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About the maker

Mishina Yoshimichi吉道

The shodai Tanba no Kami Yoshimichi devised sudareba, the basket-weave temper that became the signature of the Mishina school and one of the most immediately recognizable hamon in all of Shinto. The published sources are explicit that the pattern was his own invention. He was the third son of Kanemichi of Mino-Seki, and together with his father and his brothers Iga no Kami Kinmichi, Rai Kinmichi and Etchu no Kami Masatoshi he came up from Mino to Kyoto, settling there in the closing decades of the sixteenth century and raising the Mishina name to its height. The commentary places him among the leading hands of his moment, counting him on one Juyo blade "among the foremost master smiths even of early Shinto." His blades carry a robust early-Edo bearing, wide in body and thick in the kasane, the sori shallow, the kissaki extended and on the broadest pieces reaching an o-kissaki. His recognized hand is read off a single tell. Over an *itame* that flows into *masame* toward the mune, the grain standing, the published sources set thick and often coarse *ji-nie* with *chikei*, then open the temper with a long *suguha* *yakidashi* before widening it into a *notare*-based *midare* of large and small *gunome*. Into that line *yubashiri*, *tobiyaki* and *shimaba* run in two and three rows, and frequent striped *sunagashi* gathers until the whole takes on the bamboo-blind look of *sudareba*, the *nie* strong and somewhat coarse and uneven, long *kinsuji* entering, the *nioiguchi* tending to sink. The *boshi* rises in a pointed *tsukiage* sweep and turns back deeply with vigorous *hakikake*, the form the sources name the Mishina *boshi*. The *jigane* is the constant beneath all of this. A standing *itame* flowing to *masame*, with rough *ji-nie* and *chikei*, carries the Mino-Seki inheritance into his Kyoto work and underpins the *sudareba* above it. His *sunagashi*, far heavier than on a Bizen blade and worked together with the *yubashiri* and *tobiyaki*, is the very material out of which the temper is built. On his finest signed katana the published commentary reads the abundant *sunagashi* as suggesting "the wellspring of the *sudareba* seen in later generations," the activity that would harden into the school's hallmark. The heart of his connoisseurship lies in the incompleteness of that *sudareba*. Where his successors regularized it into a technical, almost mannered pattern, the first generation's is still a free, semi-cursive disorder. The judges return to the point again and again, holding on one Juyo blade that "the place where it has not yet settled into a fully established *sudareba* is the point of interest in the first generation, and therein lie its strength and savor." They cite the *Shinto Bengi* that in his work "within the patterned arrangement of the *hamon* there is the intent of *sudareba*" rather than the fixed lattice of his heirs. Relatively many of his blades survive, but dated examples are rare; no Keicho-dated piece has been encountered, and only a single dated wakizashi, of Genna 7, has been examined firsthand. The signature whose *tan* character is shaped like a sail is the celebrated Hokake Tanba. What separates him from the rest of the Mishina house is exactly this manner. Against his brothers Kinmichi and Masatoshi, who worked across a wider range of styles, Yoshimichi is the individualist, the one hand bound to the *sudareba* and the bright striped *sunagashi* that builds it. Apart from that manner he made *suguha* only very rarely, a register the sources call "an extremely rare case within the Kanemichi house, the so-called Sanpin family," and one in which they discern the Yamato tradition that lies as a fountainhead beneath the Mino style, the *ha* somewhat frayed with *hotsure* and laid with well-adhering *ko-nie*. He stands at the head of his own line, the Kyo-Tanba Yoshimichi name continuing through several generations in Kyoto and Osaka, none of whom the published sources rank with the first. For the collector he is a signed, knowable name, all of his recorded blades carrying a *mei*. Two of his works on record reach the Tokubetsu Juyo rank and a further thirty-three the Juyo, with examples also among the prewar Juyo Bijutsuhin; one such Juyo Bijutsuhin katana is called by Honma "the finest workmanship among the first-generation Tanba no Kami Yoshimichi I have examined." The recorded provenance runs through samurai and collector hands rather than great museums: the katana made for Naito Kuroemon, inscribed to be handed down through his descendants generation after generation, the blade certified to Kashiwara Jinbe of Osaka, and a piece from the Satake family, with one katana now held by the Kyoto National Museum. He has no National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties on record, so his work is, unusually for a name of his standing, one a private collector may realistically hope to encounter. A signed shodai Tanba no Kami Yoshimichi comes to market only from time to time and at the upper end of it, but it does come, the rare chance to hold the blade in which the most famous temper of the Shinto era was first being worked out.

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