Kasama Ikkansai Shigetsugu
笠間一貫斎繁継 (Kasama Ikkansai Shigetsugu)
A Tokyo smith and engraver (1885/1886-1965/1966) who gives his name to the Ikkansai line; he was head master of Kurihara’s Denshūjo and the teacher of Miyaguchi Yasuhiro.
Profile
Kasama Shigetsugu, who signed with the gō (art name) Ikkansai, was born in Shizuoka in 1885 or 1886, depending on the source. He began to learn in 1899 with his uncle, the smith Miyaguchi Shigetoshi, and in 1903 he went to Tokyo to work with Morioka Masayoshi at his sword-study centre, the Tokiwamatsu.
At the beginning of the 1930s he was head master of the smiths of the Nihontō Tanren Denshūjo, the forging centre that Kurihara Akihide opened in Tokyo; the sources do not agree on the year. Afterwards he forged in the forge on Tōyama Mitsuru’s estate, and some of his blades say so in the signature. His pupils tend to carry in their name the character tsugu (継) from his. Among them are Miyaguchi Yasuhiro, who would become the first head smith of the Yasukuni Shrine forge, Sakai Ikkansai Shigemasa and Tsukamoto Okimasa, who was also his son-in-law; Yoshihara Kuniie also came out of his teaching at the Denshūjo.
He worked mostly in the Bizen manner, with chōji-midare tempers rich in nie, and he is remembered above all as an engraver of blades (horimono): on those he engraved himself, the signature says that the blade and the engraving are both his work. He signed, among other forms, Ikkansai Masateru and Ikkansai Shigetsugu, first in regular characters and later in the Sōshū manner. He died in 1965 or 1966.