades while tightening in places on others. The boshi as a rule runs sugu to a small round turnback, and the published record notes the habit that even where the lower half runs to midare, "the boshi tends to settle large and straight"[[c:7]]. On one katana the utsuri emerges only partially in bo-utsuri fashion, and the commentary reads that technically unfinished rendering as an archaic charm, strengthening a date before the middle Kamakura period.
The two registers carry the scholarship. The long-signature group, few in number, is judged correctly Ko-Bizen, and in the comparison "the long signature shows the more archaic air, and the characters of the signature are somewhat more naive"[[c:8]]; whether the difference from the two-character group is one of production date or of different men is, the published sources say, a matter requiring further study. Within the two-character signature itself a bold thick-chisel hand and a finer chisel are distinguished, so several smiths of the name are considered to have existed, the workmanship supporting the view; later homonyms worked in the Fukuoka and Yoshioka Ichimonji, the Osafune and the Yoshii lines. One tachi preserving only the character Ichi on its shortened nakago carries a Hon'ami origami of 1688 appraising it to Kageyasu at thirteen gold pieces, and Honma observes that its angular ko-gunome carries even a sealed-bid appraisal straight to Kageyasu[[c:9]], taking the blade as evidence that the smith stands in the Ichimonji line.
That bridge position defines his school role. The choji standing forward in his small irregular temper is read as the manner the earliest Ichimonji inherit, the published sources writing of one Tokubetsu Juyo tachi that "it seems that this manner of workmanship was later carried forward into Ko-Ichimonji"[[c:10]]. For so early a smith the works survive in relative number, and the Juyo Bijutsuhin commentary rates the hand plainly: his works are "comparatively numerous, and skilled"[[c:11]]. The record holds one singular document of form as well. Extant kodachi begin with the Ko-Bizen smiths of the early Kamakura period, and the signed kodachi by Kageyasu, an ubu blade of 53.5 cm with koshizori and funbari, is likely the only one from his hand.
Twenty-seven designated works stand on record, and against the habit of so early an age the record is overwhelmingly signed, twenty-three signed blades against four unsigned. One blade holds Important Cultural Property rank, one is recorded in the Imperial collection, and eight are Juyo Bijutsuhin, certified across the 1930s and 1940s. The tier a private collector may realistically encounter is the six Tokubetsu Juyo and eleven Juyo, though blades of this age are held long, and a signed Ko-Bizen tachi reaching the open market is a rare event. Of recorded whereabouts, his blades rest at Kashima Jingu, the Tsuchiura City Museum, the Sano Art Museum and the Samurai Art Museum in Berlin. Eleven blades carry recorded provenance, and the roll is distinguished: the Kan'in-no-miya house, whose Prince Haruhito held the signed Tokubetsu Juyo tachi; the Date of Sendai, with whom a tanto remained from early times; a branch of the Yonezawa Uesugi, in whose line the kodachi descended; the Migita Mori; and the Yanagisawa, whose blade came as a grant from the shogunal house and carries an old origami of 1661.
Where Kageyasu stands among comparable artisans: across all of nihontō, and within tradition, era, and period. The tiers (Foremost · Leading · Major · Notable) weigh official designations from the NBTHK and Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, together with historical honors of lasting repute such as the Sansaku and Meibutsu-chō.
Select a lens to see how it's measured.
