Yamato school clarifications

[Hoshi]

I'm still a confused with Yamato school.

 

I know Hosho is T1, but I don't know the relative placements of the other schools, nor which ones are fungible or particularly distinct. I know Senjuin is recognizable because of the period shapes whereas some of the others are not. Is Tegai a way of saying sub-Hosho? or is it's own thing. I know these blades have a reputation of being very hard to judge and abundantly mumei, and thus there should be a lot of fungibility. I'd venture to say something like: Hosho T1->Taema T2->Tegai/Shikkake T3 and Senjuin being its own thing. But that's probably wrong. 

[Jean]

I don’t understand your question Chris. What means T1? What kind of classification are you looking for? Time schedule between schools? Quality classification?...

[Ray Singer]

There are five main schools of the Yamato den. Hosho, Senjuin, Taema, Tegai and Shikkake. Tegai is not considered a subcategory of another school.

[Hoshi]

By T1 I mean 'Tiers' as in levels of quality. This isn't tied to the history of schools or makers as with sub-schools and offshoots, but rather it is a way to understand the process of attribution.  

 

What I mean by this is that attributions are a judgement of quality and this becomes more true the more fungible the categories for mumei blades. There are different paths blades can take based on their level of quality. For instance: Go T1->Tametsugu T2->Uda T3. If you get 'Den Tametsugu' it could be up on tier, meaning Go, or down one tier, meaning Uda. Another one is Norishige T1->Sanekage T2->Uda T3. Masamune->Shizu Kaneuji->Naoe Shizu. It also applies to other traditions, such as Awataguchi->Rai->Unju. Bizen as well, where the Soden-Bizen category gets quite flexible with Chogi and Kanemitsu on top, and the top students hovering nearby and Hasebe looming over the very soshu-like pieces.  

 

Basically if you think of attributions as a dart thrown at a graph for which nodes are makers (more precisely, one of the maker's style) and edges are 'paths' which can be taken for attribution when the work of different makers are correlated. There is embedded in this graph a hierarchy of quality, with T1 makers epitomizing the highest value. This brings us back to 'Den' which means you're not slam dunk on the node but your dart landed on the edge between two or more nods. The path of the dart has its own component of randomness in its flight path, which is the error in attribution and this is a way to think about blades that get upgraded from Juyo to Tokuju to a different maker. For instance, Tametsugu->Go. 

 

For Yamato, while the schools are very fungible, it's unclear to me how the graph is organized. I know Hosho sits on top, but what is sub-hosho? As in, Hosho but one level of quality less. How are the paths organized? Which school stand completely aside, and which ones are so close that its a tough call. Yamato is a big fungible cloud and I don't have its structure figured out right. 

[Ray Singer]

I do not know that Hosho should be considered to be on top. Taima is an alternate consideration when looking at a sword which may be Soshu Yukimitsu. I have seen swords move back and forth between Taima and Yukimitsu on their way up the chain to Juyo. Some of the best Yamato swords I have seen were Taima. At that same level of quality I feel would be Ryumon Nobuyoshi from the Senjuin school.

[Ray Singer]

While Tegai generally seems to fall to the lower end of the Yamato spectrum, you also have a smith like Tegai Kaneuji who is one of the best smiths of all time. Shikkake also generally gets categorized as one of the lesser Yamato schools, and the jitetsu can be coarse at times, however the shodai Norinaga was an excellent smith. I have a sword of his, formerly from the Suzuki Kajo collection (he owned two Norinaga), and it is one of the best Yamato blades I have ever seen across all schools.

[Tom Darling]

How about this, they're all on the same level. On any particular day a kaji can make a masterpiece. Incidentally, I had a Taema (signed) that passed the NTHK shinsa in 1974 or 75 and a Tegai Kanenaga (kin-zogen mei) that was an absolute masterpiece. IMHO!!

 

Tom D.

[Gakusee]

Chris is on the right track for non Yamato schools even though there is some confusion (eg Unji is Bizen school and the tier 3 in that trajectory Sanjo/Awataguchi—Rai—Enju should be Enju)

 

I also think he is confusing or equating rarity (Hosho being rare) with quality. Frankly to me Yamato is also quite fungible as it seems to Chris with the exception of the top smiths Ray mentioned.

[Jean]

Sorry, it does not work like this Chris. Mainly a question of taste IMO.

