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About the maker

Awataguchi Hisakuni久國

Awataguchi Hisakuni worked at the foot of the Awataguchi slope in Yamashiro in the early Kamakura period, and he is the second of the six Awataguchi brothers, the smith who used the personal name Tojiro (藤次郎). The published record sets the family out plainly: the founder is given as Kunika, and his sons were the six brothers Kunitomo, Hisakuni, Kuniyasu, Kunikiyo (国清), Arikuni (有国) and Kunitsuna (国綱). That a community of smiths already stood at Awataguchi is attested in the early-Kamakura tale collection Uji Shui Monogatari (宇治拾遺物語), so this is a forge with a documented place in the literature of its own century, not a later reconstruction. Hisakuni's standing inside that famous house is the first thing to recognise. The 14th Tokubetsu-Juyo entry calls his manner the most refined and dignified within Awataguchi work (名工の多い粟田口物の中でも最も格調の高い), and the 42nd Juyo entry ranks him foremost of the lineage in both technique and refinement of spirit. He is repeatedly named among the bangaji whom the Retired Emperor Go-Toba (後鳥羽院) summoned to forge on rotation at the cloistered court, and one record goes further and transmits him as a teacher to the sovereign (帝王の師). The history is not decoration here. It is the reason a slender tachi with so quiet a temper carries the authority it does. Recognise his hand by the pure Yamashiro register. Over a tightly packed ko-itame, finely worked and dense with ji-nie, he tempers a quiet suguha that leans into a shallow notare, with small gunome and a little ko-midare mixed in, ko-ashi and yo entering, the nioiguchi tight and bright, and kinsuji and sunagashi running in the ha. The boshi is a calm ko-maru, and very often it sweeps with hakikake; one Tokubetsu-Juyo katana records it exactly as a straight tip that brushes into a yakizume-like finish (帽子直ぐに掃きかけて焼詰め風), and the same swept tip recurs across his katana and his tanto. The forging itself draws a recurring word from the appraisers, the so-called tataki-tsume look of a thoroughly consolidated jigane, and the Awataguchi steel praised of old as blue in colour with a white edge (鉄色青く、刃白し). Among the brothers the connoisseurs single him out for nie. The 24th Juyo entry calls him the smith whose ji and ha carry nie most strongly, sometimes with a slightly coarse nie mixed in, while the 22nd Juyo tachi names him outright the most skilful forger of the six (兄弟の中では最も鍛の上手), its tight ko-itame and deep, faintly urumi nioiguchi recalling his younger brother Kuniyasu. His tanto show the same clarity in miniature: the wide, slightly curved Juyo-Bijutsuhin tanto is flagged as an unusual shape for Awataguchi, and the Honma note attached to it draws the very line that separates this house from its successors, the occasional eccentric proportion among Awataguchi tanto being a point of distinction from the Rai school. His place in the wider road of Yamashiro steel runs through that contrast with Rai. The refined nie-suguha he and his brothers fixed at Awataguchi is the wellspring the Rai masters drew from, and through them the eastern Soshu smiths after; one of the katana grouped with him even carries a gold-inlaid attribution to Rai Kunitsugu, a reminder of how closely the early Yamashiro and later Rai hands sit in the eye. Signed work survives in the smallest numbers, a few tachi and tanto, most of them the bold two-character mei cut now with a thick chisel and now with a finer one, with the rare long Tojiro Hisakuni signature confirmed against the old sword books Kotoku Toezu (光徳刀絵図) and Kozan Oshigata (光山押形). The blades carry the names of the great houses: the Kishu Tokugawa (紀州徳川家) and the Date (伊達家), the Matsudaira of Saijo and the Akimoto, with one tanto authenticated by a Hon'ami Kotsune origami dated Enpo 9. For the collector the arithmetic is severe. A National Treasure and a small group of Important Cultural Properties stand to his name, several of them held in institutions, the Tokyo National Museum and Nikko Toshogu and Itsukushima Jinja among the recorded holders, where they can never trade. Only a handful sit in the Tokubetsu-Juyo and Juyo tiers, and those are spoken for by old daimyo provenance. A Hisakuni in private hands is therefore among the rarest things a student of the early sword can hope to meet, and when one appears it is the quiet, dignified, nie-laden suguha of the imperial forge, not the spectacle of a later age, that the buyer is acquiring.

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