Bizen-den · Bizen
4 pieces on the market now
Ko-Bizen (古備前) is the oldest stratum of the Bizen tradition, the work of the smiths who forged in Bizen province from the late Heian period, around the Eien era, into the early and middle Kamakura. The published sources trace the line to a founding Tomonari and to Masatsune, the two counted from old as the twin pillars (sōheki) of the group, and they are careful to read each of the great names as a name-line rather than a single man: surviving tachi signed Tomonari carry Katei-era dates of the early Kamakura, the Masatsune name is transmitted across three generations or more, and the Kanehira and Sukehira signatures fall into distinct chisel hands. Beside the pillars stand the three Bizen Sanpei, Kanehira, Sukehira and Takahira, and a wider field of hands, Nobufusa, Naritaka, Yukihide, Sukekane, Yoshikane and the smiths of the Masatsune house such as Tsunemitsu, Toshitsune and Tochika. From this root, before the school's great flowering at Fukuoka, the whole Bizen tradition descends. Several of these names recur in the early Ichimonji line of the same province, so that the appraisal of any one of them begins by separating the archaic Ko-Bizen hand from its later namesake. The shared vocabulary is consistent enough that the school is read as a single manner held across many hands. The sugata is the slender tachi of the age: shinogi-zukuri with iori-mune, high koshizori with pronounced funbari, the curvature settling toward a small ko-kissaki. The forging is an itame mixed with mokume, the grain often standing a little (hada-dachi), with ji-nie adhering, chikei woven through, and over it the speckled jifu-utsuri or a midare-utsuri of old Bizen steel.
The temper is the quietest reading of Bizen: a suguha tone undulating shallowly into ko-midare, into which ko-chōji and ko-gunome enter, ko-nie adhering thickly, ashi and yō working in the ha, and kinsuji and sunagashi running through; the bōshi runs straight to a calm ko-maru, at times to yakizume with hakikake, and a yakiotoshi dropped above the machi is an archaic touch met across the group. Within that norm the early masters keep their individuality. The sources separate Tomonari and Masatsune by saying the first is marked by the excellence of his sugata and the second by the excellence of his kitae; Yoshikane is known by a hada that stands more than his fellows and a nioiguchi that sinks; Yukihide leans his midare in the reverse (saka) direction; Naritaka crowds the edge with uchinoke and a doubled nijūba; and Kageyasu sets angular gunome and chōji further forward than the pillars, the manner the earliest Ichimonji would inherit. A collector seeks Ko-Bizen as the source of the Bizen line, and the kantei turns on restraint rather than display. Against the later Fukuoka Ichimonji, whose flamboyant ō-chōji stand under a brilliant midare-utsuri, Ko-Bizen keeps its ko-midare quiet and its nie archaic; against the Osafune line of Nagamitsu, which is nioi-based and utsuri-bearing, the Ko-Bizen edge is nie-deki, a distinction the published record makes the whole ground for separating Junkei from the man he was long mistaken for. The standing of the best members is fixed by the weight of designation behind their names: Tomonari, Masatsune, Kanehira and Nobufusa are graded Sai-jo saku by Fujishiro, and the school's summit is the Ō-Kanehira, the broadest and most powerful tachi old Bizen produced, a National Treasure long held as the patrimony of the Ikeda house and now in the Tokyo National Museum. The signature works carry provenance through the first houses of the realm, the Imperial Household, the Tokugawa shogunal family, and the Ikeda, Maeda, Date, Shimazu and Satake daimyo, with the Nobufusa tachi given by Ieyasu to Sakai Tadatsugu and the Naritaka blade transmitted as the wearing sword of Nasu no Yoichi. Because so much of the corpus is held as heritage and the signed early hands are scarce, a signed Ko-Bizen tachi reaching open hands is among the rarer encounters the field affords, a document of how the Bizen tradition began. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Tomonari友成 | 987-989 | 33 |
| Masatsune正恒 | 987-989 | 66 |
| Kanehira包平 | 1151-1200 | 28 |
| Kageyasu景安 | 1222-1224 | 27 |
| Yoshikane吉包 | 1150-1220 | 46 |
Bizen in the Heian period
The Bizen tradition begins where iron sand, charcoal forests, and the Inland Sea shipping lanes met. By the late Heian period the Ko-Bizen smiths were forging tachi for court nobles and the rising warrior houses, and both sides of the Genpei War carried Bizen steel.
A blade of top-grade workmanship and condition, formally judged to rank with a nationally recognized Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin). Awarded only at the NBTHK’s competitive annual examination.
