Kurihara Akihide
A smith and politician from Tochigi (1879-1954) who in 1933 opened the Nihontō Tanren Denshūjo forging centre in Tokyo, where Miyairi Akihira and Amata Akitsugu trained.
Profile
Kurihara Akihide was born in 1879 in Shimotsuke province, today’s Tochigi. His father opened a sword-forging school in 1893 at Kanma, in Tochigi, and there he learned the craft from the smith Inagaki Masaō, who had worked for the Tatebayashi domain. In 1907 he inherited the school and put the teaching in the hands of four masters, Horii Taneaki among them.
He was also an editor and a politician: a member of parliament for Tochigi from 1928 to 1932, he ran from 1935 to 1945 a magazine devoted to the Japanese sword. In July 1933, when the demand for military swords had grown after 1931, he reopened his school in Akasaka, in Tokyo, on the site of the former house of Katsu Kaishū, under the name Nihontō Tanren Denshūjo, and directed it. Later he opened the Nihontō Gakuin in Zama, in Kanagawa. The smiths who trained there full time received the character aki (昭) from his name; that is how Miyairi Akihira and Amata Akitsugu, among others, signed.
He signed Akihide (昭秀), often with his family name. Six swords of his, tachi and katana made mostly between 1933 and 1943, are protected as cultural properties of Tochigi Prefecture. One of the sources consulted holds that he did not forge the blades himself from start to finish and that his speciality was the quenching (yaki-ire) of other smiths’ blades; others present him as the maker of the swords that bear his signature. He died in 1954.
Notable works
- Tachi of November 1933: cultural property of Tochigi Prefecture since 1973.
- Katana of December 1933, forged with iron from Benxihu, in Manchuria: cultural property of Tochigi Prefecture since 1999.
- Katana of August 1942, with engravings by another craftsman: cultural property of Tochigi Prefecture since 1977.
- Tachi of August 1943: cultural property of Tochigi Prefecture since 1977.
- Two tachi signed with his name: cultural properties of Tochigi Prefecture since 1982.