Now For Something Different - Battle Axe Naginata

[Surfson]

During the course of buying a collection from the heirs of an old time collector who passed away, I have run across some very interesting items that I thought I would share.  I will let the NMB members voice their thoughts about these pieces.  They are not the usual samurai artifacts that I typically run across.  This item appears to be a naginata that is reminiscent of a battle axe.  It has old NBTHK papers to Chikushi (Kyushu) I really hope that some of you can tell us more about it.  

[DirkO]

I think it's remeniscent of how earlier naginata developped partly from farming tools. If I remember correctly AOI had a similar one for sale from Saneo , some years ago.

[Teimei]

Here is the version by Saneo:

 

https://www.aoijapan.net/masterpiecesaneo/

[Surfson]

Thanks for the link Florian!  Both are referred to as Chikushi Naginata, which is interesting to me.  I wonder if they were only made in Kyushu?  The Saneo one went for big bucks, but it is signed by Saneo, who was a student together with Kiyomaro.  

[Teimei]

Saneo was the elder brother of Kiyomaro and quite famous himself. He was the more conservative and reliable version of Kiyomaro .

[SwordGuyJoe]

I remember that Saneo. I thought it was cool then and still do. Nice pickup!

[Darcy]

Not only co-students but Masao (Saneo) is his brother. 

 

I would like to point out a couple of subtle things like

 

   
 

NBTHK Koshu Tokubetsu Kicho Paper.

 

 

And also that if you want to fake a guy this is a good target as it is hard to find his source material. 

 

It is 2017. 

 

 

37 YEARS SINCE THESE PAPERS BECAME ABSOLUTE GARBAGE 

 

For anyone who is sending $30,000 on a blade   already in Japan  that has green papers  and has been sitting there for 37 years while everyone knows green papers are garbage   and it was a valuable thing that everyone would doubt because of the green papers   you have two choices, either try to sell to Japanese with green papers or new papers and Kiyomaro connection 

 

Or else...

 
  SELL TO A FOREIGNER!!!!   

 

 

 

Left and right examples are Juyo. They represent some style change in the bottom character. This middle example is horse s**t that doesn't match the Sane on either and is confused rather than confident like the one on the right. The bottom character is different on the rightmost, this is I think his intermediate and the left is the final. But the middle character is just lost, and the bottom looks hard to execute and does not match. 

 

Big name + Green papers + In Japan 37 years of opportunities to fix the papers + mei doesn't match published examples + You want a lot of money = ___________________________________ ?

 

Put a modern paper on it and it becomes a reference work.

 

Also, note that the most beauty in this one is in the oshigata. This smith was excellent. 

[Gilles]

On one Japanese book of my book collection this type of naginata is called "satsuma naginata". this type of naginata are quite scarce and usually command high prices.

[Surfson]

That is an interesting analysis Darcy.  I know that we have been around and around with the green papers, but this collection is an interesting example of the phenomenon.  The original collector bought many swords straight out of Japan during that period and had many, many swords with green papers.  He never sent them back to Japan and papered them again.  It is clear that a dealer or two stuck him with some swords with bad papers. However, after he died, about a decade or so ago, his heirs took many of the better named swords to the NTHK, knowing about the issues with the green papers.  They didn't want to go to the expense and trouble of sending them to Japan just to get papers.  Anyway,  only one or two of the swords failed to paper with the NTHK.  In several cases, the NTHK papers were more conservative than the green papers (for instance, a Nobukuni that papered to Shikibu instead of the shodai or a Sukesada that papered about a century later, or a Yukimitsu that papered to Motomitsu....), and in a couple of cases, the NTHK papers were to a more important maker.

 

To me, this illustrates that the attitude that all green papers are garbage (to use your word) should be adopted with caution.  These swords were cloistered and never appraised again after their original shinsa getting them green papers. This set of swords is probably a good representative sample of the green papers of the time, and only a small percentage were bad.  

 

There is a question that I have been wanting to ask, and you may know the answer.  One of the green papers that I have was issued very early, I think early in the early 70s.  At what point in time did the bad green papers start to emerge? Was it later in the 70s or 80s or are the papers questionable throughout the whole era?  When did the Yakuza get involved and the corruption take hold in earnest?  I just never have heard people discuss the date of the green papers as possibly informative.

[Darcy]

Robert, not commenting on your green papers, but commenting on the Saneo. 

 

I haven't seen yours so I have no comment on it as I have no data. 

 

Just that a large number of green papers have suspect opinions that will not be confirmed presently. Regardless of the provenance of anything with green papers, one must take it only as a "slightly informed opinion." If the blade is in Japan 37 years after they were determined as a class to be unreliable, then it is very close to a guarantee that the best answer for "who made this" is anyone except for who is named on the paper.