Of Japan’s roughly 2.5 million registered swords, only 12,307 (about 1 in 203) have ever attained Jūyō.
The NBTHK (Nihon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai, the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords) is a public-interest incorporated foundation founded in 1948 and supervised by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō); it is based at the Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo. Its expert panels physically examine each submitted work (shinsa) and issue a certificate (kanteishō) ranking it by artistic and historical merit. NBTHK papers are the most widely recognized standard of authentication for Japanese swords and fittings.
NBTHK official siteIf the item fails to meet the description, it may be eligible for a return (at the seller's discretion). Item(s) must be shipped back only via FedEx or UPS within 48 hours of receipt, in original undamaged state. Costs are the purchaser's responsibility.
This listing features a rare and beautiful katana/tachi by Ko-Bizen Kageyasu, dating back to the Heian period (circa 1184 AD). It is certified Juyo, indicating its high historical and artistic significance. More details and pictures are expected soon.
NihontoWatchKo-Bizen · Heian
Ko-Bizen (Bizen) · Bizen · around 1222-1224
Tōken Taikan top 8%
The Meikan record Kageyasu (景安) under "Bizen, around Genryaku"[[c:1]], the era of 1184 to 1185, and the NBTHK counts him among the smiths of the Ko-Bizen stream at the opening of the Kamakura period. His record divides into two signature registers: a rare group cut with the small, long signature Bizen no kuni Kageyasu[[c:2]], and a comparatively numerous group signed with two large characters in a thick chisel. The Kokon Meizukushi (古今銘尽) makes him an Osafune smith and a son of Kagehide, but the published sources reject the claim on the work itself, finding that the jiba and the manner of the utsuri are in the Ko-Bizen mode, so that the Osafune theory does not hold. Whether he belongs to Ko-Bizen or to the earliest Ichimonji is left open; that he does not descend later than the early Kamakura period is held firm. One tradition makes him a pupil of Yoshinori (義憲の門).
His hallmark the NBTHK names outright. The yakiba mixes, somewhere within an overall suguha-toned line, angular ha of gunome character[[c:3]], and between widely spaced gunome and choji it shows tobiyaki and yubashiri[[c:4]], traits the published sources call clearly distinctive. The commentary on his kodachi presses the point, observing that in most of the surviving works angular elements invariably accompany the temper somewhere along the edge. Honma Junji adds that even in the flamboyant pieces "an angular hamon mixes in somewhere in almost every case"[[c:5]]. The squared edge is matched by an unusual weighting of the temper. Where the habit of the old Bizen masters is ko-midare, gunome leads in his work, and choji stands further forward in his yakiba than in the Ko-Bizen peers Tomonari, Masatsune and Kanehira, in whose recorded blades the squared gunome does not appear at all.
The tachi form is slender, the koshizori high with pronounced funbari, the blade gathered into a ko-kissaki; of one long-signed tachi the published sources write that the figure is "beautiful and unmistakably refined"[[c:6]]. The jigane is itame, mixed in places with mokume and flowing hada, with a slight tendency to stand. Ji-nie adheres well, chikei enter, and a midare-utsuri rises, with jifu mixing on some blades. The temper works in ko-nie, either a suguha-toned ko-midare or a choji-midare mixed with gunome. Ashi and yo enter well, kinsuji and sunagashi appear, and the nioiguchi runs deep on some blades while tightening in places on others. The boshi as a rule runs sugu to a small round turnback, and the published record notes the habit that even where the lower half runs to midare, "the boshi tends to settle large and straight"[[c:7]]. On one katana the utsuri emerges only partially in bo-utsuri fashion, and the commentary reads that technically unfinished rendering as an archaic charm, strengthening a date before the middle Kamakura period.
