War at home and trade abroad made Muromachi Bizen the busiest forge region in Japan: a century of Sengoku demand after the Ōnin War, and export missions to Ming China carrying blades by the tens of thousands.
This is a tanto by Yoshii Morinori from the Bishu no Kuni Yoshii school, dated November 1419 (Ouei Niji-roku Nen Ju Gatsu Hi). It features a wide blade with a bohi and ken engraving on the omote, and a bohi with a bonji inscription on the ura. The blade is accompanied by an NBTHK Tokubetsu Hozon Certificate.
NihontoWatchmei · Yoshii · Oei (1394-1428) · nagasa 28.2cm
Bizen Yoshii (Ko-Yoshii) · Bizen · around 1378-1428
Fujishiro Chu-jo saku
3 pieces on the market now
Morinori of the Bizen Yoshii group signed his earliest surviving blade Bizen Province resident Yoshii Morinori and dated it the eighth month of Eiwa 4, a year corresponding to 1378, and from that tachi of the late Nanbokucho his work runs forward into the Oei era of the early fifteenth century in a small body of signed and dated pieces. Because none of his datable work descends beyond the Nanbokucho, the published sources place him among the Ko-Yoshii, the older tier of the school that the NBTHK separates by name from the plainer Yoshii production of the full Muromachi period. The Yoshii group is traditionally held to have begun with Tamenori in the late Kamakura period, though works that far back are exceedingly rare, and within the surviving body it is the Ko-Yoshii pieces of the fourteenth century, Morinori's among them, that carry the school at its finest. One of his katana, whose individual portion of the folded-back signature has been cut away, is appraised from the calligraphic style of the remaining characters as the work of the Ko-Yoshii Morinori who was active around the Meitoku era of the 1390s.
His recognized hand is the school's own face read at its peak, and the published sources locate its heart in two things. The first is the temper, a gunome linked in an orderly, continuous run, of which they write that "the greatest point of appreciation lies in the way the gunome are linked in a regular sequence[[c:1]]". On his broader katana this becomes a ko-gunome carried in a regular, repeating line with slight variation in the individual forms, the row mixing in somewhat pointed elements, with ashi and yo entering, the nie standing strongly so that the habuchi loosens here and there into hotsure, and frequent sunagashi running through it with kinsuji entering the temper. On the Eiwa tachi the same hand reads as a gunome-midare mixed with pointed elements, the form already showing the variation that marks his row apart from a placid suguha. The second hallmark lies in the ji, where the school raises an utsuri the published sources call distinctive among all Bizen works[[c:2]], one in which "the very shape of the hardened edge appears as though cast as a shadow[[c:3]]" into the steel, so that the reflection seems to repeat the outline of the temper rather than the soft, cloud-like midare-utsuri of the Osafune mainstream.
The jigane beneath that utsuri is an itame that flows and stands somewhat in the grain, at times taking on an ayasugi-like tendency that the published sources count as a further tell of the Yoshii jigane, with ji-nie applied and chikei entering, and on one katana mokume mixed into the itame and the whole forged tightly and well consolidated. Across his recognized work the boshi enters in midare-komi and turns back in a small ko-maru or a slightly larger o-maru, on one blade running off into hakikake at the tip and on another with kinsuji entering the turn. He carves a bo-hi on both faces of his longer blades, terminated in maru-dome on the Eiwa tachi and run off in kaki-nagashi on the later katana. The signatures are long mei cut toward the mune, and where the blade has been shortened the long signature survives folded back as an orikaeshi-mei, the device by which several of his pieces have kept their attribution through the loss of their original tang.
Apart from this prime hand the published sources record a quieter signed register in his Oei tanto, a register the kantei must hold separately from the linked gunome. The dated tanto is hira-zukuri with mitsu-mune, slightly extended in proportion as sun-nobi and with almost no curvature, over an itame that flows toward the edge and is tightly forged throughout, the ji-nie adhering and the temper a narrow suguha in ko-nie, the boshi straight and turning back in a rounded form. On its omote he cut a kawari-hi and on the ura a suken carved in relief within a katana-hi, the relief work giving the small standard-form blade its principal point of interest. The published sources read this tanto as a well-composed work of small, standard form, and value it, together with the Eiwa tachi, as a dated piece that fixes his period of manufacture, the two inscriptions bracketing his career from the late Nanbokucho into Oei.
