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Kanabo Masatsugu政次

Masatsugu signs his blades in full, Nanto-ju Kanabo Hyoe-no-jo Masatsugu, cut as a long inscription toward the mune of an unshortened tang, and he is the smith the published sources name "the best-known Masatsugu within the school" (同派の中で最も名の知られた政次) of the Kanabo group, a school that rose in Nara in the late Muromachi period. The Kanabo line worked in Nanto, the old name for Nara, from the close of the Muromachi era into the early Shinto period, and many of its smiths signed simply under the school name; Masatsugu is set apart from them as its representative hand. The reference works place his dated pieces from the Eisho era onward, and the published sources are candid that the group's relationship to any of the five Yamato traditions cannot be established. That uncertainty is itself the key to him, because his work does not behave like Yamato work at all. Rather than the upright masame and restrained nie of Tegai and its neighbors, his blades take the broad, robust shape of the late-Muromachi fighting sword, and the published sources liken the Kanabo manner to the uchigatana of Sue-Bizen and Sue-Seki, blades that share, in their words, the broad-bodied form with sakizori of that age. The hand that runs through every one of his designated blades is a gunome-based great midare, and it is the first thing by which he is known. Over a base of notare he sets gunome of several kinds at once, angular gunome and ko-gunome mixed in with ashi and yo entering freely, the line broad and unquiet. On his katana of the fifteenth Juyo session the temper is exactly this, a notare carrying angular and small gunome with deep nioi and ko-nie along it, while on the naginata of the twenty-fourth session the yakihaba widens and the gunome opens at the hips with sunagashi drawn through the nie. The nioiguchi takes a tightened cast rather than a soft one, and the published sources, describing the school at large, observe that the Kanabo temper is a gunome-based great midare in which the nioiguchi tends to sit subdued. Masatsugu's own line is the more controlled and luminous version of that family habit, deep in nioi where many of his fellows are merely dull, and it is on this account that the published sources judge his fifteenth-session katana to show a superior workmanship among the smiths of the same school. His jigane is the second half of the recognition, and it carries the trace of Yamato even where the rest of the blade has left the tradition behind. The forging is an itame that flows and tends to masame, standing a little under the polish, and on the boldest of his naginata it loosens further into large grain shot with mokume. Ji-nie gathers over it, and on the long onaginata of the twenty-fifth session a whitish utsuri rises in the ji, the pale reflection that the late Yamato and Mino steels throw up. Across the broader temper run sunagashi and kinsuji, with hotsure breaking the habuchi and yubashiri starting here and there in the ji on his most active pieces. The boshi is constant and diagnostic: it turns in midare-komi on every one of his blades, resolving to a ko-maru on the katana and naginata of the early sessions, to a pointed return on the long onaginata, and on the latest naginata it is swept frequently with hakikake and run down somewhat long before it returns. What survives of him is dominated not by tachi or katana but by polearms, and this is the most particular fact of his record. The Kanabo school left a conspicuous number of naginata, and the published sources read that abundance straightforwardly as production for the warrior-monks of the seven great temples of Nara, beginning with Kofukuji, whose armories needed staff weapons in quantity. Two of his four designated blades are themselves naginata, and the longest is a commanding piece the published sources call "exceptionally long, and moreover excellent in its workmanship" (極めて長大であり、しかも出来が優れている). The school also tempered a quieter manner that does not appear among his designated work, a tight-nioiguchi suguha into which ashi and yo enter well, which the published sources actually name as the most common Kanabo hamon; on Masatsugu's own surviving blades that suguha is held in reserve and the gunome-based midare prevails throughout. The thirty-eighth-session naginata, preserved together with its vermilion-lacquered nagamaki mounting, the published sources call "a typical example of Masatsugu" (政次の一典型), the mounting itself made to suit the blade. What distinguishes him is best stated through his own grounded traits rather than by contrast with the schools around him. The broad fighting shape with its large kissaki, the flowing standing jigane, the many-formed gunome midare with its deep nioi and tight nioiguchi, and the unfailing midare-komi boshi together form a recognizable whole that belongs to no single Yamato tradition and looks instead toward the late Bizen and Seki smiths working in the same decades. Within the Kanabo group itself, where the run of work is competent but plain, his is the hand the published sources single out as the soundest and most accomplished, the standard against which the rest of the school is measured. His relation upward into the five Yamato traditions remains, by the published record's own admission, an open question, and that very detachment from the old lineages is part of what makes his work legible at sight. Four of Masatsugu's blades stand on the official designation record, all of them at the Juyo level, and they are the realistic measure of what a collector might one day encounter. His record holds at the Juyo level and rises no higher, and the surviving designated pieces are held privately, their owners largely unrecorded in the catalogue, so no roll of famous houses can honestly be set against his name. He is rated Jo saku in the Fujishiro ranking, a solid standing for a provincial late-Muromachi smith, and his Toko Taikan valuation sits in the middle of the range. A blade of his comes to market only from time to time and chiefly among his naginata, the form in which he is most often met, and an example with its original mounting intact, as the thirty-eighth-session piece survives, is rarer still. For a collector drawn to the late Yamato schools and to the armed religious houses of Nara that sustained them, a designated Masatsugu, broad and forthright and tempered in his unmistakable gunome midare, is among the more attainable ways to hold a securely attributed work of the best Kanabo hand.

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