From the late Kamakura period into the early Nanboku-chō period, Shizu Saburō Kaneuji—a Yamato-born disciple of Masamune counted among his "Ten Disciples"—relocated to Shizu in Mino Province, followed by Kanshige, who moved from Tsuruga in Echizen to Seki. Their fusion of Yamato-den and Sōshū-den techniques, oriented toward practical utility, took root in Mino, establishing the last of the Five Traditions (Gokaden): the Mino tradition.

Nanboku-chōCultural Event

c. 1368 (Ōan 1)

Establishment of Nen-ryū — The Oldest of the Three Founding Schools of Japanese Swordsmanship

Nen-ryū, founded by Nen-ami Jion (secular name Sōma Shirō Yoshimoto, born 1350) from the late Nanboku-chō period into the early Muromachi period, is regarded as one of the three great source schools of heihō and the oldest of them. Around 1368, Jion attained the secret essence of the sword while training at Anraku-ji in Tsukushi, Kyushu, and he perfected his swordsmanship through travels across the provinces. Chūjō-ryū, founded by his disciple Chūjō Nagahide, formed a core lineage of Japanese swordsmanship that led on to Ittō-ryū. The orthodox line of Nen-ryū survives today as Maniwa Nen-ryū, which was inherited by Higuchi Sadatsugu in the late Sengoku period.

MuromachiSword Incident

From Onin 1–Bunmei 9 (1467–1477) onward

Dispersal of the Higashiyama Gomotsu

Through the devastation of the Ōnin War (1467–1477) and the collapse of the Muromachi shogunate's authority that followed, the Higashiyama Gomotsu, a collection centered on karamono (Chinese art objects), mostly Chinese (Song and Yuan) paintings but also including tea utensils, flower vases, and writing implements, which the Ashikaga shogunal family had collected and kept over generations, flowed out of the Kyoto gosho and storehouses and scattered into the hands of daimyō, merchants, and temples and shrines. Among the dispersed objects, the tea utensils were prized by tea masters of the Azuchi-Momoyama period and also influenced the later view of meibutsu.