Minamoto Kiyomaro

Profile

Kiyomaro was born in 1813 at Akaiwa in the Komoro domain of Shinano, son of a village head. In 1829 he entered the school of Kawamura Toshitaka, a smith of Ueda, together with his brother Yamaura Saneo, and signed first Masayuki and, in 1834, Hidetoshi. In 1835 he moved to Edo, where the strategist Kubota Sugane became his patron; according to the Japanese Wikipedia, the character «Kiyo» in his name comes from Sugane's. In 1842 he left half-finished a subscription of a hundred swords and spent some two years at Hagi in Chōshū, invited, according to the NBTHK, by Murata Seifū. Back in Edo he settled in Yotsuya, hence his nickname, and in 1846 adopted the name Kiyomaro. His Sōshū-den, which looks to Samonji and Shizu Kaneuji, combines gunome-midare touched with chōji, abundant sunagashi and kinsuji and aggressive points. He took his own life at forty-two, in the eleventh month of Kaei 7 (January 1855), his health ruined by drink. His pupils included Kurihara Nobuhide, Saitō Kiyondo and Suzuki Masao. The katana he made for Sugane in 1846 is an important art object.