Masamune - Style

Style

The swords of Masamune have a reputation for superior beauty and quality, remarkable in a period where the steel necessary for swords was often impure. He is considered to have brought to perfection the art of "nie" - 錵 - (martensitic crystals embedded in pearlite matrix, thought to resemble stars in the night sky).

Masamune studied under Shintōgo Kunimitsu and made blades in suguha (straight temper line) but he made magnificent notare hamon, where the leading edge of blade slowly undulates where it was quenched. There are also some blades with ko-midare (small irregularities), a style which appears to have been copied from the Old Bizen and Hoki Province styles. His works are well-characterized by rich chikei (clear grey lines on the leading edge), kinsuji (lines like lightning streaking across the blade) and beautiful nie (a grey shadow on the front of the blade caused by quenching).

Swords created by Masamune often are referred to with the smith's name (as with other pieces of artwork), often with a name for the individual sword as well. The "Honjo Masamune", a symbol of the Tokugawa shogunate and passed down from one shogun to another, is perhaps the best known Masamune sword.

Signed works of Masamune are rare. The examples "Fudo Masamune", "Kyogoku Masamune", and "Daikoku Masamune" are accepted as his genuine works. Judging from his style, he was active from the late Kamakura period to the Nanboku-chō period.

His swords are the most frequently cited among those listed in the Kyôho Meibutsu Cho, a catalogue of excellent swords in the collections of daimyos edited during the Kyoho era by the Hon'ami family of sword appraisers and polishers. The catalogue was created on the orders of the Tokugawa Yoshimune of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1714 and consists of three books. The first book known as the Nihon Sansaku is a list of the three greatest swordsmiths in the eyes of Toyotomi Hideyoshi including Etchu Matsukura Go Umanosuke Yoshihiro, Awataguchi Toshiro Yoshimitsu, and lists 41 blades by Goro Nyudo Masamune. The three books together list 61 blades by Masamune. There are far more blades listed for Masamune than the next two swordsmiths combined. It is known that Hideyoshi had a passion for Soshu swordsmiths which may explain this. A third of all swords listed are Soshu blades by many of the greatest Soshu masters including Masamune's students.