Yagyu/Owari?

[Toryu2020]

Tim I’m skeptical, is there a source that says Yamakichibe made Tsuba for the Yagyu?

 

-t

[Tim Evans]

2 hours ago, Toryu2020 said:

Tim I’m skeptical, is there a source that says Yamakichibe made Tsuba for the Yagyu?

 

 

Hi Tom,

 

There are a few mentions. Okamoto in Owari to Mikawa no Tanko calls signed Yagyu tsuba, Yagyu utsushi, I think meaning that that some Owari smiths made Yagyu-like tsuba for themselves and not as commissioned pieces for the Yagyu family. Sakura Yamakichibe is mentioned in the Yagyu Utsushi section on page 51 of the Sesko translation of Owari to Mikawa no Tanko.

 

This Yamakichibe (as well as a group of other Owari smiths) is mentioned as signing Yagyu-like tsuba in the following references:

• Tsuba, an Aesthetic Study by Dr. Torigoye and Robert Haynes, page 95 -softcover issue
• Sukashi Tsuba, (gold book) by Sasano, page 18
• Japanese Sword Guard Masterpieces (silver book) by Sasano, the Yagyu introduction after #172

Also, Bob Haynes made a copy of a Yagyu design or inventory book while studying with Dr. Torigoye. Entry #153 states "Yamakichibe saku, no signature", implying, I think, commissioned by the Yagyu, so not a Yagyu utsushi. 

 

I have not seen the Yamakichibe enso tsuba in person, or know its dimensions or metal, so I am speculating that it may be Yagyu utsushi. It does have a pattern resemblance to a few in the Yagyu design book, and does not look like a typical Yamakichibe. I am not sure how the NBTHK would handle a Yagyu utsushi. Would they say iron tsuba, signed (so-and-so), design of (whatever) and ignore the Yagyu connection? 

Edited yesterday at 01:43 AM by Tim Evans

[GRC]

2 hours ago, Tim Evans said:

Here is another signed Yamakichibe

That mei, I am afraid, is best described as a "hot mess" and none of the three kanji align with anything from the Yamakichibei smiths... not even with their smaller sized atelier works that show more variation in their mei.

Just looking at the mei on the round enso tsuba (not even taking into account the tsuba itself in terms of style and execution of the plate, and even the hitsu-ana shapes) I think we could definitively say that is not a YKB tsuba.

It's a very nice enso piece though. 

Personally, I don't see much overlap, if any, between YKB and Yagyu... so that "connection" may be apocryphal and likely has no real foundation in fact, other than "it is said that...".

 

Re. the enso motif: when I said I had not seen another with the enso motif, I meant specifically in the "square with notched corners shape" (sumiiri-kaku-gata), otherwise there are many diverse examples of enso motifs.

 

As an aside but still on topic, I have just recently seen two Kanayama tsuba with this sumiiri-kaku-gata shape, but with the more typical Kanayama tekkotsu on the rim as opposed to the more Yagyu looking layers you showed in yours with the open grid sukashi @Tim Evans, which is an interesting piece  

One of the ones I saw had a slightly more elaborate grid pattern (a cross like yours but with "windows" in each arm of the cross shape). 

 

So I think it is now safe to assume that there was a stylistic overlap between the two groups at this point in time (sometime in the early 1600s to mid 1600s)... and/or that some smiths working in the Kanayama style were commissioned or recruited to make some tsuba in the Yagyu style (or so the legend goes...without any period documentation to verify it).

 

Here's the other one of the two Kanayama with that shape:

 

Note: Sato Kanzan said Kanayama, NBTHK said "den Kanayama" (which makes some "sense" because this doesn't fit in the standard preconceived "Kanayama" box, likely due to the atypical shape).

I feel like this tsuba (and the other one I saw recently) are physical "evolutionary missing links" that show some stylistic crossover between Kanayama and Yagyu that reflect an aesthetic shift/movement at a specific point in time.

 

Also Note: the NBTHK is merely offering an opinion on unsigned tsuba from this period (for a hefty price). And, there is no certainty in the matter, as demonstrated by the countless examples of NBTHK papers that contradict each other by showing virtually identical tsuba with different attributions. The NBTHK are just people (often with differing opinions) who are assigning attributions within an imperfect system of classification with imperfect sorting criteria. The tsuba themselves have characteristics that are more fluid and more diverse than the current system allows for.

The system needs work.  

[Curran]

42 minutes ago, GRC said:

That mei, I am afraid, is best described as a "hot mess" and none of the three kanji align with anything from the Yamakichibei smiths... not even with their smaller sized atelier works that show more variation in their mei.

Just looking at the mei on the round enso tsuba (not even taking into account the tsuba itself in terms of style and execution of the plate, and even the hitsu-ana shapes) I think we could definitively say that is not a YKB tsuba.

 

 

Yes!  Thank god or [danke gott] that someone else said this.

Nice tsuba with a "hot mess" signature. 