 

You will have to do your homework. Here is a link which give you the 5 schools and their leading smiths. Check their ratings and compare them school by school. This is subjective as stated Ray. People who loves masame will say Hosho, it is not my opinion. Tegai has had splendid smiths, Shikakke also.

 

http://www.sho-shin.com/contents.htm

 

Each sword has to be judged on its own merit. One cannot say this school is better than this one ex-abrupto.

[Hoshi]

Each sword has to be judged on its own merit. One cannot say this school is better than this one ex-abrupto. 

 

 

There appears to be some misunderstanding: I am writing about smiths as statistical distributions. Of course, each sword must be judged on its own merit. But If I handed you a bag of sue-seki sword with a masamune in there and asked you which one was likely to be of best quality, you'd say the Masamune one and you'd be right ex-abrupto everytime. For most cases it's a statistical process with some probability of being right. I've seen these threads in the past go all the way down to "Everything lies in the eyes of the beholder/Quality and or Beauty has no basis in reality". Let's just say this would be a thread of its own more suited for a forum on the philosophy of aesthethics.  

 

There are many proxies for quality: Old records from acceptable gifts to Fujishiro/Meikan and various others, to Darcy's pass factor...

 

 I do not know that Hosho should be considered to be on top. Taema is an alternate consideration when looking at a sword which may be Soshu Yukimitsu. I have seen swords move back and forth between Taema and Yukimitsu on their way up the chain to Juyo. Some of the best Yamato swords I have seen were Taema. At that same level of quality I feel would be Ryumon Nobuyoshi from the Senjuin school.

 

 

Which is interesting to me. The fact that the fungability crosses through traditions and into a school. 

 

The big difficulty with judging through entire school is that some schools have very varied master-smiths, while for others there is an outlier who produces incredibly work and gets all the Tokuju while the rest are completely unknown. Shizu is a good example of this, so is the famous Bungo master. For Yamato this is made even more difficult because we simply don't know a lot about individual smiths given the paucity of extant work. 

 

Tegai Kanenaga and Shikkake Norinaga produced excellent blades and have probably become a way of saying top quality for the school more than anything else, but even this is problematic for me. Comparatively we know even less about Hosho and Taema lines. This is to say the fungability becomes extreme and judges are most likely loathe to stick their necks out and give a specific attributions at all. What has likely happened over time is that the few signed exemplars of the Yamato tradition ended up 'attracting' similar blades forming clusters of attributions based on quality. This leads us to clusters of blades attributed based on proximity with very few original and signed production. When you have so little data, you know nothing about the variance in the production of the smith compared to or those of another line. While classifications is expected to at least correlates with smith ground truth, it will be driven mostly by an appraisal of on the execution of some desirable trait (let's call that quality). 

 

So this is a hypothesis as to where we are with Yamato: clusters of blades judged based on some similarity, hovering around very few examples. I want to understand those clusters, when an attribution is made, what are the second and third guesses?  

[Tom Darling]

Chris, you're absolutely right, I doubt that you will get a sufficient answer. I would guess on a mumei blade, you would get three different shinsa opinions, or Den to cover it all.

 

Tom D.

[Jean]

You should ask members of Shinsa Panel, there is no direct logic as in your Norishige example.

 

Best example is a katana I owned kanteied to Hosho by Tanobe sensei and Honma Junji and to Tegai Kanekiyo by Shinsa. Two different Yamato schools. One will say it is because NBTHK shinsa is reluctant to kantei a mumei blade to Hosho, or because Kanekiyo first generation was a son of Kanenaga who made blade in masame.

 

It means you will have to study examples of each smith of these five traditions to understand NBTHK kantei, you will object you have no data available to understand the kantei. You, yes, NBTHK no, they have all their archive of thousand blades. It may exist Japanese books on these Yamato schools but no accessible to non Japanese speaker. So your only ressource is ask a shinsa panel the why’s.

 

You will notice that most of O suriage Yamato blades are kanteied to a school and not a smith

 

Juyo shinsa 25: 31 Yamato blades passed: only seven kanteied to a given smith (the top ones in their schools), 24 to a Yamato school.

 

Why? because most Yamato blades were not signed.

[Hoshi]

It's not just me. It's also the Shinsa panel. There aren't thousands of signed Yamato school blades. There are a handful of signed Hosho school blades spread across four or five different smiths. That's not enough to build a representation of the variance within and between smiths for the school and probably even less Tegai Kenekiyo. The sampling space is just too small. 

