Bunshō Era

Bunshō (1466-1467) was a mid-Muromachi era name used for only a brief span, from Bunshō 1 (1466) until the third month of Bunshō 2 (1467). In the ninth month of Bunshō 1, Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, acting on advice from Ise Sadachika and others, sidelined the powerful shugo daimyo Hatakeyama Masanaga, deepening rifts within the shogunate; in the twelfth month of that year Hatakeyama Yoshihiro marched on Kyoto with a large army, and by the first month of Bunshō 2 (renamed Ōnin 1 in 1467) the Hatakeyama succession dispute had escalated into open warfare, igniting the Ōnin War between the Eastern Army under Hosokawa Katsumoto and the Western Army under Yamana Sōzen. Bunshō was, in effect, the fuse-lighting year for the political struggle that triggered this great conflict. In sword history, the early Muromachi period had been dominated by tachi valued chiefly for artistic refinement amid relative peace - epitomized by the Ōei-Bizen blades of the Ōei era - but the fighting that followed the Ōnin War shifted battlefield tactics from mounted to foot combat, and the uchigatana, worn thrust through the sash for easy carrying, gradually became the mainstream weapon. The Bunshō years sit immediately before this shift: in Bizen's Osafune school, smiths of the generation later called Sue-Bizen, including Katsumitsu (son of the Ōei-Bizen smith Sukemitsu) and his brothers Munemitsu and Tadamitsu, were active and are recorded as having worked around the time of the Ōnin War. Their style, still rooted in the Bizen tradition inherited from earlier generations, would gradually transform to meet the practical battlefield demands of the coming Sengoku period. Though it lasted barely half a year, Bunshō holds real significance in sword history as the hinge connecting the refined art-sword culture of the peaceful early Muromachi period to the practical battle-sword culture of the Sengoku era.