Ōmura Kaboku

Profile

Kaboku was a physician by trade, a native of Suruga, and the sword was for him a lifelong pursuit rather than a workshop. According to the biographical dictionary collected by Kotobank, he served as physician to Matsudaira Mitsunaga, lord of Takada, in Echigo, and later to the Tokugawa house of Mito, and he forged for more than forty years. Japanese Wikipedia gives March 1644 as the start of his forging and 1647 as the year he began to sign «加卜 (Kaboku)»; before that he had used other names in the signature. It estimates that he made about a hundred blades, and warns that forgeries abound.

He sometimes signed «真十五枚甲伏造 (shin jūgo-mai kōbuse tsukuru)», the forging method he himself developed: a kōbuse construction, in which the hard steel wraps around the core, of fifteen layers. Markus Sesko records that signature and names Bokuden as his pupil. In 1684 he wrote two books on the sword, the Kentō hihō and the Nihontō tanpō hisho. He died in the first days of 1705 (on the 18th day of the twelfth month of the previous year in the Japanese calendar), and his grave is in the Fudōin temple, in Naka (Ibaraki). Tradition says that he learned from the Shitahara smiths of Musashi, but there is no document that confirms it.