Life and times

The first Mitsuyo

• Mitsuyo, of unknown dates, was a smith of the late Heian from Chikugo Province, in the south of today’s Fukuoka. He was called Tenta (典太, Tenta, also read Denta) and his Buddhist name was Genshin (元真, Genshin). Because he lived in Miike (三池, Miike), today Ōmuta, he is known as Miike Tenta or Miike Tenta Mitsuyo.
• The 大辞泉 (Daijisen) dictionary gives him the same period and the same name, and says that the school he formed is called the Miike school and that his Ōdenta was held to be a treasure of the Ashikaga shogunate.

Four dates for the first Mitsuyo

• The treatises, according to Markus Sesko, place him in the Kōhei era (1058–1065), in the Jōhō (1074–1077) or in the Heiji (1159–1160).
• The 日本国語大辞典 (Nihon Kokugo Daijiten) puts him in the Jōhō era.
• The Japanese Wikipedia gives the Eihō era (1081–1084) for the Mitsuyo of the Ōdenta.
• Sesko warns that there are no reliable dates for the oldest smiths.

All four fall in the second half of the Heian, but a century separates the first from the last: the date of the first Mitsuyo is tradition, not document.

The Miike school

According to the Japanese Wikipedia, the name Mitsuyo passed among smiths of the Miike school from the end of the Heian until the middle of Muromachi. The Kyūshū National Museum’s record (Mochizuki Norifumi, 2024) says that the school was born in Miike with Mitsuyo at the end of the Heian and lasted until Muromachi; that almost all its works are unsigned and attributed to it by kantei; and that, apart from the first Mitsuyo, hardly any certain works are known.

The Japanese Wikipedia lists twenty-three signatures attributed to the school, among them 光世作 (Mitsuyo saku), 典太 (Tenta), 傳太光世 (Denta Mitsuyo) and 三池住光世 (Miike-jū Mitsuyo). The sources do not agree and the relationships between those smiths are unclear. Neither the names nor the number of the generations of the lineage are known.

The traditions of Ōmuta

• In Takaizumi the site of Miike Tenta’s forge is pointed out, where, they say, frost never forms however cold it is.
• In Amagi there is an uninscribed stone held to be his grave which, it is said, punishes whoever touches it; in Takase, in Miyama, another is attributed to a pupil of his, and the town council could not locate it.
• His swords are credited with the power to heal the sick and to ward off evil. All this is folklore recorded by the Japanese Wikipedia, not documented history.