Next to the Tegai gate
- A Yamato swordsmith of the mid- or late Kamakura period and founder of the Tegai school, according to the Daijisen and Nihon kokugo daijiten dictionaries.
- The Nihon jinmei daijiten places him around the Shōō era and tells that he made tachi for the warrior monks (僧兵, sōhei) outside the Tegai gate (転害門, Tegaimon) of the Tōdai-ji temple.
- The NBTHK calls him the real founder of the school: the Tegai was the most prosperous of the five of Yamato from the second half of the Kamakura period until Muromachi, its swordsmiths used the character 包 (kane), and he lived next to that gate, in what is today Tegai-chō, in Nara.
When he worked
The NBTHK puts his main activity around the Shōō era, but adds that, as many of his works have a very archaic look, some think he worked earlier. In other words: the date comes from the records and from the style, not from a dated blade.
The Tegai school
- The five schools of Yamato are Senjuin, Tegai, Taima, Hōshō and Shikkake.
- The Heibonsha encyclopaedia tells that the Tegai was a group of swordsmiths subject to the Tōdai-ji; that the name Kanenaga was repeated for several generations, until Nanbokuchō; that the family signed with the character 包 (kane): 包利 (Kanetoshi), 包清 (Kanekiyo), 包吉 (Kaneyoshi), 包重 (Kaneshige), 包真 (Kanezane), and that it lasted until Muromachi, longer than the other Yamato schools.
- The Nipponica, in a text by Ogasawara Nobuo, qualifies this: the records give Kanenaga as founder around Shōō, but there are works of the Tōdai-ji branch, such as those of Tōdai-ji Nobuie, that are no later than the beginning of the Kamakura period, so the school’s family tree “still requires study”. It adds that the Mino swordsmiths came from the school, that it had ties with the Kasuga shrine, and that in Muromachi only the Tegai survived: its works of that time are called Sue-Tegai.
Four ways of writing Tegai
Tegai is written 手掻 (Tegai) in the biographical dictionaries, 手搔 (Tegai) in the Heibonsha encyclopaedia, 転害 (Tegai) in the name of the Tōdai-ji gate and at the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and 天蓋 (Tegai) in his byname. It is not a discrepancy in the data, but in the spelling.