Newbflat

Oh, yeah. Sorry about spoiling the fun. All I saw was the "would appreciate comments" and having Tadayoshi swirling around in my brain just blurted it out. I will READ next time! Apologies. Bill

Count me in please.. Bill

Having spent the better part of a week with Robert Robertshaw's book studying a confusing mei on a sword my first though is no one in the Tadayoshi main line signed Tada like that. I mean the extra stroke at the very top of the center line and the small extra stroke at the bottom of the vertical stroke on the bottom left plus the over all shape is difrent than anything I can remember, it's taller and 'squarer' for lack of a better term. Yoshi is odd as well as I think only Tadayoshi 5th signed with an upward stroke on the left side of the 'box' but also he finished the horizontal strokes with a stronger mark on the right and not the left. I would highly suggest you get Roberts book on main line Hizen smiths. It's less than a $40 download in PDF format and is an excellent reference. Bill

Just some guessing from a beginner but my flags are....The perfect even rusting on the Nagako. That red active rust just seems suspiciously even down in every nook and cranny and the same rusting in the Machine drilled MAKUGI ANA. That's a lot of "old" rust on that NAGAKO to have such smooth sided holes and the same fresh? rust as the NAGAKO's nooks and cranny's. The JIHADA looks acid etched. No stone polishing I'm familure with is going to give that kind of relief. Those two things alone raise a red flag for me. Bill

Lovely....That is the most detailed video if the forging process I have seen. Thanks Yoshindo Yoshihara, I feel you have reveled all your secrets so the cats out of the bag now. I'm going to make a forge and whip out some swords. Can't be that hard.. Right? After all I watched the video very carefully. Maybe I should watch it twice? Anyways, I should have a masterpiece or two in a week or so. Bill

Thanks all... I will PM you Barry, but it sounds dangerous.. :-) Bill

My name is Bill and I have been interested in nihonto for a long time. When I was 18 or so a friend showed me a WW2 firearms book that had a few pages dedicated to Japanese swords and there construction. I have always been interested in blades as they are to me the most basic tool of man. I was immediately struck at the beauty and craftsmanship in the swords themselves and there Koshirae. Over the years I dabbled here and there in nihonto appreciation but only on a surface level. Pre internet it wasn't exactly easy to learn about nihonto if you didn't know someone who was interested or have some sort of 'in'. To make a long story short-ish, my real introduction to nihonto happened rather abruptly. My girlfriend of 8 years after knowing my interest in Japanese knives, tools and such let it slip.... " you know my dad has an old sword he brought back from Japan after the war"..... I said what? It turns out that he was on a boat in the invasion fleet heading to Japan when the war ended. He spent a couple of years in Tokyo ( as he says "on a ship in Tokyo ") mostly working on the ship. His close friend was a guard who spent his time guarding a room "piled with swords" and just before he left his friend said he could take one. So he said he looked at the pile and just grabbed one off the top and called it good. He brought it home and it sat in the basement for 45 years or so. I asked him about the sword and he said he would look for it but he hadn't seen it in 20 years and thought it was still down there. Knowing my luck I assumed it was a gunto but still thought it would be cool to check out. He found it and sent me some funky pictures and I immediately told him I needed better pictures. I could see a flamboyant hamon and the nakago looked well, old. He sent better pictures with the Mei and some of the blade. It has had some rust here and there but still had a lot of old polish 90+%. Being in the age of the internet I poked round for a while and found a nihonto forum and posted a photo of the mei and asked for translation. In the mean time I did some research and figured out it was an O-Wakizashi. It was missing the Tsuba and everything else was really falling apart. I got back to the forum and sure enough had a translation for the Mei... ( Hishu Kawachi no kami Fujiwara Masahiro). The photo wasn't good enough to see which Masahiro and photos of the blade were needed. I asked my girlfriends father to take better pictures but he seemed kinda put out and un interested so I told him I would pay for him to sent the sword to me and I would take care of it. Two weeks later I had the sword and took some good scans of the nagako tachi-mei and blade and posted them. In the mean time I took the blade to Tatsuhiko Konno in Kirkland Washington and he looks at it and checked some books and thought it was Nidai Masahiro but only a shinsa could say for sure. When I got home the combine power of the Internet agreed that the mei looked good and was most likely Nidai Masahiro. The blade matched the mei with its konuka-hada , Nie-deki in billowing cloud like gunome-midare with tobiyaki. I was told to contact Barry Hennick ( hi Barry, remember me?..it's only been 15 or so years? ) as he was a collector of Sodai and Nidai Masahiro and might have some insight. It just so happened that he was coming to Seattle and a few weeks later I met him at a hotel and he gave it the once over and thought it looked good and was a nice example of his work and "too bad it wasn't a few inches longer". So, there it was, a nice Niadi Masahiro ( most likely) in need of a polish but still interesting to look at. I told my girlfriends father the news and about getting a polish and papers if he wanted to. He decided not to as it cost a lot and unfortunately still doesn't believe the Japanese wouldn't keep it. I tried to persuade him that it was a common thing to do and he should have no fear, but in the end it was apparent he just didn't trust the Japanese, "we were at war with these people” he told me. I reminded him that we were at war with Germany and Italy as well.... "That's different". In the end my girlfriend kept the sword but not me... So, there is a nice Nidai Masahiro O-Wakizashi sitting is a closet in Tacoma, Washington just waiting to be appreciated. So all I'm left with are some books, a signed copy of "The Craft of the Japanese Sword"... I had it signed by Yoshindo Yoshihara when he was in Seattle so I know the signature in not Gimei :-) And "The Connoisseurs Guid to Japanese Swords" from back when it was a $60 book. Plus the book "Lethal Elegance" for some lovely fitting pictures, bought that a year ago though Damn... I was going to make that short. Oh well, that's my introduction to real nihonto and I have been longing for something like that ever since that sword fell into my life, even if too short an acquaintance. Without a sword in hand and too many other hobbies I drifted and only occasionally drifted back into the Nihinto world. It's always seemed out of reach to me mostly because I'm very limited in my disposable income and other hobbies take most of it. Dropping $2000 on a sword is not in the picture at the moment. I have placated my repressed desire for nihonto with Japanese kitchen cutlery. Throw in a few Toishi and in retrospect I could have bought some reasonable nihonto with what I have spent. Even so, one of the reasons I like it is I can actually use it! Let's not count the money I have in racing kayaks... That's off limits. While talking to a toishi seller in Japan and mentioning my interest in nihonto he laughed and said "don't go down that rabbet hole, there is no coming out". I accused him of being a hypocrite with his 30,000+stones and that the world of toishi is nearly as esoteric, addicting and expensive. He said "you got me" and convinced me to focus on getting one interesting Wakizashi with or without Koshirae to appreciate and leaving it at that ( right!). But it did really get me thinking. So I will sell a few kitchen knives and not buy the one or two stones from him I was looking at and start thinking and saving more for a Wakazachi. In the mean time I will study, read a lot here and try! to restrain myself from buying anything until I have a really good idea what I want and my budget. So hard to resist though. So, hi to all and I look forward to gleaning what I can here and hope it will help me make a solid, smart, restrained, level headed choices in the future........ Rrrrright. Bill Cirino Seattle * all spelling errors and grammatical mistakes are totaly intentional *cough* and copyrighted, so don't use without asking!