Hoshi

I don't understand the appeal of this. Is it the wabi-sabi aesthethics of having irregularities which evoke decay? Are these the effects of corrosion over time due to the unevenness of impurities in the steel? Are these hammered into place by the maker? It seems possible to make to 'make bones' with a file and a chisel. I know that bones are used to judge cast from carved work, but with enough effort it should be possible to recreate these.

This is fantastic, you put a ton of work into this and it's generous of you to share it with us here. This is valuable reference work. When I catch a breath with work I'd like to put some time into this and parse the strings to put it into a database-friendly format (e.g. csv). From there we can easily manipulate the data. This could be the start of an interesting and promising project.

Congratulations Jeremiah. This is what collecting really means. You set yourself a goal, to find the best masame hada blade possible. What you have now is eerily close to the summit of masame craftmanship. Anything closer and prices moves exponentially for gradually less emotional dividends. The provenance is excellent. This blade comes from jean, a discerning collector, and before that was a on DTI consignment catalogue. Moreover, it was not papered at the time (carried risk) although mitigated by two authoritative sagayaki. The blade was bought at a good price, and then passed on to you for a good price also. This blade has Juyo potential and you should consider submitting it. It may not be a slam dunk first try, but it's clearly worth a shot. You could have browsed the big online dealers like a monkey on cocaine making impulsive purchases of problematic blades at a premium, seeking the next hit to feed the hoard. But no, you were patient. You waited, and when opportunity came up you took a social risk and you seized it. Now that you're so close to the top, with two examples - the original masame and a latter shinshinto work paying homage to the method - you need to consider what to do. The wise answer, in my view, is not going to be more masame (That's hoarding) or better masame (price takes a steep elevator). Will you stop collecting? Will you move on to another attribute which fascinates you? Where to go...

Stunning. Excellent contrast in these pictures for both the hamon and hada. Bravo. Why is there a sepia hue, is it a filter?

It was not my intention to come off as exasperated. I've adjusted the post. The goal is to pass on very important heuristic in the most categorical way possible. Generally, I feel we should be careful about looking at kantei points for these blades without prefacing with the warning. This gives the impression that there could actually be a chance of something there. While explaining the kantei points is educational in its own right, we must at minimum preface these posts with this warning. If we take gloves, speak indirectly, ramble on with anecdotes of the old days we're not going to get the message through. People who get burned will exit the hobby and conclude it's all a scam. Casual readers of this forum need to read this message enough time from different people that it becomes a second nature to question these 'free lunches'

Thank you all, this has been a very stimulating discussion. Jussi, your work is very impressive. Since when did you start counting systematically? If we can establish the yearly online juyo trade volume, it would give us some precious hint. I have a high quality response in mind from the numbers your put forth but it will take some time. For now what stands out is that the number of Juyo traded online is large in relation to the total number of juyo items (assuming this count is relatively new, need the numbers here). This doesn't even account for offline sales. This means that the Juyo market is remarkably healthy, and thus the prices we observe do not lag much behind the current state of the demand landscape. I have not hunted a sword, not yet. For me, if it comes up more than once in the same year I'd be wary of a trap.

If the sword comes from Japan, and it's signed with a big smith, and it doesn't have papers or has old papers = gimei. This simple heuristic will prevail 99.999% of the time.

Let's be clear about what is meant by price-scarcity, or value-scarcity. Everything of value is organized in a hierarchy. At the top are the things with the most value, at the bottom the things with the least value. Value is defined as the highest willingness to pay drawn from the market population at time t. There are fewer things of high value compared to things of low value. The steepness of this slope represents the rate by which value increases as a function of scarcity. My basic argument is that this slope climbs too slowly, and starts off too high. It's not about particular smiths, or about judging a blade for itself or any of that. Now we can take papers as a 'proxy' for this slope, although we all know it is a bad proxy because it discretizes a continuous variable and everyone gets it wrong, leading to ladder theory, and I think we've talked about this endlessly. What Rivkin says is that I assume that demand is constant, which is obviously false. Anime/martial arts population exerts demand pressure on low tier items Dealers exerts control over the supply of low tier items to boost margins Extreme scarcity of 100k+ buyers. And this could very well be our anomaly. Take European masterworks, Chinese potery, 20th century impressionists or collectible watches. We're dealing with a majority of 100k+ buyers there, and these things reach astronomical prices. It's not status enhancing to collect nihonto for the very wealthy, except in Japan perhaps, while having a collection of 1930's rolex to parade clearly is.

