Horii
堀井 (Horii)
The Horii family: from Taneyoshi, a Bakumatsu smith of Ōmi, to Toshihide and the Zuisen forge in Muroran, with a stint in the workshop of Takase Ukō's library in Tokyo.
Style and characteristics
Of Taneaki, the second generation, a dictionary of smiths records blades in suguha and chōji-midare with a tendency to lean. Toshihide, the third, worked in the manners of Bizen, Mino and Sōshū, and on his most carefully made works he added under the signature the word 謹作 (kinsaku, «made with respect»), a custom that, according to the Japanese Wikipedia, he took from the Katsumura of Mito.
History
The founder, Horii Taneyoshi, was born in 1821 into a family that forged farm tools on the lands of the Ishiyama temple. According to Fukunaga's dictionary and the history of Ōtsu cited by the National Diet Library, he studied with Gassan Sadayoshi in Ōsaka and then in Edo with Naotane (Taikei Naotane); the Japanese Wikipedia instead names Gassan Sadakazu. In 1863 he entered the service of the Zeze domain; with the Restoration he returned to the countryside, but kept forging and offering swords to shrines, and later worked on commission for the Imperial Household.
He was followed by Horii Taneaki, nephew and adopted son, born around 1852, who had also passed through Gassan Sadayoshi's workshop. He worked on commission for the Imperial Household from 1903.
The third generation is Toshihide (1886-1943). He joined Taneaki in 1904 and first signed Kaneaki; in 1906 he spent a year with his master at the Zuisen temple forge in Kamakura, of Sakurai Masatsugu, and in 1911 he was called to the workshop that Takase Ukō, the driving force of the Tōken Hozonkai, kept inside his library in Tokyo. That year he married his master's daughter and entered the family. In 1913 he took the name Hideaki (秀明), with the «hide» of Suishinshi Masahide, and in 1918 the Japan Steel Works of Muroran hired him, where the Zuisen forge was opened. Around 1933 or 1934 he changed to Toshihide (俊秀) so as not to use the character in the name of the newly born crown prince. He forged the votive sword for the 700th anniversary of the death of the retired emperor Go-Toba (1939) and the so-called Mikasa-tō, with steel from the guns of the battleship Mikasa, one of them given to Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō; in 1942 the Imperial Household commissioned ten marshal's swords from him, and he died in 1943 before finishing them.
According to the Japanese Wikipedia, the house continued with Horii Nobuhide, the fourth generation, and a branch with Horii Tanetsugu. The Japanese Sword Index genealogy joins in a single tree the students of the Tokyo workshop, which it calls Hanazawa, and the Muroran line, and counts among them Takase Ukō himself as an amateur.
Smiths of the school
- Horii Nobuhide 堀井信秀
- Horii Taneaki 堀井胤明
- Horii Tanetsugu 堀井胤次
- Horii Taneyoshi 堀井胤吉
- Horii Toshihide 堀井俊秀