What sets Morinori apart from the rest of fourteenth-century Bizen is therefore not power or flamboyance but the particular Yoshii combination his own blades carry. While the other Bizen branches were drawn through the Muromachi period into the consolidated Osafune mainstream, the Yoshii group alone continued and held its distinctive linked gunome and its school utsuri, and Morinori stands among the dated Ko-Yoshii smiths whose signed pieces fix that late-Nanbokucho manner. On his finest katana the published sources find not only this smith's hand but the characteristic style of the entire group clearly shown, in the ayasugi-tending jigane, the reflected utsuri and the regular gunome strongly covered in nie with frequent sunagashi, and they judge both ji and ha sound. His name continues forward into the Muromachi Yoshii line beside Kiyonori and the other dated hands of the school, so that he reads as one of the documentary anchors by which the older Ko-Yoshii is told apart from the later production carrying the same name.
Morinori's work survives in a small number of signed and dated pieces, four of them papered to the Juyo rank across the twenty-second, twenty-eighth and fortieth sessions, the inscriptions running from Eiwa 4 in 1378 through the Oei era. The Fujishiro appraisers rate him at the chu-jo saku level, a standing above the average run of the school's hands, and the published sources reserve their warmest assessment for his fortieth-session katana, of which they write that its "ample, robust and sound form is excellent, and along the habuchi strongly lustrous nie glitters, the workmanship outstanding[[c:4]]". None of his blades carries one of the higher cultural-property designations, and none carries a recorded daimyo provenance, so his pieces belong to the upper-Juyo tier rather than to the museum-held patrimony of the great Kamakura names. For a private collector this means a dated, signed Ko-Yoshii Morinori, when one of the few survives to come to market, is an attainable rather than an unreachable thing, though it appears only from time to time and rewards patience, valued less for rarity of name than for being a signed and datable witness to the late-Nanbokucho Yoshii hand at its most characteristic.
Where Morinori 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.
Years he was demonstrably active, proven by signed-and-dated blades
Bizen-den · Bizen
10 pieces on the market now
The Yoshii school (吉井) took its name from a locality on the Yoshii River in Bizen province, the stretch of country facing Osafune across the water, and it is from that base that the lineage is read in the late Kamakura period, through the Nanbokucho, and on into the Muromachi. Tradition holds that the line began with Tamenori toward the close of the Kamakura age, though pieces reaching that far back are exceedingly rare; the NBTHK separates the older tier, of Nanbokucho date and before, as Ko-Yoshii, reserving the plain name Yoshii for the full Muromachi production. The dated, signed hands by whom the school is most clearly told run from Kagenori and Noritsuna in the fourteenth century, through Morinori and Naganori of the late Nanbokucho into Oei, to Kiyonori in the middle Muromachi, the name passing along a chain of Nori- and Tsugu-cut signatures (Yoshinori, Kiyonori, Naganori his son) that fixes the school to the year across roughly a century and a half. Kagenori, whose lineage-name endured longest and is held by one account to be the main line, anchors the early record; Kiyonori supplies its textbook Muromachi face. What binds the school as a body, and what no other branch of Bizen-den shares in the same way, is a single distinctive temper: a small gunome (the ko-gunome or ko-choji the trade calls the "Yoshii-ba") linked in a regular, orderly, repeating run, often with a slight slant or togari-gokoro and pointed elements folded into the row. Over this the school raises its second great hallmark, a midare-utsuri so particular that the published sources describe the very shape of the hardened edge as though cast straight into the ji as a shadow, echoing the outline of the temper rather than drifting as an ordinary Bizen reflection would. The jigane is a tight, standing ko-itame mixed with mokume, at times taking an ayasugi-like or masame tendency that itself reads as a Yoshii tell, with ji-nie densely applied and chikei entering; the boshi follows the temper into the point in midare-komi, turning in ko-maru. Within this shared vocabulary the generations diverge in degree: the older Ko-Yoshii hands work nie-laden, with vigorous sunagashi and kinsuji that on Kagenori's boldest tachi recall the oldest Bizen, while the Muromachi production is mostly nioi-based with modest ko-nie and a soft nioiguchi.