Hi Brian, Just to clarify: I said worthless as an art object, not as an artefact. Militaria are valued because they are artefacts of moments in history. It's a different thing. My comment basically says: if a painting's value is fully derived from its aesthetic qualities, and it's covered in muck then you can't possibly appreciate its aesthetic qualities. Thus, if the value of the painting in a restored state is lower than the cost of restoration, then the value of the painting is negative, i.e. worthless. Now you can say the premise of the value is flawed, and in fact a painting is a historical artefact and some portion of its value ought to be derived this property. One can always argue that the boundaries are blurred, that art is in the eye of the beholders, etc. It's all fair and games and this can debated without ends. I'm taking the most extreme position as an exercise in caution. Who benefits from the distorsion in the price-scarcity function? Owners of mispriced items. This is rather obvious. Dealer, and I don't fully understand it. As John say, the internal market is very insular and follows its own set of unspoken rules and deference to authority. In fact, another interesting way to to look at it is that nihonto price distribution is basically socialised: the distribution ought to be more Pareto-behaved, i.e fat-tailed, with many items close to zero and a few accounting for the majority of the value. For instance, old masters art market is extremely fat-tail. You can get some unknown Italian 19th century print for five dollars, or a Da Vinci for 250 million. Here you can buy a chu-saku wak for 1000$ and a masamume for 1 million. Basically my point is that there is some invisible market force which is reducing the pricing spread as a function of scarcity. While not unique to the west, the distorsion here is especially pronounced and ladder theory contributes to 'upending' the value of items which are near zero. Dealers masterfully play this game. Ultimately the distorsions in the western market are far simpler to understand compared to those affecting the Japanese market, which eludes me. The only parsimonous answer I can come up with is an extreme pareto-distributed function for collectors. Basically this means that 1% of Japanese collector snatch 99% of the good stuff, and they are in a position of 'buyer oligopoly' because there is a deference factor to top items: you need to trust that the buyer will care for it and will be discrete about it. And these 'costs' emanate from the client: nobody must to know that the Tokugawa heir had to sell his ubu ko-yamashiro heirloom last week to pay off his gambling debt. Selling to a westerner is also a no-go because you can't trust them and hell, it may end up on Christies in five years and everyone will ask question and the shame will be immense. In this sense, the seller is trading money in exchange for a lower risk of shame. And this directly feeds into the game of the the monopolistic buyers who uphold the seller's unspoken contract. He will not pay a price commensurate to the scarcity function of the item because the item cannot go on the broader market and this facilitates oligopolistic coordination between top buyers. Needless to say if you make a mistake here as a dealer, you're done. This in turns trickles down and causes price stickiness. I'm not confident in this explanation at all, but perhaps its a contributing factor.

This is another topic which deserves a discussion. It's a fundamental rule of economics that prices are driven by the scarcity of a good for a given level of demand. However, in the west at least, we do not have full information w.r.t to the true state of scarcity of the things we buy. The reasons for this are multiple, but I think it's fair to say that it's mostly driven by supply-side transaction costs: it's costly for Japanese dealers to communicate in English and deal with oversea customers who do not share the same cultural norms, and fundamentally it's not a status enhancing activity among their peers so they don't do it. This means the market is not efficient at providing us with the true supply of Japanese antiques. The corollary from this is that we as customers tend to form our impressions and expectations of scarcity and prices based on the limited offerings we see, which largely takes advantage of ladder theory to convey impressions of good deals to us because the knowledge asymmetry. This problem is especially acute in the low-grade market because this is where the supply is highest and the chance of market distortions most pronounced. Take low grade iron tsuba. These things are so plentiful they're used as paperweights. We've all heard stories of dealers with shelves absolutely stacked with that stuff. The real of value of these is far below the 'ladder price' we see on the western-oriented dealer sites. The same as De Beers historically controlled the diamond supply and thus prices, the inefficiencies in this antique market allows a few key players to form impressions of scarcity which trickle down into higher margins. It's the same thing with the Chu-saku Ebay Wak. We all have seemingly agreed here that the price of a wak should be 500-1000$, and most of us here nod our head in agreement because it conforms to our expectations. But I fear this is our collective delusion. We paid 500$ so we pass on this price expectation to others because we paid it ourselves. I can imagine there are warehouses full of stuff, and it's not even worth peddling the chu-saku wak on the Japanese market. Playing the devil's advocate I would say that a nihonto which does not justify the price of a mid-grade polish should be close to worthless as an art object by virtue that it can't be appreciated as it was supposed to be appreciated. But we keep buying them from the problem-specialized dealers who control the supply. Fundamentally, something very strange is happening in the broader market. I believe the distorting forces are far greater than most of us would dare to imagine. There are ten times more Juyo items than Tokuju items, and yet the average price differential is about a 3x. I can't find Jussi's post on the estimated number of Hozon/TH, but I assume the same distorted quantity-to-value relationship exists. This is not normal and it also exists in the Japanese market. And the Japanese market is going to be far more efficient at price finding with their internal auction systems, and the like. The question which I can't answer is what sort of equilibrium did it get stuck in? Who benefits from the distorted price-scarcity function? How did it come to be in the first place? and will we ever see the big correction? What this means is that here, in the west, we have two layers of distortions: The base layer present in the Japanese market, and the supply-side manipulation on low-grade items. Both these effect compound (i.e. multiplied) in distorting the price of low-level items, and we blindly take it all in and assume it's how things are. And then we encourage beginners to buy into the same beliefs. We live in a distorted bubble. This is not good and must be kept in mind.

