Brian

https://www.igavelauctions.com/auctions/japanese-swords-and-asian-works-of-art-from-the-collection-of-michael-quigley https://jssus.org/1976_Bulletin.pdf

I know it may not be much extra, but I'll add lifetime Gold membership for the winner of the auction too. At $60/year, that may help someone a bit.

Easier said than done.

Agree with Ray, and it is almost unheard of to find fakes like this in Japan, since you risk jail time. More likely this was pickup up outside of Japan.

My thanks go out to Sam and the donor (again) Really blown away by the generosity of the members here. This is a lovely Showato with a nice hamon and would make a nice display or collector sword for anyone collecting WW2 swords. Hope it find a very good home.

Yip...I am aware guys. Rebooted the server twice, but seems we were up to 100% CPU useage. And the hosts seem to be fairly unhelpful, saying it's self managed and it's my job to analyze and sort out. Pretty stressful. I am talking to a developer to do some paid support and speed up the upgrade and get Cloudflare working. I am sorry about this, but please bear with me for the next week or so. I can assure you one way or another we'll get this sorted and get back to fast and reliable service. I think we have grown so large that it's time to throw some more money at this and get everything updated. I can't even tell you why it is suddenly working ok, except maybe something was hammering us and is now asleep. lol I'm on it. If we have downtime, just know I am working on it, and we will be up and fast again soon. Will keep updates here.

Can we get a few overall shots of the entire item, not so close up please?

I am certain there will be, but it's a huge update, and I have yet to play with all the features. So time will tell but I suspect there will be a lot of improvements for everyone. Gold members also currently enjoy larger file sizes and can post more images. Plus many more features.

Kinda a significant find. One of the better of the WW2 swords and has some decent value. Follow the advise above, and don't clean anything except careful oiling of the blade. You have a few thousand $'s there, so time to sit back and take things slowly.

The fact that there are infinitely more militaria collectors than there are Japanese sword collectors speaks a lot. Most of those people collect history, not items. And I daresay that man of them have far better investments than many of us Nihonto collectors. And for many people, investment aspect is something that cannot just be ignored in the name of art. But hey...as they say, "You do you"

Indeed, and it's because searching through the hundreds of thousands of posts is one of the most resource intensive things that can happen to the forum. So it it is a necessary limit, until we can afford to have better hosting without going full commercial. Of course there is always the Gold membership that reduces search intervals down to a more comfortable limit, and I think $5/month is easily worth the convenience. Brian

Honestly, what's the point of trying to translate a mei that is clearly cast or stamped in, and not carved? I wouldn't go past that point before calling this a fake. Sorry.

Well, you got your wish, your account is gone. However you do NOT get to insist we delete all your posts, as that messes with topics and threads and makes some conversations nonsensical. So no..I don't remove someone's past here. In cases where I am asked nicely, I will delete certain posts on request, with a reason. But not when someone demands I delete past threads. And no, they aren't "your" posts anymore. Read the conditions when you join. Stuff posted here becomes open info, you don't get to remove at all. Not sure what led to this tantrum, but good luck with whatever other forum you found.

Jacques, that's an opinion. And one not shared by most.

Going to look at pushing forward the update and maybe moving towards Cloudflare etc, so see if I can mitigate the hammering on the server.