* Image is for illustrative purposes only.Fukushima Mitsutada
福島光忠
Also known as: The Osafune Mitsutada of Fukushima Masanori / a lost meibutsu
Description
A signed tachi by the founder of the Osafune school
The Fukushima Mitsutada is a tachi by Mitsutada, the mid-Kamakura smith who founded the Osafune school in Bizen province. It measured 2 shaku 3 sun 7 bu (about 71.8 cm), bore Mitsutada's signature, and is recorded as having grooves on both faces. Mitsutada, whose flamboyant chōji-midare temper line made his work a favourite of Oda Nobunaga, is one of the great names of Kamakura swordmaking. This blade is listed in the Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō, the register of celebrated swords compiled by the Hon'ami family at the order of the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune, where it is valued at 130 gold pieces.
The name and its descent
The sword is named for Fukushima Masanori, one of the celebrated "Seven Spears of Shizugatake," who owned it; tradition holds that he received it from Toyotomi Hideyoshi for his service in the Odawara campaign. Masanori was stripped of his domain in 1619 for repairing Hiroshima Castle without permission, and when he died at Takaino in Shinano province in 1624 his son Masatoshi presented the sword to the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu as part of his father's bequest. In 1627 Iemitsu granted it to Tokugawa Yorifusa, first lord of the Mito domain, and it subsequently passed to the Matsudaira house of Shishido in Hitachi province, a branch founded by Yorifusa's son. At the time the Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō was compiled, the sword was recorded as being in the hands of the Shishido Matsudaira.
A lost treasure
Nothing certain is known of the blade after its descent to the Shishido Matsudaira, and it remains missing to this day. Some researchers have suggested that a surviving Mitsutada bearing a Kōtoku inlaid attribution, now a National Treasure, may be this very sword, but the identification is unproven. Having passed from the unifier of Japan to a great daimyo and then to a Tokugawa collateral house before vanishing, the Fukushima Mitsutada is a textbook example of a meibutsu that survives only in the records.
The smith Mitsutada
Mitsutada established the Osafune school in Bizen in the mid-Kamakura period, and the line continued through his son Nagamitsu and grandson Kagemitsu. He excelled at a broad, flamboyant chōji-midare temper line, a style set beside that of the contemporary Fukuoka Ichimonji school. Oda Nobunaga is said to have prized Mitsutada's work and to have gathered more than thirty of his blades, and celebrated examples include the Shokudaikiri, Jikkyū and Ikoma Mitsutada. The Fukushima Mitsutada belonged to that company, and though lost, its shape, dimensions and appraised value are still known from the Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō.
Legends & Stories
A hero of Shizugatake and his sword
Fukushima Masanori served Toyotomi Hideyoshi from boyhood and built his reputation as a warrior at Shizugatake, at Odawara and in the Korean campaigns. The celebrated Mitsutada he is said to have received from Hideyoshi adds a connoisseur's dimension to a man usually remembered purely as a fighter. Among the other arms Masanori received from Hideyoshi was the famous spear Nihongō, one of the "three great spears of Japan" — which, tradition says, he later lost to Mori Tomonobu in a drinking contest.
A bequest handed to the victors
That this blade should have been surrendered to the shogunal house as part of Masanori's estate is telling. Stripped of his domain in 1619 and dying in obscurity at Takaino in Shinano in 1624, Masanori embodied the fate of the daimyo who owed their rise to the Toyotomi and were absorbed by the Tokugawa order — and their swords flowed to the victors with them. Ironically, the blade then passed to the Mito Tokugawa and their Shishido branch for safekeeping, only to slip out of the records altogether.