 

A blade that was papered in the 70s and has not been back to Japan since, the papers are suspect still because of the same reason the NBTHK got rid of them in 1980: vast quantities were no good. 

 

Anything US based that didn't go back is not exempted from that class-wide issue that caused them to be disowned. But those in Japan now with green papers and big names, have no excuse because the owner will make more money with very little work and protect his reputation when selling if he simply takes two months to confirm it.

 

If i tell you, wait two months and I can get you $10,000 extra and all of us can relax with our reputations intact if we just upgrade this paper, you and anyone reasonable, will agree to this. If everything is OK with the blade, we will all make more money and we all (owner, future owner, and middleman) reduce our risk and potential loss of reputation.

 

It is what we call, a no-brainer. 

 

When outside of Japan and never been back you need to use your judgment on a case by case basis, but you still deal with that general fudge factor of a great many of them are no good, so many that the NBTHK deleted the category.

 

Again, comments above are directed at the Saneo as it is being used as a reference piece for this smith, while the signature does not match reference examples, while it is hard to find reference examples, while it is being sold attached to the name Kiyomaro, while it has green papers, while it is expensive, while the oshigata looks a lot better than the blade. 

 

This does not mean that it is surely no good.

 

It is a series of caution flags and when so many come up in a row then the reasonable person needs to accept caution and put an asterisk beside it. 

 

...

 

There is no such thing as any reliable green paper as the primary issue is that they could be written at regional offices, or so I understand the problem. So they basically lack expertise and were subject to corruption. Any particular green paper or any others of the less-than-Juyo classed papers from these eras, what it suffers from is going to be a case by case basis.

 

If you can look at your paper and determine it was issued by the main branch then better experts would have looked at it. 

 

Outside of Tokubetsu Juyo there seems to be a general theme of relaxing standards that applies more as the papers go down in levels in the 1970s. Maybe the introduction of Tokubetsu Juyo and now the focus on these being centerpiece swords contributes to that. It seems at least to have caused Juyo to relax. 

 

People do not believe me sometimes when I talk about this and people do not grasp it entirely. Over time the judges change and standards change at the NBTHK and mid 70s era is a low bar for Juyo to cross. I have had people on this website come and attack me for saying that. 

 

[Edit: I use "you" a lot below, this is not aimed at anyone in particular, please read this as "one must" instead of "you must" when I'm talking like this...]

 

It doesn't mean that every 1970s Juyo is bad any more than it means that every 1970s green paper is bad. It means that the low bar for Juyo is very low indeed, so low that some of those blades will not pass Juyo today. Did you get one from session 26 that will not pass today or did you get one of the best from session 26 that will pass Tokuju today? This is why you need to study and not just believe that Juyo A and Juyo B are equivalent. They are not.

 

Similarly the green papers, the bar was so low that fakes got through. 

 

For those that still don't believe, this chart shows the number of Juyo accepted in every session from beginning to now. There are major trends and minor trends and pretty obvious.

 

Juyo volume 58 has 47 swords in it by my count. 9 of those passed Tokuju over two sessions of Tokuju.

 

Juyo volume 24 has 482 swords in it by my count. 28 passed Tokuju over I think about 21 sessions of Tokuju. 

 

So 20% of Juyo 58 passed Tokuju after two attempts.

 

5% of Juyo 24 passed Tokuju over 21 attempts. 

 

That tells you something about the average quality of blades entered into those two sessions and indicates that no, they are not equivalent in the least. Both have top line items that went on to pass Tokuju, but the average blade in 24 is far below the average blade in 58. 

 

That blade in 24, the odds are that it would not pass in 58 if submitted. Stuff in 58 is very close to meeting Tokuju standards on average. Having a juyo 58 is like having a mini-Tokuju. 

 

And the blades from the 70s, they require a lot of knowledge on the part of the person looking at them to determine if it truly meets the standards of Juyo from a modern perspective.

 

The numbers do not lie.

 

You need to put your thinking cap on hard, retain scepticism and make conservative judgments. I do this all the time, I am acutely aware of these things and I am spending my own money too and obviously I am researching the hell out of trying to make good decisions. Even so people who don't study the issue will sit down and have a good fight over it. 

 

For me I caught onto the shifting Juyo standards when a dealer calculated the market value of a sword I had in front of him by looking up the session and the attribution about 15 years ago before even looking at the blade. That's when I knew that you had to factor in the session. From there I wanted to understand why, and to look at the evidence that supports the why. And the evidence is there if you get to see enough of the blades and then if you look at the raw data and what it points at.