 

Now if I'm to differentiate between some Hosho smith who has, say, a grand total of four signed blades, and a Tegai smith who has three, and try to find what's closest to my mumei blade, I might as well toss a coin. If I was training an algorithm to make that call, I would be fitting absolute noise because it is exceedingly probable that the variance within the smith precludes prediction based on the variance between the smiths. 

 

My point is that in the presence of so few datapoints, what you do is that you seek out the most highly reputed example, in physical form and across old books. Look at what was valued, make this your tier 1, and then form a ladder downwards where blades with similar attributes that don't quite make the cut get bucketed in. This is attribution by quality levels. In Yamato blades it's particularly acute. 

 

This is why Shinsa says your sword is Tegai Kanekiyo, which is a way of saying 'we're not sticking our necks out at Hosho' and why Tanobe says its Hosho.

 

Hosho T1->Tegai Kanekiyo T2. Those are the sorts of relationships I want to parse for the Yamato school. 

[Jussi Ekholm]

I am with Ray's Taima opinion that they are highly thought of in general, and also Ryūmon Nobuyoshi from Senjuin. Also elevating Tegai Kanenaga and Shikkake Norinaga above others in their respective schools.

 

Here is a bit of statistical data about signed Yamato blades from my database (lots and lots of further work to be done on it). I can maybe do some more digging when I have more free time.

 

509 Yamato swords pre-mid Muromachi (approx) so far in it. (Didn't include Shizu Kaneuji in this count, I have only 1 包氏 signature documented so far)

 

Senjuin 15 smiths / 29 signed works in total

14 smiths only have 1 signed blade (2 odachi, 6 tachi, 1 kodachi, 4 tanto, 1 ken)

Ryūmon Nobuyoshi 6 signed (6 tachi)

Senjuin (or just partial mei) 9 signed (5 tachi, 1 naoshi, 1 ken, 2 yari)

 

Taima 4 smiths / 11 signed works

Kuniyuki 5 signed blades (4 tachi, 1 kodachi)

Aritoshi 3 signed (3 tachi)

2 smiths only have 1 signed (1 tachi, 1 tanto)

1 mei Taima (1 katana)

 

Tegai 9 smiths / 46 signed works

Kanenaga 29 signed blades (24 tachi, 4 katana, 1 tanto)

17 other signed pieces by various smiths (6 tachi, 9 tanto, 1 ken)

 

Hōshō 5 smiths / 13 signed works

Sadayoshi x 2 (2 tanto)

Sadaoki x 4 (1 tachi, 3 tanto)

Sadakiyo x 5 (1 wakizashi, 4 tanto)

Sadamune x 1 (1 tanto)

Sadatsugu x 1 ( 1 tachi)

 

Shikkake 2 smiths / 21 signed works

Norinaga 18 signed works (10 tachi, 2 naoshi, 5 tanto, 1 ken)

Sukemitsu 3 signed (1 odachi, 2 tachi)

 

So if my math is not failing that should be about 120 signed works from Yamato so far in 509 swords. Of course the signature vs. mumei ratio is bit skewed as the focus is on top & high end pieces. And information of those is more easy to aquire compared to your basic stuff.

 

EDIT* as Chris mentioned below about the blades so I added which blades the signed ones are.

[Hoshi]

Thank you Jussi, fantastic. And we need to keep in mind Tantos are more likely to be signed than Daito, which would cut our signature counts by a least 1/2. 

 

Hosho and Taema are complete darkness. Kanenanga and Norinaga, provided these sign works aren't in their great majority tantos, could have enough work to create a sensible corpus to attribute towards... 

 

But this really goes on to show just how little data there is on Yamato... 

[paulb]

based on swords I have actually seen in hand I would fully support the opinions on Taima, Tegai Kanenaga and Shikkake Norinaga. The Taima blades in particular were stunning and as Ray said previously if they are considered close to Yukimitsu then you know they have to be very good indeed. Within the past couple of weeks I had the chance to look again at a signed wakazashi by Kanenaga which is a very unusual thing and stunningly beautiful. I have also spent a lot of time studying a Norinaga Nnaginata naoshi which is out of this world (in my opinion). I have seen few Hosho works but those I have have always been of very high quality. While not as beautiful as Taima  they are very good indeed.

