SteveM

Here are a few more 2nd gen Kanemoto (Magoroku). http://iidakoendo.com/809/ http://www.touken-sato.com/event/katana/2014/03/D-kanemoto-01.html http://www.aoijapan.jp/%E7%9F%AD%E5%88%80%EF%BC%9A%E5%85%BC%E5%85%83-%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BE%E3%81%94%E3%82%8D%E3%81%8F%EF%BC%89

It would seem to be 勢州久居住勝久 But...not a lot of info on this mei, other than a few random entries for auction sites.

Looks like Kojima Kanemichi (one of the ones mentioned in Stephen's link). Here are some other Kanemichi signatures for comparison. http://www.sanmei.com/contents/media/G45577_S8110_PUP.htm http://www.e-sword.jp/sale/2014/1410_1063syousai.htm Showa 14 (again, repeating, or affirming Stephen's post), or maybe Showa 10 with a zodiac sign after it... hard to tell. Some closer shots would help. The chalk is a bit distracting.

豊佑作 (Toyosuke Saku) would be my guess. The suke in this mei uses ninben instead of shimesu-hen. Pretty confident on the Toyo. I have less confidence on the suke, but looking at the way 作 is carved, it seems that 佑 is more likely than 祐 - but I've had a look around at the online databases and I can find no online reference to 豊佑 or 豊祐, so it is bit of a mystery.

Haha - bugger me, you are right! I was also thinking that maybe 美 (yoshi) was also a fashion of the time, and so 正美 as Masayoshi was maybe more common than I originally thought. (So, there could well be 2 or 3 smiths with the name Masayoshi 正美 at that time, and that it wasn't so much of a coincidence.

Your reading of Kaneuji-saku is correct, but it doesn't match any of the signatures of the wartime Kaneujis. I'm afraid your blade has endured an amateur polish job which has, for now anyway, ruined the condition of the blade. The kanji on the blade itself are 大和魂 Yamato-damashii (spirit of Japan/Yamato). You can find other Kaneuji signatures here and compare. http://www.japaneseswordindex.com/oshigata/index.htm

Yes, Ryu Masayoshi, one of the rikugun smiths. This might be the art name of the last smith on the list Stephen provided (Kosaka Masayoshi). I'm looking for confirmation of that, but I haven't found any yet. Seems likely, but I can't quite exclude the possibility that these are two different guys. Actually, I'm wondering if the last two Masayoshis on that list aren't the same person. One is from Shizuoka, and the other is from Ōsaka, but Masayoshi (正美) is a slightly unusual spelling, and the birth/death dates match, so I'm wondering if its not the same person, or just an amazing coincidence. Anyway, Ryu Masayoshi is your man. http://www.japaneseswordindex.com/gendai2.htm

Tips for deciphering: 1. Generally speaking, mei usually include location + smith's name, in that order. The location will usually include the old domain/province name. A few domains were prolific sword-producing locations, and so these names appear more frequently than others (Mino, Bizen, Bungo, etc...). Once you have input the province names in your head, you can usually pick out the location. 2. If you pick out the province name, the personal/art name of the smith usually follows, and is usually a two-kanji name. However, smiths often added "Fujiwara" to their names as an allusion to an old noble family - kind of like me saying I'm "Steve M of the House of Windsor". 3. Certain names are associated with certain provinces. The Kanji 兼 (Kane) is a component of names that are associated with Mino province, for example. Once you have nailed the province/domain, it might give you a hint as to the name of the smith - or at least a part of it. 4. Unfortunately for us, many smiths inscribed their names using a cursive style, which means the kanji don't appear as they would in a normal font. On the positive side, the cursive styles followed certain conventions, and so there tends to be a certain similarity to how the kanji appear. Again, I'm thinking of kanji like 兼、光、國、義 Now that you have some basic rules-of-thumb, we can throw them all out the window when we look at the three swords you've posted. 1. Your first sword is a Showa-to (war-era). These mei are often very choppy, like the one in your picture. Its as if the smiths didn't have the time to carve careful, delicate lines into the steel, and instead just used a sort of shorthand, employing a severe economy of short, hasty strokes The one in the picture also doesn't follow the above rule of location + name. It is just the smith's name. The good thing is that modern swords normally don't have mei that are eroded or obscured by rust, and so there is less guesswork. 2. Your second sword uses an alternative name for the location - you'll pick this up with practice and as you see more and more swords. It is cut off just before the smith's name, although with this particular location name being used, one might be able to deduce who the smith is. (You can tell it is cut off at the location name because the final kanji is 住, indicated that everything above that is address (basically), and everything below that will be name. 3. Your third sword doesn't have a location, and has a 5-kanji art name. The thing with this one is, the art name is such a big name that you will become used to it as you look at more and more swords.

