Guido

Mikaeri 見返 - "looking back" – a passer-by will not realize he has been cut by it, but will fall in half when turning back. Presented by the Hosokawa to Sakai Tadayoshi. It was stolen in 1986 from the Sakai family, but retrieved under undisclosed circumstances.

A friend of mine used to own a jūyō-bunkazai, and it was kept by a sword dealer.

To quote myself:

May I ask what your source is, Piers? To my knowledge, fixed property tax is only levied on land, houses and buildings, and tangible business assets.

In 2005 (IIRC), I was offered a Ōmiya Morikage by a Japanese dealer; that sword came as a battle prize to Uesugi Kenshin, and remained in the Uesugi family for centuries. It came in a very old wooden box that was stored in an almost as old black lacquer box with the Uesugi kamon. The jūyō papers confirmed the story behind it. 50,000 US$. I had to pass. In 2006, that dealer put it up for auction at Christie's in London - it remained unsold. A very fine sword that would have fit right into my collection, and I would have loved to own it, but no one was willing to pay almost double the "regular" price. Great provenance, exciting story of how it came into the possession of Kenshin, but there's a limit for how much one is willing to pay because of who owned it. It simply wasn't in the same league as the Yamatorige.

Hey, don't be too hard on yourself - NMB is not a competition*! The shikami is one of the more rare mythical creatures, and can be easily confused for an oni or shishi or something else along those lines. That I was able to identify it just shows what a warehouse of randomly stored, more or less useless, bits of info on obscure things Japanese my brain turned into. I'm not sure if I should be thankful or alarmed. *I know that some forumites have a different take on that.

Actually it's not an oni 鬼, but a shikami 魅. They are easily distinguished by their horns. Oni have square heads with small, conical, stubby horns. The shikami has the face of a shishi, and the ears and horns of an oxen, and is frequently depicted without a lower jaw (but not always). One will only see the head of a shikami, but never the body. Shikami are sometimes described as onimen shishi 鬼面獅子, "devil/demon-faced lions". From the Nambokuchō period on, the shikami was one of the favorite subjects of maedate. Here's one on a suit of armor of mine:

With that caveat no meaningful answer is possible.

Actually the NBTHK/Sword Museum keeps the blades below 55% RH, and at about 21° Centigrade - that's why you should wear a sweater when visiting them .

Funny, on my computer the arrow I added shows up, on my tablet it shows to the right ...?

I cropped the seal and rotated it to the right orientation - I think ... Seal script, the lower left character could be 山 (yama/san).

From Markus Sesko's "Encyclopedia of Japanese Swords":

I accept I think we both saw it at the DTI special exhibition room: Kiyomaro,

Forever stuck at stage 3 of the Kübler-Ross model ...

Maybe 兼重?

The one you're digging yourself into deeper and deeper? Suriage on a katana doesn't change the fact that it's still a katana. Suriage on a naginata changes it into a katana/wakizashi, hence the term naoshi. Nice try.

Nowadays I'm happy if I remember my own birthday, let alone when the NBTHK changed designations , but IIRC it was in the eighties. I'v never heard about/seen that. If written 長刀, the correct reading is actually chōtō - however, it's also a seldomly used character combination that's pronunced (and means) naginata. Do you have any examples of them using this recently?

That's up to the moderators. Besides, this thread is still very much on topic with many well made points (except for the usual outlandish claims by Jacques). What actually overshadows an academic discussion are remarks like "this blade was made for brutal attacks".

Well, nagamaki do exist for them, but since it originally refers to a mounting style, they discontinued using the term in papers for blades. Kind of a "historical correctness."

Not necessarily: the verb naosu 直す just means “to correct, repair, change, alter, convert“. However, it’s my impression,too, that the kissaki wasn’t altered, at least not significantly. The placement of the mei, mekuginana, and the (still) long, obviously shortened nakago, OTOH, are a clear indication that this blade was born as a naginata; if naginata-naoshi-zukuri, the NBTHK wouldn’t have mentioned that, and just put wakizashi on the papers.

According to the company website, the name "Masamune 正宗" is a play-on-words, because its alternate pronunciation of seishu sounds like another Japanese word meaning sake: seishū 清酒.

I've seen those papers even less. In fact, I don't remeber when I saw one the last time in Japan. Again, I'm just reporting, I don't have any horse in this race. People who deal in swords and fittings for a living stick with the NBTHK.

In all fairness, Mr. Tsuruta's comment (which shouldn't have been posted here in the first place, being made in a private e-mail conversation) is the opinion of most dealers and many collectors in Japan. If that opinion of the NTHK-NPO is deservedly low or not is an entirely different topic. Fact is that one very seldomly sees NTHK (both groups) papers accompanying a sword for sale by a dealer in Japan.

Sorry, but I won't give up that easily : if you store all that UHD info on a DVD, isn't the run time then limited to 15 minutes or so?