Something I don't think has been mentioned in detail is ko-Senjuin. Based on only one piece I saw more than 20 years ago  I was smitten by the quality of what I saw. While different from the others it was equally beautiful and screamed quality.

I think the disparity in opinions tends to relate to later wok of both Senjuin and more especially Tegai where the quality certainly seems to have slipped away as with so many other schools of the time.

[Mark]

not to hijack the thread but i just was told that at the Chicago Sword Show there will be a display/presentation by the NBTHK-AB on Yamato swords. There will be excellent examples of all 5 schools (many Juyo), there will be a lecture explaining the schools and then examples you can examine in hand.  A great chance to learn about this.   Chris - not sure where you are located but if you can attend maybe most of your questions will be answered

[Vermithrax16]

You should ask members of Shinsa Panel, there is no direct logic as in your Norishige example.

 

Best example is a katana I owned kanteied to Hosho by Tanobe sensei and Honma Junji and to Tegai Kanekiyo by Shinsa. Two different Yamato schools. One will say it is because NBTHK shinsa is reluctant to kantei a mumei blade to Hosho, or because Kanekiyo first generation was a son of Kanenaga who made blade in masame.

 

It means you will have to study examples of each smith of these five traditions to understand NBTHK kantei, you will object you have no data available to understand the kantei. You, yes, NBTHK no, they have all their archive of thousand blades. It may exist Japanese books on these Yamato schools but no accessible to non Japanese speaker. So your only ressource is ask a shinsa panel the why’s.

 

You will notice that most of O suriage Yamato blades are kanteied to a school and not a smith

 

Juyo shinsa 25: 31 Yamato blades passed: only seven kanteied to a given smith (the top ones in their schools), 24 to a Yamato school.

 

Why? because most Yamato blades were not signed.

As the new caretaker of this very sword (thank you Jean forever) I can say after exhaustive research, someone is going to have to show me a Tegai Kanekiyo that is remotely close to the sword discussed. Maybe some examples exist only in rare Japanese books, memories, but I cannot find anything that even makes sense in a comparison. 

[Hoshi]

I'd venture to say I would be very, very skeptical of such a specific attribution as Tegai Kanekiyo.

 

First, it doesn't even fit with the standards of conservative snipes on specific smiths. Let's face it: that smith maybe has one tachi extant with his name. Boom. No uncertainty. No Den. This is noise in the flight trajectory when the dart is throne on the board.

 

Den Hosho would have been the better attribution because 1) it acknowledges it's not 100% slam dunk and 2) it's conservative and doesn't snipe on a smith with no data. 

 

In fact, I would not trust any specific attributions to smiths, except for Kanenaga, Norinaga and to a lesser extent, Nobuyoshi. 

[Gakusee]

Well, den Hosho is not really sensible as Hosho is already a group attribution, Chris. So they could have said Hosho rather than Tegai Kanekiyo, if we are talking about that specific blade above.

 

On Tegai Kanekiyo - well, there are more than 1 zaimei (shodai) blades. The problem is also then exacerbated by there being several generations, with shodai rare but then sandai having a few more blades which have a Juyo status.

 

I would personally also trust more Tanobe sensei’s attribution (he studies swords for longer in his home office before he writes sayagaki than the Shinsa panel) and definitely Kunzan sensei’s attribution (his are very, very rare and treasured by connoisseurs).

 

Going back to the original, broader topic: at the lower level they become indistinguishable and interchangeable. But agreeing with Chris in that attribution is the first attestation of quality, the higher end Yamato blades obviously get attributed to the overall better smiths, who have been studied empirically and whose [signed] work the Shinsa has records of and can compare to.

Just flicking through some of the TokuJu records, there are a lot of Taema, a fair few Tegai Kanenaga, some Shikake Norinaga, a fair few Senjuin.

[Hoshi]

Yes, it's not current practice. But given the exceedingly small size of extant signed work by this group, it would make sense to use as as +/- 5% Hosho archetype. The only case in which it wouldn't make sense is if the variance between Hosho smiths is such that +/- 5% gets eclipsed. In which case attributions to this group barely make sense at all. 

 

I agree that Tanobe/Kunzan/Some of the early Honami judges > NBTHK. 

 

And back to the broader topic, yes:

 

It seems Yamato Taema and Tegai are exit point out of the graph for Soshu. But Hosho is its own thing and it's unique. Kenenaga and and Norinaga could also be singular points.