A quieter second register runs throughout the school, a narrow suguha carrying only a slight admixture of small gunome, the calm half of the same hand; even there it is the folded-in gunome that returns the attribution to Yoshii. The long signatures, cut toward the mune, frequently use saka-tagane, reverse-driven chisel strokes that mark the very mei as the school's own. To kantei a Yoshii blade is therefore to read the regular linking first: the orderly, repeating ko-gunome and the shadow-cast utsuri distinguish it at once from the softer, cloud-like midare-utsuri and the broader choji of the Osafune mainstream, and the strength of the nie on older pieces is what guards against a later confusion with Mino. The school's standing rests less on grand provenance than on this recognizability and on its documentary value, the dated inscriptions making its smiths placeable to the year, which for late Bizen hands is much of the appeal. Among the named members Kagenori and Morinori carry the line at its Ko-Yoshii finest, the Fujishiro appraisers rating Morinori and Naganori at chu-jo saku, a step above the school's average run; Kiyonori's best wakizashi is judged to approach the Ko-Yoshii range within a Muromachi frame. Recorded whereabouts scatter across temple, museum, and private hands, a Kagenori tachi in the Sano Art Museum, a Kiyonori tachi at Yasukuni Shrine, a Naganori odachi in the Tokugawa Art Museum, and a Kagenori once appraised as Ko-Bizen passing through the Date family; none rises above the Important Sword tier into National Treasure or Important Cultural Property. A signed, dated Yoshii blade thus remains an attainable way to hold late Bizen-den in its most exactly knowable and most immediately recognizable form. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Kiyonori清則 | 1429-1453 | 9 |
| Kagenori景則 | 1362-1375 | 6 |
| Naganori永則 | 1429-1441 | 4 |
| Morinori盛則 | 1378-1428 | 4 |
| Noritsuna則綱 | 1364-1394 | 3 |
War at home and trade abroad made Muromachi Bizen the busiest forge region in Japan: a century of Sengoku demand after the Ōnin War, and export missions to Ming China carrying blades by the tens of thousands.
A Hozon-certified blade judged to show notably superior workmanship and a better state of preservation. The bar is higher: re-tempered blades and most unsigned Muromachi/Edo works are excluded.
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 you wish to return an item, please notify us within 3 days of receipt. After this period we cannot accept cancellations. Please ship the return to us within 5 business days. Cancellation is conditional on the item being kept in the same condition as at the time of sale, so please handle it with care.
This is a tanto by Yoshii Morinori from the Bishu no Kuni Yoshii school, dated November 1419 (Ouei Niji-roku Nen Ju Gatsu Hi). It features a wide blade with a bohi and ken engraving on the omote, and a bohi with a bonji inscription on the ura. The blade is accompanied by an NBTHK Tokubetsu Hozon Certificate.
NihontoWatchmei · Yoshii · Oei (1394-1428) · nagasa 28.2cm
Bizen Yoshii (Ko-Yoshii) · Bizen · around 1378-1428
Fujishiro Chu-jo saku
3 pieces on the market now
Morinori of the Bizen Yoshii group signed his earliest surviving blade Bizen Province resident Yoshii Morinori and dated it the eighth month of Eiwa 4, a year corresponding to 1378, and from that tachi of the late Nanbokucho his work runs forward into the Oei era of the early fifteenth century in a small body of signed and dated pieces. Because none of his datable work descends beyond the Nanbokucho, the published sources place him among the Ko-Yoshii, the older tier of the school that the NBTHK separates by name from the plainer Yoshii production of the full Muromachi period. The Yoshii group is traditionally held to have begun with Tamenori in the late Kamakura period, though works that far back are exceedingly rare, and within the surviving body it is the Ko-Yoshii pieces of the fourteenth century, Morinori's among them, that carry the school at its finest. One of his katana, whose individual portion of the folded-back signature has been cut away, is appraised from the calligraphic style of the remaining characters as the work of the Ko-Yoshii Morinori who was active around the Meitoku era of the 1390s.
His recognized hand is the school's own face read at its peak, and the published sources locate its heart in two things. The first is the temper, a gunome linked in an orderly, continuous run, of which they write that "the greatest point of appreciation lies in the way the gunome are linked in a regular sequence[[c:1]]". On his broader katana this becomes a ko-gunome carried in a regular, repeating line with slight variation in the individual forms, the row mixing in somewhat pointed elements, with ashi and yo entering, the nie standing strongly so that the habuchi loosens here and there into hotsure, and frequent sunagashi running through it with kinsuji entering the temper. On the Eiwa tachi the same hand reads as a gunome-midare mixed with pointed elements, the form already showing the variation that marks his row apart from a placid suguha. The second hallmark lies in the ji, where the school raises an utsuri the published sources call distinctive among all Bizen works[[c:2]], one in which "the very shape of the hardened edge appears as though cast as a shadow[[c:3]]" into the steel, so that the reflection seems to repeat the outline of the temper rather than the soft, cloud-like midare-utsuri of the Osafune mainstream.