The two registers carry the scholarship. The long-signature group, few in number, is judged correctly Ko-Bizen, and in the comparison "the long signature shows the more archaic air, and the characters of the signature are somewhat more naive"[[c:8]]; whether the difference from the two-character group is one of production date or of different men is, the published sources say, a matter requiring further study. Within the two-character signature itself a bold thick-chisel hand and a finer chisel are distinguished, so several smiths of the name are considered to have existed, the workmanship supporting the view; later homonyms worked in the Fukuoka and Yoshioka Ichimonji, the Osafune and the Yoshii lines. One tachi preserving only the character Ichi on its shortened nakago carries a Hon'ami origami of 1688 appraising it to Kageyasu at thirteen gold pieces, and Honma observes that its angular ko-gunome carries even a sealed-bid appraisal straight to Kageyasu[[c:9]], taking the blade as evidence that the smith stands in the Ichimonji line.
That bridge position defines his school role. The choji standing forward in his small irregular temper is read as the manner the earliest Ichimonji inherit, the published sources writing of one Tokubetsu Juyo tachi that "it seems that this manner of workmanship was later carried forward into Ko-Ichimonji"[[c:10]]. For so early a smith the works survive in relative number, and the Juyo Bijutsuhin commentary rates the hand plainly: his works are "comparatively numerous, and skilled"[[c:11]]. The record holds one singular document of form as well. Extant kodachi begin with the Ko-Bizen smiths of the early Kamakura period, and the signed kodachi by Kageyasu, an ubu blade of 53.5 cm with koshizori and funbari, is likely the only one from his hand.
Twenty-seven designated works stand on record, and against the habit of so early an age the record is overwhelmingly signed, twenty-three signed blades against four unsigned. One blade holds Important Cultural Property rank, one is recorded in the Imperial collection, and eight are Juyo Bijutsuhin, certified across the 1930s and 1940s. The tier a private collector may realistically encounter is the six Tokubetsu Juyo and eleven Juyo, though blades of this age are held long, and a signed Ko-Bizen tachi reaching the open market is a rare event. Of recorded whereabouts, his blades rest at Kashima Jingu, the Tsuchiura City Museum, the Sano Art Museum and the Samurai Art Museum in Berlin. Eleven blades carry recorded provenance, and the roll is distinguished: the Kan'in-no-miya house, whose Prince Haruhito held the signed Tokubetsu Juyo tachi; the Date of Sendai, with whom a tanto remained from early times; a branch of the Yonezawa Uesugi, in whose line the kodachi descended; the Migita Mori; and the Yanagisawa, whose blade came as a grant from the shogunal house and carries an old origami of 1661.
Where Kageyasu stands among comparable artisans: across all of nihontō, and within tradition, era, and period. The tiers (Foremost · Leading · Major · Notable) weigh official designations from the NBTHK and Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, together with historical honors of lasting repute such as the Sansaku and Meibutsu-chō.
Select a lens to see how it's measured.
Bizen-den · Bizen
4 pieces on the market now
Ko-Bizen (古備前) is the oldest stratum of the Bizen tradition, the work of the smiths who forged in Bizen province from the late Heian period, around the Eien era, into the early and middle Kamakura. The published sources trace the line to a founding Tomonari and to Masatsune, the two counted from old as the twin pillars (sōheki) of the group, and they are careful to read each of the great names as a name-line rather than a single man: surviving tachi signed Tomonari carry Katei-era dates of the early Kamakura, the Masatsune name is transmitted across three generations or more, and the Kanehira and Sukehira signatures fall into distinct chisel hands. Beside the pillars stand the three Bizen Sanpei, Kanehira, Sukehira and Takahira, and a wider field of hands, Nobufusa, Naritaka, Yukihide, Sukekane, Yoshikane and the smiths of the Masatsune house such as Tsunemitsu, Toshitsune and Tochika. From this root, before the school's great flowering at Fukuoka, the whole Bizen tradition descends. Several of these names recur in the early Ichimonji line of the same province, so that the appraisal of any one of them begins by separating the archaic Ko-Bizen hand from its later namesake. The shared vocabulary is consistent enough that the school is read as a single manner held across many hands. The sugata is the slender tachi of the age: shinogi-zukuri with iori-mune, high koshizori with pronounced funbari, the curvature settling toward a small ko-kissaki. The forging is an itame mixed with mokume, the grain often standing a little (hada-dachi), with ji-nie adhering, chikei woven through, and over it the speckled jifu-utsuri or a midare-utsuri of old Bizen steel.
