Kanewaka
加州兼若 (Kashū Kanewaka)
The Tsujimura family of Kanazawa: smiths of Mino origin who settled in Kaga in the early 17th century and signed Kanewaka throughout the Edo period.
Style and characteristics
The founder's katana have little curvature, a wide blade and a large point (ō-kissaki); his tantō are long and have sakizori, in the manner of the Enbun and Jōji eras of the 14th century, and the wakizashi, above all in hirazukuri, are around 30 cm. Under the name Takahira the point becomes medium and the blade narrows towards it.
The steel is a mokume mixed with masame, with ji-nie. The typical hamon is a wide ō-notare or ō-gunome-midare, with box-shaped gunome (hako-midare), more disordered in the founder and squarer in the second and third generations, with abundant sunagashi and kinsuji; there is also suguha and chōji-midare. This is the hamon known as Kaga-midare, and tradition relates it to that of the Shizu school of Mino.
The founder often engraved his blades (bōhi, double grooves, dragons coiled around a sword, pine, bamboo and plum); his successors hardly did so. The tang ends in a rounded point (kurijiri), with oblique file marks.
History
The family claimed descent from Shizu Saburō Kaneuji, and the genealogy published by the Japanese Sword Index follows it down to a head of the family active in Mino around 1532. When Maeda Toshiie established his seat in Kanazawa in 1583, several Mino smiths followed him to Kaga, where local lines such as that of Fujishima were already working. The founder of the Kaga branch, the first Kanewaka, arrived in Kanazawa around 1604 or 1605: the first date comes from the records cited by that genealogy, the second from the Japanese Wikipedia and Kotobank, which say that the Maeda invited him.
His dated works run from 1604 to 1628. He signed first Kanewaka, then «Kashū jū Kanewaka saku» and, from 1611, «Kashū jū Kanewaka tsukuru». In 1619 he received the title Etchū no Kami and changed his smith name to Takahira (高平); the genealogy places the change between 1619 and 1621, and there is a tantō signed with the intermediate title Etchū Daijō. He died around 1628.
Of his sons, the eldest, Kagehira, signed blades between 1628 and 1656, but is not counted as the second generation; the second, Arihira, with the title Echigo no Kami, left very few works; the third, born in 1613, was the second Kanewaka, active from the Meireki era (1655-1658) until his death in 1677; and the fourth, Kiyohira, opened the Hachimanyama branch, with works from 1652 to 1694, some signed in Odawara, in Sagami.
The third Kanewaka took the name in 1677 and died in 1711; he was followed by a fourth, active around 1716, and a fifth, around 1736. There was also a second Kiyohira, who had previously signed Morihira, and a second Takahira, son of the second Kanewaka, with the titles Dewa Daijō and Dewa no Kami, with dates that the source gives contradictorily. The genealogy adds three more generations down to the end of the Edo period, for which it gives no data.