↑　On behalf of some gullible guy who was likely to pay good money for that hunk of junk, your efforts are much appreciated.

That (the one on the right) would be Osa (from Osafune) . I can see where you see the resemblance, but I don't think it is Osa. For one thing, the top horizontal strokes on the tang on your sword are placed too far to the right (literally running off the edge of the sword). I don't think that would ever happen with Osa 長.

The top one (I think) is カーン and represents Fudō Myō-ō The bottom one is アン and represents Fugen Bosatsu On the site below they are #10 and #6. http://www.rakuten.ne.jp/gold/sidtyoukoku/desin/bonji/bonji.html I'm not completely confident about the top one.

Hello Ben, I think its too far gone to be deciphered. Where are you looking that you see a part of Osafune? I can't find it. The only thing that stands out to me is a horizontal line (that may or may not be part of a kanji), and a peaked shape underneath that line that reminds me of the top part of the kanji "金” meaning "gold".

Wow - now I'm really intrigued. I thought for sure that Steven K was correct with Handaka Sonja (半託迦尊者）. There are other artworks featuring the motif of Handaka Sonja (or Panthaka, or Pantha the Younger) conjuring a dragon from a bowl. http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-handaka-sonja-handaka-sonja-one-of-the-sixteen-rakan-or-arhats-one-60196774.html http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/handaka-sonja-10336 http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/isida_tooru/GALLERY/show_image_v2.html?id=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.c.yimg.jp%2Fres%2Fblog-9f-18%2Fisida_tooru%2Ffolder%2F818926%2F59%2F61864059%2Fimg_1%3F1365387714&i=1 But Mauro's post above indicates the same theme coming from a different place in Japanese/Chinese lore https://archive.org/details/mma_the_chinese_sennin_chen_nan_japanese_chinnan_37263 Now I don't know which one is correct (and how unusual that the two exact themes seem to be independent of one another). Note that the book to which Mauro linked lists both legends: Chinnan on page 38, and Handaka on page 109. If I had to pick one, I'd say that the lack of any obvious Buddhist paraphernalia makes me think the figure is, as Mauro suggests, the hermit Chinnan, rather than the Buddhist disciple Handaka Sonja.

Something a bit more prosaic, I think. To me it looks like a fairly common Japanese surname, Abe (阿部). Possible to get a look at the other side? "Goodbye" in Japanese isn't normally written in kanji - you can write part of it in kanji, but its a bit unusual to do so.

This is a particularly good thread that might be of use to Julian http://www.militaria.co.za/nmb/topic/12646-advices-for-newbies-buyers-rules-of-thumb/?hl=%2Brules+%2Bbuying&do=findComment&comment=130767 Also, Guido's article is good for a bit more food for thought for the person thinking about nihonto collecting http://www.nihontomessageboard.com/articles/Collecting.pdf

Well, you can judge for yourself how close she is to my translation. The skinny tag is simply a name/address tag, and there isn't a whole lot of room for artistic license. The address names still persist in one form or another,. So Mamedo (let's call it a village) in Imajuku city in Hiki county in Saitama prefecture is still Mamedo village, Imajuku city in Hiki county in Saitama prefecture (even though it may have been merged into a larger municipality since the war). In Japanese its pronounced as Saitama-ken, Hiki-gun, Imajuku-shi, Mamedo-mura. So your friend has just rendered the Japanese into an approximate English pronunciation, give or take a few errors on her part (pronouns are notoriously difficult to figure out) . The village name of Mamedo （大豆戸） does in fact contain the two kanji for soybean 大豆 which is in fact pronounced daizu, but in this context the three characters go together and form a location name. Hope this helps.

It is laughably incorrect. The person who wrote that quite simply doesn't know what he is talking about, or worse, he does know, but he is deliberately obscuring things in the hope that he can trick some gullible person into believing the sword is a Kamakura artifact. Fun fact: the kanji he says is 浓 is not used in Japan. It is only used in mainland China.