I feel sorry for the tsuba and want to give it a proper burial.  

[GRC]

Interestingly enough, this just popped up... a signed modern casting, in a box printed with "arts and crafts Yagyu tsuba" that comes with a general information sheet about Yagyu tsuba:

Apparently produced by "Ieda"? I have no idea what company or organization that name belongs to.

Edited 17 hours ago by GRC

[ROKUJURO]

They used a special technique to make it extra ugly!  

[GRC]

OK, I apologize for that... so I'll attempt to clean up this page with a proper "wow"

 

Edited 15 hours ago by GRC

[Steve Waszak]

Joining the party late here... 

 

Just wanted to agree with Glen and Curran on that "Yamakichibei" Yagyu piece that Tim posted the image of.  I really like the tsuba overall;  too bad it's been marred by a "problematic" mei.  

 

Just a thought on the matter of whether Sakura Yamakichibei may have made tsuba for the Yagyu.  Setting aside the published content stating that he did, there is at least some plausibility in the idea.  He lived in the right place and at the right time to have done so, and it is known that "Yagyu" tsuba were commissioned to be made by various craftsmen in Owari in the latter 17th century.  These "are thought/known" to include Sakura Yamakichibei, Ohno smiths, Hoan Kanenobu, Toda Hikozaemon, and Fukui Jizaemon.  According to Jim Gilbert in his article on Yagyu (2005 publication for the Northern California Japanese Sword Club in coordination with the American branch of the NBTHK and an exhibition of Yagyu sword guards at the 2005 San Francisco Token Kai), "One version of the [Yagyu] design book mentions Akasaka makers," and the renowned swordsmith Kotetsu is speculated to have been commissioned to make tsuba for the Yagyu, among others.  I have long observed the varied presentation of the construction and finish seen in Yagyu (even just early Yagyu) works, and have speculated that the reason for this is probably that many different smiths were commissioned to produce Yagyu tsuba over the years.  

 

For any who are especially interested in Yagyu tsuba, acquiring the aforementioned 2005 publication is a must.  Some excellent photography here, too.  

[ROKUJURO]

3 hours ago, GRC said:

OK, I apologize for that... so I'll attempt to clean up this page with a proper "wow"

 

 

 

That is much better! Thank you Glen!

[GRC]

Hey @Steve Waszak, thanks for joining in 

 

So here's a definite problem with the whole papering business for "Yagyu".

The fact that there were so many smiths commissioned to do Yagyu style tsuba (with no extant all-encompassing pattern book), makes it nearly impossible for any organization to identify Yagyu commissioned pieces unless they fit neatly into the more obvious patterns. 

It becomes essentially a black box of unknowns, and organizations like the NBTHK have demonstrated time and again that they don't deal well with unknowns. If it doesn't fit in the preconceived box, they don't know what to do with it and have a range of attributions outcomes. 

And in the face of unknowns, the NBTHK (and collectors) have a clear pattern of reverting to what has already been "established"... which creates its own feedback loop that closes off any oppenness to broadening the group through comparative analysis. i.e "this is not like the others that we already certified, so it it not one of these..."  

 

It's like those two small, but unusual "Owari" tsuba I showed you in San Fran whose aesthetic aligns somewhere between YKB (in sukashi aesthetic), Kanyama (in surface treatment) and Yagyu (in stylistic sensibility of the bamboo type and the oar & waves type)...

,

 

and the one "Kanayama" that shares so much aesthetic overlap with Sasano's published "oar & waves" tsuba that he attributes to Yagyu.

I always thought the oar & waves stood apart from all the other Yagyu examples, so much so that it should probably be separated out into a separate group.

 

So it's another "hot mess" really... in terms of assigning an attribution because there sure aren't any mei on any of these (not even a messy one! )

 

Again these are the kinds of examples that strongly point out the flaws and lack of depth in the current system that was primarily established by Akiyama in the early 1900s, but has remained relatively ":fixed" until Sasano's tinkering and resetting of the timeline and creation of "ko-shoami"... a whole other bucket of worms that doesn't need to be addressed in this Yagyu thread. 

 

[GRC]

Clearly there was "something in the water" in those late Momoyama to early Edo years that led to all these...

A bunch of wild individualism and newfound artistic freedom, with a solid dash of irreverent Kabukimono counterculture....

 

Too bad it all got shut down after the mid 1600s, with a "moon-race"-like shift in focus toward craftsmanship rather than artistic expression 

[Steve Waszak]

YES to all of the above.  

 

An interesting (and perhaps very productive) pursuit would be to work backwards in time in an effort to locate objectively factual information (e.g. unimpeachably reliable period documentation)  about all tosogu artists, groups, and "schools."  How far back could we go before running into the "it-is-said" abyss?  Of course, the results of such an excursion would be quite ragged, with some traditions (e.g. the Higo smiths) likely having much more reliable information about them going back than, say, the early Akasaka group. or the early Umetada masters.  Once the ends of reliable certitude are reached, and knowing that any artist or group of artists had to have had some sort of influencing agent(s) -- whether formal teachers or some other inspirational force -- then informed (we hope) speculation based on knowledge of cultural contexts of various kinds could be presented as further "time travel" is undertaken.  