 

If you want to whip it out and piss into the wind of the facts you can in fact succeed. As can be seen in Juyo 24, 28 times, brave men pissed into the wind and succeed. But generally when you piss into the wind it ends up on your face especially if you don't know just exactly the tricks and techniques involved in doing so. 

 

Many of those weak Juyo ended up in the US market because they could be acquired in Japan for cheap, and then sold overseas as Juyo on the strength of the papers because people do not bother to study and want simple answers to complex questions. One of those simple answers is that there are four price categories that correspond to the four levels of modern NBTHK papers and it is patently false.

 

One dealer will use that to attack another dealer's sword and win a customer by saying, "You don't want to buy that Tokubetsu Hozon blade it is too expensive for Tokubetsu Hozon. Here, let me sell you this Juyo blade. Now you have a Juyo." Then he can whip out a session 24 that won't pass today either and is JINO. Meanwhile the TH blade with a good smith, ubu, long, nice horimono, nice koshirae, all the bells and whistles... that gets shot down as the collector is hypnotized by the yellow paper waved in front of his eyes. 

 

Getting back to your green, nobody will ever know how good it is until someone tries to get it through the NBTHK. Every paper is some level of opinion and needs to be taken with some amount of salt, large or small quantities, and never can someone let their discretion slip.

 

I am very concerned though with my comments above that people will take it as a statement of "if it is Juyo 24 then it's no good" and I am not saying this at all. I am saying that the standards for these sessions were lower. 

 

If the most beautiful girl in the world goes to the high school beauty contest she is going to win though the standards are not high. But she also might win Miss Universe. The runner up though at the high school beauty contest might not even get into the competition for Miss Universe. It is up to you, as a student, to look at an individual sword and say, "Is this one the champion or is it a runner up that won't even get into the competition now?" 

 

To answer that question means internalizing a lot of knowledge. 

 

There are no simple and easy answers to any of this and our desire to make abstractions and make it easily digested and to have simple rules we can always apply is human nature but that is how people end up making bad decisions. Abstractions work, but sometimes you need to unplug them and not try to hammer a square peg into a round hole because your board has only 5 round holes in it. If the round peg fits into the round hole it's fine, if the square peg doesn't fit, hammering it won't necessary lead to the right result.

 

Some answers can only ever be given as probabilities. Like the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. You know one, the other one is just a curve. A green paper is a curve with probabilities of being legitimate and illegitimate. In Japan now the probability of any existing green paper is approaching 0 for being legitimate because it's not reasonable to believe that nobody will act in their best interests over 37 years to answer the question and remove the risk and get the max value out of the blade. 

 

But even removing that easy opportunity the green paper is still just a probability function, that has got a substantial probability of turning up bad because it is what it is. 1970s era green is not reliable and will never be. It could still be ok, and the only way to know is by sending it in. 

 

[Jean]

To illustrate Darcy's post:

 

My Ryokai passed juyo in the 24th session, Price reflected the Session and the smith. I asked for Tanobe sayagaki:

 

http://www.militaria.co.za/nmb/topic/17307-translation-assistance/?hl=%2Bsayagaki+%2Bryokai

 

This one will never pass Tokuju.

 

Morality: You must be aware of what you buy

[Valric]

Very interesting however the argument hinges on a key assumption... 

 

What's the correlation between number of sword accepted to juyo per session and number of Tokuju upgrades of those same sessions? if its very high then we can use the amount as proxy, but I would expect that its not the case. Early session probably have a overwhelming conversion rate compared to latter ones. For various reasons I'm somewhat skeptical that it's a very good proxy at present. For instance, I do not believe session 61 Juyo are much better than session 57. Since you do not know the amount of swords submitted (or do you?) to calculate the pass rate, it's hard to say whether a high output sessions are due to low standards or high inputs. And even if you did, the problem of the average input quality still looms. 

 

You can avoid these confounding factors if you get the Tokuju conversion rate per juyo session then you should get a good idea of how much you can derive the ballpark value of a sword from a given session. Have you assigned a unique ID to each sword such that you can track how many have upgraded to Tokuju per session? That would really be fantastically informative. 

 

I understand however that the work involved in attributing a unique ID is pretty daunting by hand (and supremely annoying...). But if you filter by smith with some measurements you could get a pretty good guesstimate of what went where. And this can be automated such that the search automatically goes through all possible sets to find a match, or give you a degree of match such that you can incorporate uncertainty into the ID, looping over the 900 or so Tokuju. That way if the match is uncertain you can give it a lower weight into the calculation of conversion rates. 

[Surfson]

Darcy, I have no quarrel with any of the things you said, and most of it was informative as well as sobering.  Can you tell me what the axes of the chart are though?  I thought at first it would be subsequent success to TJ of Juyo blades in the various sessions, but am not sure.  Cheers, bob