Ehhhh, What's Up Doc? 24Th Tokubetsu Juyo Paper

[nagamaki - Franco]

Morning entertainment. 

 

Nagayuki Oite Settsu Koku saku kore.

 

 

https://www.aoijapan.com/katana-nagayuki-oite-settsu-koku-saku-korenbthk-24th-tokubetsu-juyo-paper

 

 

 

 

[mywei]

Interesting sword. Blade with no flaws, huge nagasa from a Owazamono smith who is sought after but not often seen on the market.

[Pete Klein]

I am wondering what about it placed it at Tokubetsu Juyo?  That's a pretty rarefied group.

[Vermithrax16]

Magnificent! Dimensions are amazing, seen very few polishes I would imagine. I hate bo-hi though so I will pass

[Valric]

I'm surprised the market is willing to pay so much for a jo-jo saku Shinto smith. But then again, I know so little... 

[nagamaki - Franco]

I am wondering what about it placed it at Tokubetsu Juyo?  That's a pretty rarefied group.

 

Disclaimer, although not well versed in TokuJu, would have to believe in addition to all the i's dotted and t's crossed, a well rated smith, this must be an exemplary example of his workmanship combined with and in virtually perfect health. Perhaps, even still in its 1st or 2nd polish??? Known history??? All the bells and whistles except original koshirae???

[Vermithrax16]

Disclaimer, although not well versed in TokuJu, would have to believe in addition to all the i's dotted and t's crossed, a well rated smith, this must be an exemplary example of his workmanship combined with and in virtually perfect health. Perhaps, even still in its 1st or 2nd polish??? Known history??? All the bells and whistles except original koshirae???

I am not well versed in a lot of this, but to me the stand out is the health of the sword; Kasane at 0.78cm???? Yes, very few polishes. Maybe even only 2, this last one which is high grade IMO. 

 

Only offshoot on tree of smith Yasunaga, who was a student of Yasuhiro 1st gen Ishido School. I am starting to get nervous Ishido School is getting popular because I love the works.

[Ken-Hawaii]

I would be interested in finding out how many other Shinto & Shinshinto blades were awarded Tokuju in recent cycles - Darcy?

 

Ken

 

[Jean]

As said Pete, so rare, I think it is the first time I have seen this smith name

[Surfson]

To me, the price is more typical of juyo, so maybe you are not the only one surprised about the shinsa rating of this sword....

[Surfson]

Let me take that back - jet lag addled brain saw it as $20K, not $200K.  

[mywei]

For those interested, just came across another Nagayuki - 13th Juyo Token

 

http://www.nipponto.co.jp/swords3/JT327191.htm

[Vermithrax16]

For those interested, just came across another Nagayuki - 13th Juyo Token

 

http://www.nipponto.co.jp/swords3/JT327191.htm

Did a translate of the page, but was poorly translated for sure. Thanks for the post!

[Darcy]

The smith is appreciated for his ability to render blades in Ichimonji style. 

 

Always put the blade before the papers with the papers serving in an advisory role. 

 

There are a lot of Juyo and Tokuju papered blades that are difficult to separate from their brethren one level below. 

 

An Aoe wakizashi passed Tokuju in this last session that I would dare any of you, including me, to separate from a table of Tokubetsu Hozon wakizashi from this school. 

 

Consider if you have swords A and B, where A is mind blowing and B is pedestrian. If you sell them, A will get max price because it is mind blowing even if it has Hozon papers, and B will end up selling based on the strength of the papers. Anyone looking at A will know it will paper to the highest level where B people assume that it is maxed out where it is.

 

In this situation if you paper A to top level and leave B where it is, you will spend money and time on papers and get the same revenue as the status quo. If however you leave A where it is and work hard to paper B higher then you will get more revenue from the sale of both papers if you're successful in papering up B. 

 

If you own both, and submit both, you will compete against yourself and create more pressure for B to paper in light of the A submission. 

 

Keep this in mind then that there are blades that squeak over the line while blades below them may be much more worthy. 

 

I'm including a chart of the relative breakdowns for tradition in Juyo and Tokuju. It is obviously dominated by Koto and Bizen. There are a lot of good observations you can make from this. Reading the chart, at the end of the bars is a count and a percentage. If the percentage goes up at Tokuju it tells you this tradition becomes more dominant at higher levels. Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu go up, Shinto and Shinshinto go down. Shinshinto there is actually only one Tokuju, a daisho by Kiyomaro. 

 

If we adjust this further by eliminating Muromachi and younger works you can get a better idea of the various core Koto traditions and how they stack up (second chart set).

 

This said, it's very difficult for any Shinto work to get to Tokuju but there are still Tokuju works of all traditions that make me scratch my head. Especially in the last few shinsa. Where if you crack open the book and look at sessions 1 through 3 there is no doubt whatsoever about any of them.

 

I hesitate to isolate individual swords because I never know if I will be talking about a member's piece by accident, I have in the past picked stuff that was interesting to me and posted it here and had a member contact me after and say that was his piece (luckily it was positive). But there are a couple in this last Tokuju session and in the previous that I believe were not good enough for Juyo let alone Tokuju. I am relatively sure if those were my submissions then it would not have gone through. 

