Tachi (Mei Mitsutada)

The Founder of Osafune, Marked by a Paulownia Crest

The tang bears a single name, Mitsutada, the smith remembered as the effective founder of the Osafune school in Bizen province, in the east of present-day Okayama Prefecture. Working in the mid-Kamakura period of the thirteenth century, he led the school that would dominate Japanese swordmaking for centuries. This tachi is one of several signed Mitsutada blades preserved across the country, and its mounting sets it apart from the rest of the swords held by Kishū Tōshōgū.

The blade runs to about 74.1 centimetres along the edge. Its temper line is a clove-pattern chōji, the bold, flowering hamon that made Mitsutada's name. Where most of the shrine's blades wear the Tokugawa hollyhock crest, this one is dressed with scattered paulownia crests in gold lacquer and dark shakudō, a design that points toward a different chapter in its history.

The sword belongs to Kishū Tōshōgū in Wakayama City and is kept on deposit at the Wakayama Prefectural Museum.

Why It Matters

Mitsutada stands at the head of the Osafune line, the single most influential school in the long history of the Japanese sword. His work ranges from restrained early forms to broad, dramatically tempered blades, and his bold clove pattern became a model for the smiths who followed. By tradition Mitsutada blades were favoured by the warlord Oda Nobunaga, though many are said to have been lost in the fire at Honnō-ji.

The paulownia crest on the mounting is telling. The paulownia was associated with the imperial court and with Toyotomi Hideyoshi rather than the Tokugawa hollyhock that adorns the shrine's other blades. The sword is traditionally said to have passed from Nobunaga to Hideyoshi and then to Tokugawa Ieyasu, a chain of ownership that is recorded by tradition rather than firmly documented. It was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1950.

What to Look For

The blade is shown mainly through special exhibitions at the Wakayama Prefectural Museum, which gathered the Kishū Tōshōgū swords in 2024.

Two features reward attention. First, the temper line: Mitsutada's chōji is broad and confident, the clove heads larger and more emphatic than the smaller pattern of earlier Bizen work. Second, the mounting. Look for the paulownia crest rather than the hollyhock, and let it prompt the question of how a Toyotomi-associated blade came to rest in a Tokugawa shrine. The traditional answer threads through three of the great names of the warring states period.

Kishū Tōshōgū itself sits above Wakanoura bay at the top of the 108-step Samurai Slope. The painted and gilded halls of 1621 give it the name the Nikkō of the West. The grounds are free; the inner shrine charges a modest admission.