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His names
The Japanese Wikipedia gives him 左衛門三郎 (Saemon Saburō) as his common name and 源慶 (Genkei) as his Buddhist name. He signed 左 (Sa), and to tell him apart from the other swordsmiths of the school he is called 大左 (Ō-Sa, “the great Sa”). The NBTHK qualifies the matter of 安吉 (Yasuyoshi): an old treatise said that Samonji, in old age, went by that name, but no work confirms it, and today Ō-Sa and Yasuyoshi are held to be two different swordsmiths. According to the tradition recorded by the Kyūshū National Museum, he lived in Okihama (息浜, Okihama), in Hakata, today in the Hakata ward of the city of Fukuoka.
A family of swordsmiths
The treatise 往昔抄 (Ōjakushō), cited by the Japanese Wikipedia, gives this lineage: the founder 良西 (Ryōsai), of mid-Kamakura; 西蓮 (Sairen), who signed 国吉 (Kuniyoshi); 実阿 (Jitsua), his father; Sa; and his son Sa Yasuyoshi. The NBTHK, in the exhibition that the Japanese Sword Museum devoted to the school in 2019, also names Ryōsai, Sairen and Jitsua as his forebears, and Yasuyoshi, Yukihiro, Kunihiro and Yoshisada as his pupils.
Some of them have their own profile on this site: Yasuyoshi and Sa Kunihiro.
When he worked
The NBTHK places him between the end of the Kamakura period and the beginning of the Nanbokuchō, in Hakata; the Japanese Wikipedia pages on his works repeat those dates, and the one on his biography says only “Nanbokuchō”. No date of his birth or of his death is known, nor any dated blade of his.
Where “Samonji” comes from
The official record of the Kōsetsu Samonji explains that he is called Samonji because he signed with the character 左 (sa). Where that character comes from, the sources do not tell in the same way: the Edo scholar Kaibara Ekiken, in the 筑前国続風土記 (Chikuzen-no-kuni zoku fudoki) cited by the Kyūshū National Museum, makes it the first letter of 左衛門尉 (Saemon-no-jō), a court title; the NBTHK, the Kyoto National Museum and the Japanese Wikipedia give it as an abbreviation of his common name, Saemon Saburō.
A pupil of Masamune?
Tradition holds him to be a pupil of Masamune and counts him among his ten great pupils, the 正宗十哲 (Masamune jittetsu). The Japanese Wikipedia says that “he is said to have entered Masamune’s school”; the official record of the Kōsetsu, that “he is said to have learned with Sōshū Masamune”; and the Kyoto National Museum, that he was long held to be the first of his pupils. The NBTHK included him among the ten in its exhibition “正宗十哲” (Masamune jittetsu) of 2024.
It is a tradition, not a documented fact: no document of the time links him to Masamune. It remains to be checked in the original text of the 2024 exhibition whether the NBTHK warns that the ten were not all direct pupils.
A new style in Kyūshū
The national museums of Kyūshū and Kyoto explain that, before him, the sword of Kyūshū was of itame with masame, of a rustic air, with a suguha of sunken, sober nioiguchi; Sa brought a brilliant and refined style, of very tight steel and a temper of notare with nie.