NihontoWatch出ました出ました驚くなかれ肥後細川藩54万石の沼田家6千石の殿様英記藤原直宗公が作った刀が出ました、沼田家は初代細川幽斎の妻の実家の家系で豊臣秀吉の甥の福島正則の娘の家系でもあり細川家の親戚の家柄で6千石の大身の武士です。水心子正秀に教えを請い、又薩摩の奥元平に学び鍛法の研究を良くした事で有名です。著書に「刀剣疑解」を残していますが殿様の為に現存作品非常に少なく本刀は熊本県にとっても刀剣界にとっても大変貴重な刀です。本刀は幕末の文政10年（1827年）（197年前）頼山陽が幕末の尊皇攘夷運動に影響を与えた平安時代末期の源氏、平氏の争いから始まり、北条氏、楠木氏、新田氏、足利氏、毛利氏、後北条氏、武田氏、上杉氏、織田氏、豊臣氏、徳川氏までの歴史を著した有名な「日本外史」を上梓した丁度その時の作品です。頼山陽の天皇中心の歴史書「日本政記」も伊藤博文や近藤勇の愛読書としても有名で頼山陽的な歴史観、国家観は幕末から維新、戦前の日本に素晴らしく大きな影響を与えた事でも有名です。本刀の姿は元身幅と先身幅の差の有る刃肉のやや付いた上品な刀姿を現し、地金は力強い板目肌に杢目肌を交え、地には鍛え肌が良く現れて見事です。刃紋は小沸の付いたのたれ乱れ刃に互の目や尖り互の目を交え刃中に鍛え肌が現れ素晴らしく覇気有る刃を焼いています。この度古いお数寄者様から自分も年を取ったので後進の方にお安くお譲り下さいとお預かりした為に熊本細川藩54万石の親戚沼田の殿様の直宗の作った貴重な刀を格安で是非お楽しみ下さい。
NihontoWatchOffered by Nipponto
We couldn’t find current papers for this piece. Ask the dealer whether it has been, or can be, submitted to shinsa. — Hoshi
As written by the shop
(Translation unavailable)
Shinshinto · Higo · around 1818-1830
Tōken Taikan top 95%
Shinshinto · Musashi
67 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.
We could not find an authenticity certificate on the seller’s listing. Japanese swords and fittings are normally papered by the NBTHK (or the NTHK). Without one, the attribution is the seller’s own assessment and has not been independently verified — treat it with caution and ask the dealer about certification before buying.
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¥480,000