The jigane beneath that utsuri is an itame that flows and stands somewhat in the grain, at times taking on an ayasugi-like tendency that the published sources count as a further tell of the Yoshii jigane, with ji-nie applied and chikei entering, and on one katana mokume mixed into the itame and the whole forged tightly and well consolidated. Across his recognized work the boshi enters in midare-komi and turns back in a small ko-maru or a slightly larger o-maru, on one blade running off into hakikake at the tip and on another with kinsuji entering the turn. He carves a bo-hi on both faces of his longer blades, terminated in maru-dome on the Eiwa tachi and run off in kaki-nagashi on the later katana. The signatures are long mei cut toward the mune, and where the blade has been shortened the long signature survives folded back as an orikaeshi-mei, the device by which several of his pieces have kept their attribution through the loss of their original tang.
Apart from this prime hand the published sources record a quieter signed register in his Oei tanto, a register the kantei must hold separately from the linked gunome. The dated tanto is hira-zukuri with mitsu-mune, slightly extended in proportion as sun-nobi and with almost no curvature, over an itame that flows toward the edge and is tightly forged throughout, the ji-nie adhering and the temper a narrow suguha in ko-nie, the boshi straight and turning back in a rounded form. On its omote he cut a kawari-hi and on the ura a suken carved in relief within a katana-hi, the relief work giving the small standard-form blade its principal point of interest. The published sources read this tanto as a well-composed work of small, standard form, and value it, together with the Eiwa tachi, as a dated piece that fixes his period of manufacture, the two inscriptions bracketing his career from the late Nanbokucho into Oei.
What sets Morinori apart from the rest of fourteenth-century Bizen is therefore not power or flamboyance but the particular Yoshii combination his own blades carry. While the other Bizen branches were drawn through the Muromachi period into the consolidated Osafune mainstream, the Yoshii group alone continued and held its distinctive linked gunome and its school utsuri, and Morinori stands among the dated Ko-Yoshii smiths whose signed pieces fix that late-Nanbokucho manner. On his finest katana the published sources find not only this smith's hand but the characteristic style of the entire group clearly shown, in the ayasugi-tending jigane, the reflected utsuri and the regular gunome strongly covered in nie with frequent sunagashi, and they judge both ji and ha sound. His name continues forward into the Muromachi Yoshii line beside Kiyonori and the other dated hands of the school, so that he reads as one of the documentary anchors by which the older Ko-Yoshii is told apart from the later production carrying the same name.
Morinori's work survives in a small number of signed and dated pieces, four of them papered to the Juyo rank across the twenty-second, twenty-eighth and fortieth sessions, the inscriptions running from Eiwa 4 in 1378 through the Oei era. The Fujishiro appraisers rate him at the chu-jo saku level, a standing above the average run of the school's hands, and the published sources reserve their warmest assessment for his fortieth-session katana, of which they write that its "ample, robust and sound form is excellent, and along the habuchi strongly lustrous nie glitters, the workmanship outstanding[[c:4]]". None of his blades carries one of the higher cultural-property designations, and none carries a recorded daimyo provenance, so his pieces belong to the upper-Juyo tier rather than to the museum-held patrimony of the great Kamakura names. For a private collector this means a dated, signed Ko-Yoshii Morinori, when one of the few survives to come to market, is an attainable rather than an unreachable thing, though it appears only from time to time and rewards patience, valued less for rarity of name than for being a signed and datable witness to the late-Nanbokucho Yoshii hand at its most characteristic.
Where Morinori 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.