 

I have long maintained that the problem being referred to regarding NBTHK (or other) papers is much less about such papers being issued than it is about those papers being seen by the community as factually correct and truthful.  If it could be universally recognized that the NBTHK is simply providing an opinion (albeit a rather expensive one, in some cases), and that this opinion can be and has been incorrect on occasion, we would be in a better place with all this.  A related issue here is that the NBTHK, to my knowledge, does not provide written explanations, reasoning, or strong references to support the conclusions they draw in delivering their judgments.  Absent this, the opinions they offer lose a lot of weight (in my view), especially when we're talking about Hozon Paper-level tosogu submissions for mumei items.  How much time are the shinsa teams really devoting to examining and analyzing such pieces?  This dynamic, when combined with the entrenched iemoto-ism of always following what previous teachers and senior scholars determined, results in a morass of misinformation, contradiction, and undermined confidence in the capacity of such expert bodies to provide guidance and learning opportunities.  This is why, in my opinion, it is so important to invest in our own studying and research (which may include NBTHK results, but not without a dose of healthy skepticism), not only of the objects themselves, but also of the various contexts (historical, cultural, political, etc...) that gave rise to these objects in various regions and in different periods.  This last -- the deep consideration of multifarious contexts as they pertain to tosogu study -- is one that I do not see given sufficient focus and energy in many discussions and publications.  However, I do not have access to (many?) Japanese sources that may indeed feature such an effort.  If anyone does, and could recommend these, I would welcome knowing about them.     

 

 

 

 

 

[GRC]

24 minutes ago, Steve Waszak said:

How much time are the shinsa teams really devoting to examining and analyzing such pieces?  This dynamic, when combined with the entrenched iemoto-ism of always following what previous teachers and senior scholars determined, results in a morass of misinformation, contradiction, and undermined confidence in the capacity of such expert bodies to provide guidance and learning opportunities.

 Couldn't agree more

 

25 minutes ago, Steve Waszak said:

An interesting (and perhaps very productive) pursuit would be to work backwards in time in an effort to locate objectively factual information (e.g. unimpeachably reliable period documentation)  about all tosogu artists, groups, and "schools."  How far back could we go before running into the "it- is-said" abyss? 

As you know, this is my main focus at the moment. I've already done a ton of digging and hit some of those limits you mention... it's truly shocking to see what our current "accepted understanding" is built upon. It's very much a house of cards built on some very tenuous assumptions at its base.

I'm trying to map out all the links and inter-dependent suppositions that connect everything together and it's turning out to be a spider web that is built on a mix of logic and illogic, which makes it inherently harder to break through and correct. The easiest way to convince someone of a mistruth is to weave in enough facts to make the untruth believable.

"if this is true then this must be true..." ,except the first truism isn't based on anything reliably factual at all. 

 

Indeed everything has to line up with other social, cultural, economic, political, and artistic factors of the time period in question.

If those are missing from any proposed conclusion that is being asserted as fact, then it's a pretty empty conclusion in that, at best, it's just a hypothesis without any verifiable support.

The onus is then to build up enough evidence to support, or modify, or refute the initial hypothesis... i.e. the scientific method (sorry...I know that's a set of words to be avoided these days )

 

From what I have read, I feel like that was the original intent of Akiyama back in the early 1900s, but the majority of people have lost sight of this and turned everything into dogmatic "truths". 

The goal should always be to build around verifiable facts, or in the absence of that, accumulate a whole lot of indirect support from external societal factors that line up with a particular style/type of tsuba to help position it among others. That's the only way to reorganize this mess.

[Curran]

4 hours ago, GRC said:

Indeed everything has to line up with other social, cultural, economic, political, and artistic factors of the time period in question.

If those are missing from any proposed conclusion that is being asserted as fact, then it's a pretty empty conclusion in that, at best, it's just a hypothesis without any verifiable support.

The onus is then to build up enough evidence to support, or modify, or refute the initial hypothesis... i.e. the scientific method (sorry...I know that's a set of words to be avoided these days )

 

From what I have read, I feel like that was the original intent of Akiyama back in the early 1900s, but the majority of people have lost sight of this and turned everything into dogmatic "truths". 

The goal should always be to build around verifiable facts, or in the absence of that, accumulate a whole lot of indirect support from external societal factors that line up with a particular style/type of tsuba to help position it among others. That's the only way to reorganize this mess.

 

I'm agreeing too much with Glen and Steve.

I am not sure how much else to say.

It is easy and lazy to trust the NBTHK opinions, but they haven't been very good for at least 10 -12 years now.

Difficult to get modern collectors to self educate and trust their own opinions.