Horii Taneaki
堀井胤明 (Horii Taneaki)
A smith from Ōmi (born in 1852), nephew and heir of Horii Taneyoshi, smith to the Imperial Household from 1903 and master of the 羽沢文庫 forge, in Tokyo.
Profile
Horii Taneaki was born in 1852 in Ōmi, today’s Shiga. He learned from his uncle, Horii Taneyoshi, who took him as his son and heir, and according to the National Diet Library he also apprenticed in 1864 with the smith Gassan Sadayoshi.
In 1903 he was named smith to the Imperial Household, and in 1912 the Nihon Tōken Hozonkai granted him the title Ōmi no Suke (近江介). In 1907 Kurihara Akihide chose him as one of the four masters of his forging school in Tochigi. From 1911 he worked with his adopted son, Horii Toshihide, in Takase Ukō’s forge in the 羽沢文庫 in Tokyo, which gives its name to this group of smiths.
The National Diet Library places him later in Muroran, in Hokkaidō, at the Nippon Seikōsho steelworks, but with dates that do not fit together, and the sources do not give a certain date for his death.