The temper is the quietest reading of Bizen: a suguha tone undulating shallowly into ko-midare, into which ko-chōji and ko-gunome enter, ko-nie adhering thickly, ashi and yō working in the ha, and kinsuji and sunagashi running through; the bōshi runs straight to a calm ko-maru, at times to yakizume with hakikake, and a yakiotoshi dropped above the machi is an archaic touch met across the group. Within that norm the early masters keep their individuality. The sources separate Tomonari and Masatsune by saying the first is marked by the excellence of his sugata and the second by the excellence of his kitae; Yoshikane is known by a hada that stands more than his fellows and a nioiguchi that sinks; Yukihide leans his midare in the reverse (saka) direction; Naritaka crowds the edge with uchinoke and a doubled nijūba; and Kageyasu sets angular gunome and chōji further forward than the pillars, the manner the earliest Ichimonji would inherit. A collector seeks Ko-Bizen as the source of the Bizen line, and the kantei turns on restraint rather than display. Against the later Fukuoka Ichimonji, whose flamboyant ō-chōji stand under a brilliant midare-utsuri, Ko-Bizen keeps its ko-midare quiet and its nie archaic; against the Osafune line of Nagamitsu, which is nioi-based and utsuri-bearing, the Ko-Bizen edge is nie-deki, a distinction the published record makes the whole ground for separating Junkei from the man he was long mistaken for. The standing of the best members is fixed by the weight of designation behind their names: Tomonari, Masatsune, Kanehira and Nobufusa are graded Sai-jo saku by Fujishiro, and the school's summit is the Ō-Kanehira, the broadest and most powerful tachi old Bizen produced, a National Treasure long held as the patrimony of the Ikeda house and now in the Tokyo National Museum. The signature works carry provenance through the first houses of the realm, the Imperial Household, the Tokugawa shogunal family, and the Ikeda, Maeda, Date, Shimazu and Satake daimyo, with the Nobufusa tachi given by Ieyasu to Sakai Tadatsugu and the Naritaka blade transmitted as the wearing sword of Nasu no Yoichi. Because so much of the corpus is held as heritage and the signed early hands are scarce, a signed Ko-Bizen tachi reaching open hands is among the rarer encounters the field affords, a document of how the Bizen tradition began. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Tomonari友成 | 987-989 | 33 |
| Masatsune正恒 | 987-989 | 66 |
| Kanehira包平 | 1151-1200 | 28 |
| Kageyasu景安 | 1222-1224 | 27 |
| Yoshikane吉包 | 1150-1220 | 46 |
Bizen in the Heian period
The Bizen tradition begins where iron sand, charcoal forests, and the Inland Sea shipping lanes met. By the late Heian period the Ko-Bizen smiths were forging tachi for court nobles and the rising warrior houses, and both sides of the Genpei War carried Bizen steel.
A blade of top-grade workmanship and condition, formally judged to rank with a nationally recognized Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin). Awarded only at the NBTHK’s competitive annual examination.
Of Japan’s roughly 2.5 million registered swords, only 12,307 (about 1 in 203) have ever attained Jūyō.
The NBTHK (Nihon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai, the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords) is a public-interest incorporated foundation founded in 1948 and supervised by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō); it is based at the Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo. Its expert panels physically examine each submitted work (shinsa) and issue a certificate (kanteishō) ranking it by artistic and historical merit. NBTHK papers are the most widely recognized standard of authentication for Japanese swords and fittings.
NBTHK official siteIf the item fails to meet the description, it may be eligible for a return (at the seller's discretion). Item(s) must be shipped back only via FedEx or UPS within 48 hours of receipt, in original undamaged state. Costs are the purchaser's responsibility.