Sorry - it gets confusing. I was trying to say the orientation of the photo should be horizontal (rotated 90° to the left), which would then make the writing on the tags vertical, as they were written.

Hello Geoffrey, Plug in Takada ju Fujiwara Munekage into a search engine and see if you get any hits that appear with NBTHK papers. If that doesn't work, try the Japanese version, which Sebastien has provided above. When I did this, one of the hits I got was the link below. It isn't certified, but the seller says he/she will guarantee it to pass NBTHK. http://www.ricecracker.com/inventory/c1_katana_munekage/c1_katana_munekage.html This signature is quite different from yours, particularly the 景 kage kanji. Dig a bit deeper and you can find a certified Munekage on ebay, that has a significantly different signature, one that looks more in line with yours. http://www.ebay.com/itm/WAKIZASHI-ANTIQUE-Japanese-SWORD-NBTHK-TOKUBETSU-KICHO-SIGN-MUNEKAGE-EARLY-EDO-/131719320774?rmvSB=true&nma=true&si=JH19JdVe4wI4nc9JF765DuxRRuo%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 At this point I start to wonder how many Munekages there were. I would look into one of the swordsmith databases that are linked somewhere on one of the links at the top of this page, to find out more. I can't say anything more than the signature on your swords kind of looks like the one being sold on ebay. What you ought to be doing though is looking at the sword itself, and looking up in a good reference to see if your sword has any characteristics of a Munekage sword (other than the signature). The Connoisseur's Guide (forget the actual name) is a very good reference for this. If your sword has the same characteristics as a Munekage sword, submit it for shinsa.

Hello, In Wakayama's reference of artists, there are ten artists who used these particular kanji for Toshimitsu. Unfortunately it doesn't give pictures of each smith's signature, so it would be a bit hard to pin down exactly which Toshimitsu this is (or if it is genuine at all) without sending it to shinsa, I think.

前川助房 Maekawa Sukefusa. Modern smith, I think.

The picture should be oriented horizontally, with the tsuba on the left hand side, the big tag in the middle, and the thin tag on the right. The thin tag is an (old) address and name, and it reads: Saitama prefecture, Hiki-gun, Imajuku-mura, Mamedo. ARAHATA, Seiichi 埼玉県比企郡今宿村大豆戸新幡精一 (Arahata can also be read as Shinhata, and maybe a few other ways. Arahata is the family name, Seiichi is the given name). The big tag with the letters blacked out looks like a shop tag for a department store in Nagano prefecture. It says Ueda city, Matsuo town Kaizuya Shōten Wholesale Section Stockings, Imported Goods then it lists a long-defunct telephone number 上田市松尾町 足袋、洋品　海津屋商店卸部 (Not completely confident about that middle kanji, but I think its not as crucial as the address and name above).

That's what I would have thought, but then the writing on the box seems to be contrary to that. There is no honorific on the box for Imai, which would be weird, yet there is an honorific for Ono (on the box). So... that's why I'm puzzled. Edit: Yes I think John is right again. It must be Imai who is the recipient (and the sender is Ono). The lid is strange to me. Maybe it was written by a third party, but its still odd. At any rate, there are no other clues as to the year or the organization. Could be wartime, could be post-war veteran's association. The kanji for prefecture - 懸 - is the old style kanji. The Ministry of Education simplified some kanji in the late 40's. Of course not everyone follows the government guidelines, and old habits persist, so the old kanji could still have been written in the 50's or later. The cup itself is in beautiful condition. (Maybe Imai-san wrote the description on the lid himself, to remind him who gave the cup to him?)

I think Jean is right. Bracken fern sprouts (or, 蕨 - warabi - in Japanese) https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=%E9%90%94%E3%80%80%E8%95%A8&hl=en&biw=1456&bih=811&site=webhp&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkvKafk-PMAhVJH5QKHZAoD2wQsAQIGg

The box. The cup itself says Ono 小野 and Present Imai kun/kimi? 　贈今井君 I'm confused about the 君 in the line above. Kun attached to a name is an honorific (used for subordinates or those younger than yourself) so you wouldn't attach it to your own name. In another context it can refer to the emperor (君万歳), but it doesn't seem have that context here. So, I'm slightly puzzled.