Years he was demonstrably active, proven by signed-and-dated blades
Bizen-den · Bizen
10 pieces on the market now
The Yoshii school (吉井) took its name from a locality on the Yoshii River in Bizen province, the stretch of country facing Osafune across the water, and it is from that base that the lineage is read in the late Kamakura period, through the Nanbokucho, and on into the Muromachi. Tradition holds that the line began with Tamenori toward the close of the Kamakura age, though pieces reaching that far back are exceedingly rare; the NBTHK separates the older tier, of Nanbokucho date and before, as Ko-Yoshii, reserving the plain name Yoshii for the full Muromachi production. The dated, signed hands by whom the school is most clearly told run from Kagenori and Noritsuna in the fourteenth century, through Morinori and Naganori of the late Nanbokucho into Oei, to Kiyonori in the middle Muromachi, the name passing along a chain of Nori- and Tsugu-cut signatures (Yoshinori, Kiyonori, Naganori his son) that fixes the school to the year across roughly a century and a half. Kagenori, whose lineage-name endured longest and is held by one account to be the main line, anchors the early record; Kiyonori supplies its textbook Muromachi face. What binds the school as a body, and what no other branch of Bizen-den shares in the same way, is a single distinctive temper: a small gunome (the ko-gunome or ko-choji the trade calls the "Yoshii-ba") linked in a regular, orderly, repeating run, often with a slight slant or togari-gokoro and pointed elements folded into the row. Over this the school raises its second great hallmark, a midare-utsuri so particular that the published sources describe the very shape of the hardened edge as though cast straight into the ji as a shadow, echoing the outline of the temper rather than drifting as an ordinary Bizen reflection would. The jigane is a tight, standing ko-itame mixed with mokume, at times taking an ayasugi-like or masame tendency that itself reads as a Yoshii tell, with ji-nie densely applied and chikei entering; the boshi follows the temper into the point in midare-komi, turning in ko-maru. Within this shared vocabulary the generations diverge in degree: the older Ko-Yoshii hands work nie-laden, with vigorous sunagashi and kinsuji that on Kagenori's boldest tachi recall the oldest Bizen, while the Muromachi production is mostly nioi-based with modest ko-nie and a soft nioiguchi.
A quieter second register runs throughout the school, a narrow suguha carrying only a slight admixture of small gunome, the calm half of the same hand; even there it is the folded-in gunome that returns the attribution to Yoshii. The long signatures, cut toward the mune, frequently use saka-tagane, reverse-driven chisel strokes that mark the very mei as the school's own. To kantei a Yoshii blade is therefore to read the regular linking first: the orderly, repeating ko-gunome and the shadow-cast utsuri distinguish it at once from the softer, cloud-like midare-utsuri and the broader choji of the Osafune mainstream, and the strength of the nie on older pieces is what guards against a later confusion with Mino. The school's standing rests less on grand provenance than on this recognizability and on its documentary value, the dated inscriptions making its smiths placeable to the year, which for late Bizen hands is much of the appeal. Among the named members Kagenori and Morinori carry the line at its Ko-Yoshii finest, the Fujishiro appraisers rating Morinori and Naganori at chu-jo saku, a step above the school's average run; Kiyonori's best wakizashi is judged to approach the Ko-Yoshii range within a Muromachi frame. Recorded whereabouts scatter across temple, museum, and private hands, a Kagenori tachi in the Sano Art Museum, a Kiyonori tachi at Yasukuni Shrine, a Naganori odachi in the Tokugawa Art Museum, and a Kagenori once appraised as Ko-Bizen passing through the Date family; none rises above the Important Sword tier into National Treasure or Important Cultural Property. A signed, dated Yoshii blade thus remains an attainable way to hold late Bizen-den in its most exactly knowable and most immediately recognizable form. Learn more →
| Smith | Era | Designated |
|---|---|---|
| Kiyonori清則 | 1429-1453 | 9 |
| Kagenori景則 | 1362-1375 | 6 |
| Naganori永則 | 1429-1441 | 4 |
| Morinori盛則 | 1378-1428 | 4 |
| Noritsuna則綱 | 1364-1394 | 3 |
War at home and trade abroad made Muromachi Bizen the busiest forge region in Japan: a century of Sengoku demand after the Ōnin War, and export missions to Ming China carrying blades by the tens of thousands.
A Hozon-certified blade judged to show notably superior workmanship and a better state of preservation. The bar is higher: re-tempered blades and most unsigned Muromachi/Edo works are excluded.
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 you wish to return an item, please notify us within 3 days of receipt. After this period we cannot accept cancellations. Please ship the return to us within 5 business days. Cancellation is conditional on the item being kept in the same condition as at the time of sale, so please handle it with care.