 

Some take-homes from this are that Bizen dominates everything. It does this by being excellent, most long lived, with the most pieces kept in original condition, and with a lot of extant examples.  Core Soshu by comparison basically has only 100 years to compete with 400 years of core Bizen works. Shinto having a couple of centuries and many smiths has a lot of Juyo, but you can see the fall-off at Tokuju. 

 

One metric to get a handle on as mentioned above is the difference in percentage (call it a footprint) at the two levels. If your footprint expands as the criteria get higher, it implies a higher appreciation for the tradition (or smith). The rate at which the footprint expands indicates then the relative importance of a tradition. Subtracting the Muromachi works, Soshu expands the most, followed by Yamashiro then Bizen. 

 

Normalizing all of this by works extant I think would further separate those three in this regard. But I don't have those numbers so I can't do the calculation... we can hope though that the Juyo counts represent a best guess for their relative abundance. 

 

Another thing to note is that age does play a factor and because of this Shinto and Shinshinto will always be behind the 8 ball in terms of papering higher and it shouldn't necessarily denigrate a particular work. We see that in the pricing of Juyo Shinto blades in the marketplace, where a great work by a great Shinto master which may not achieve Tokuju ever can easily outpace mumei Juyo works by great old schools. Paper does not imply price necessarily. And of course the poster child for this is Kiyomaro who has extremely high prices on average but at the same time makes for a very poor Tokuju candidate. The summary is that paper is not everything and is another nail in the coffin of the "pricing ladder theory." 

 

This is hand counting so there are a couple of discrepancies I need to look into in the numbers below. 

 

Full Juyo / Tokuju breakdown:

 

 

By percentages only:

 

 

Subtracting the Muromachi period koto works and all younger works to get an idea of the relative appreciation of the schools at their heights:

 

Full Juyo / Tokuju:

 

 

By percentages:

 

[Brian]

Damn...that project you have been working on has a WEALTH of info, and I bet 90% of it hasn't even been taken advantage of yet.
How are you eventually going to make use of all this data you have gathered Darcy? Seeing tables like this, that have not been published anywhere before, sure shows the potential of having all this info logged and available.

[Vermithrax16]

OUSTANDING Work, wow!

[Pete Klein]

[Darcy]

The end goal is an ultimate educational tool for everyone. But it is going to take a few more years to get there.

 

It can so far answer more questions than questions I can think of for it. 

[Surfson]

Darcy, that is nice work!  Have you ever calculated each school's success in TJ as a percentage of the total in both designations?  It is my impression that a higher percentage of Yamashiro and Soshu blades are TJ compared with Bizen.  

[Valric]

You can glean this information in the second chart, which confirms your impression.  

 

Take the percentages in the second chart, and divide the TJ with the J number to get the ratio of TJ to J normalized over the number of J and TJ blades. 

 

Yamashiro : 1.18

Bizen : 1.13

Soshu : 1.3 

 

You may then calculate the relative ratio between schools to calculate the relative footprint difference, which is a good proxy for appreciation. 

 

Soshu>Yamashiro>Bizen 

 

What I'm curious about is the distribution of smiths within each group. We can parse out how much of a school's success is due to general techniques compared to particularly outstanding smiths if we compare distributions over all blades by smiths. If say, Soshu group has 100 smiths, and 10 of them are responsible for 90% of the TJ, then we're dealing with a select few outlier smiths that are incredibly valued. If say, in the Bizen group, we have 1000 smiths, and 400 of them account for 90% of the TJ, we know it's the school's techniques which are valued most. In other words, we can assess how much these techniques have spread from the top smiths to become the school's signature versus insularity of excellence. Of course there is bias in this analysis as top mumei blades tend to be attributed to top smiths, but it would be enlightening nonetheless. 

 

I can think of a lot of questions...what else is recorded in the dataset? Shinsa session, blade age, mumei status? I would presume... 

[DirkO]

Hi Darcy, very educational graphs. A question if I may: your DB probably has the sessionnrs as well. Do you see an evolution there? More Bizen Juyo for a certain period of sessions for example,... This would be very usefull knowing the pet pieves of the more recent shinsa panels,or even if ones Juyo stands out for a certain period of Juyo sessions.

[Valric]

I agree with Dirk, it also crossed my mind. But I just can't get it to work without being overly biased. 

 

One could examine trends as a function of Shinsa session. But its very difficult to draw any conclusions w.r.t to the putatively evolving tastes from the jury. Could simply be that the supply of certain smiths/school is exhausted, or order effects in the Shinsa sessions (submissions are certainly not random over sessions, as earlier ones for sure had most of the top blades held by old families, which would skew the results). In any case I think the noise in such analysis would obscure whatever signal is left, its too easy to draw wrong conclusions. If anything, it tells us something about what sort of blades were brought first to shinsa, and this tells us about the tastes of powerful families in Japan, which is interesting in itself. Line graphs showing how the footprint of each school grew as a function of time (shinsa session) would certainly be interesting to look at, but conclusions should be measured. 

 

The challenge here is to think of what sort of analysis can be performed which are not overly tainted by the absence of the full dataset (e.g knowledge, and numbers about what failed). The second challenge is that Shinsa submissions are not random as said above. It's possible to heuristically get over this if we have a reasonable counterfactual in the form of a prior to implement in the analysis, but its not easy.