Ukai
鵜飼派 (Ukai-ha)
A small Bizen school, from the late Kamakura to the Nanbokuchō period, whose smiths signed with the cloud character; its blades resemble those of Kyoto and Aoe more than those of Osafune.
Style and characteristics
Although it is a Bizen school, its blades do not resemble those of Osafune or of the Fukuoka Ichimonji. The curvature is that of Kyoto (kyō-zori), and the steel shows a fine grain compared to spider threads (kumo no ito-hada), the same one described for the Aoe school of Bitchū. For that reason the school is usually placed alongside the Kyoto Rai and Aoe, and the expert Honma Kunzan also pointed out features shared with the first Masaie, founder of the Mihara school of Bingo.
The scholar Fukunaga Suiken records a rule of thumb from kantei contests: if someone takes a blade for a Rai work and is told that he has not even got the region right, it is probably Ukai.
History
The school takes its name from the district where it worked, and it is also called Unrui, «those of the cloud», because most of its smiths signed with the character 雲 (un, «cloud»). The best known are Unshō and Unji, and its activity spans a little over a century, from the late Kamakura to the Nanbokuchō period.
Its origin is unclear, and there are three versions that do not agree with one another. A legend in the Kokon Kaji Bikō (1830) tells that two Osafune smiths received the names Unshō and Unji from Emperor Go-Daigo after dreaming of a hamon in the shape of clouds; it is discarded because there are blades signed Unshō that predate his reign, and Fukunaga considers it an invention of the author, perhaps inspired by a false signature that places Unshō in Kyoto with a date of 1362 that does not exist in the calendar. A treatise by Takeya Naomasa (1612) has him descend from Morishige of Osafune. And a signature compendium of the Shōan era (1299-1302) says they came from Izumo, a version that Fukunaga considers worthy of attention, because nothing in the school recalls Bizen.
Of the first Unshō a blade is known with the inscription «Kagen 2, 61 years»: counting the years the Japanese way, he would have been born around 1244. The old tradition made the first Unji his brother; the researcher Ishii Masakuni, going by the dates, thinks he was his son, and supposes that the school ended up absorbed by Osafune around the Ōei era (1394-1428), with the fourth Unji. The lords of the district were the Matsuda, from the Jōkyū war (1221), and Fukunaga thinks it was they who brought the smiths there, far from the great Osafune centre. A post marks the place that tradition gives as Unshō's house, where forging slag turns up.
According to the Japanese Wikipedia, around 2020 at least five tachi signed Unshō and six signed Unji were Important Cultural Properties, in addition to an unsigned blade attributed to each. Among those of Unshō there is one in the Tokyo National Museum; among those of Unji, a tachi dated 1315 kept in the Japanese Sword Museum.