Barry, It depends on the seller of the unpapered blade. If its from a Japanese dealer, then it's going to be gimei 99%+ So many blades are submitted to Shinsa because they come from sources with decent chance of papering, namely the estate of deceased Japanese collector. This is where the vast majority of undocumented treasure blades are found, some of which were hidden for decades and sometimes more. This is also where profits are made for dealers who have access to these estates because the family will sell in bulk at a low price for a quick liquidation and no questions asked. Estate blades are then triaged into lots. Where its worth it and needed, it goes for polish and restoration. Then to Shinsa. Problematic blades get dispatched to dealers specialized in problematic blades via internal auctions. The top shelf stuff returning big names goes first on the table of top Japanese collectors. What remains gets hyped at DTI or other channels.

This is absolutely true. You can buy a top quality Shinshinto ubu mumei blade for a fraction of the price. My first sword was an ubu mumei 'Naotane/Korekazu/insert JoJo Saku shinshinto maker name' Katana. The thing to keep in mind here is that the attribution reflects quality, because you can't really recognize the work very well during this time compared to the Koto period. So it basically says this is a very high quality blade for the shinshinto period, which is about as much as there is to be said. Word of caution: Make sure you don't overpay for such blades though, they're absolute bottom tier blades in terms of collectability. This means avoid online sellers with fixture on the western market in my opinion because they know some collectors don't care much about ubu mumei, but just want quality and their prices won't reflect the real devaluation attached to ubu mumei. Many times I've seen such blades overpriced, and nobody would pay these amounts in Japan. Rule of thumb: if the discount isn't close to 80-90% compared to the closest signed example, don't touch it or you'll get burned.

It's shinto and upward. Loss of 80%-90%+ value for mumei. That's the market reaction to mumei. Here are some factors affecting Shinto Mumei Loss of moral value: its ubu mumei because of foul play. It was ruined by someone with bad intentions, and it's an ethical duty to reject those blades regardless of their quality. The sword is a sacred object, and foul intentions defile it forever. Loss of aesthetic value: The signature of part of the beauty. The Nakago is an area which is appreciate, and any alterations reduce its beauty Loss of historical value: The maker cannot be identifier because during Shinto times and later, iron production was centralized and the Mino school dominated. This led to a vast homogenization of work which makes kantei incredibly difficult or all together uninformative. Loss of rarity value: because mumei shinto and later can't be attributed well, they go into a big bucket. Stuff in this bucket is less scarce than a signed example of the smith's work. Loss of completeness: signature is part of a package, collectors value having the complete package. Now let's look at Koto mumei through the same lense. Devaluation of a koto blade due to absent signature is highly dependent on the school and it's beyond my punching weight to make a statement here, and it interacts in complex ways with the factors below. Since mumei is the norm, it's easier to think about this as a signature premium. Loss of moral value: If the sword was a tachi and was shortened, it's likely that the full signature was removed to comply with the rules governing sword length during the Edo period. Moroever, it was more common at the time not to sign blades. While we know some blades were made mumei intentionally for purpose of trickery, it's not the modal explanation. Thus, the corruption is lesser for Soshu, nill for certain schools such as Yamato, present but tolerated for Bizen. Loss of aesthetic value: Same as Shinto. Some signatures of the Koto era are highly valued for their aesthetic appeal. Loss of historical value: It's easier to attribute a Koto blade to a maker, or a quality tier level within a school via a maker's name. Technics are very different, and iron is locally produced, giving it different properties (e.g northern iron tends to be blackish, etc). Loss of rarity value: It's less the case because mumei koto are easier to attribute. Loss of completeness: Absolutely still the case. Hope this helps.

I bet the dog ate his papers. Same source I suppose. Again this is highly suspicious, and I'm not a good Tadayoshi judge either. This has to be one of the worst gold onlays I've ever seen. It's so fake, it's a disgrace. The thing is in many of these cases you don't even need to study the piece. if it doesn't have papers, and the photo are professional photos, it means its someone 'in the business' who is selling it to you. This means he knows his stuff better than you, and will not reveal his private information in hope of catching a greedy fish. Rule of thumb: if it has no papers and it looks like a deal and its a professional selling to you, it's a scam.

No it's not. Someone is trying to play you. I bet it feels like a bargain and it's stirring the spirits of greed deep inside. Good you post here, we will banish these evil ghosts. Aside from the lack of basically all classical muramasa kantei points, the nakago is wrong. Look at the chisel stroke, they feel fresh, crisp and deep, without any differential texturing due to aging. This is a big red flag for muromachi and older work. I'm not even refering to the stroke patterns for which I am not a good judge. Signature was added recently, and Nakado feels repatinated. This guy is fishing for a sucker, stay away. Look at the thickness of the Nakago, unless this was a Yoroi-doshi you won't find such thick tantos from the muromachi period.

Tantos survived because they were seldom used in battle compared to Daito. If you look at famous Daimyo collections, it's clear that the Daito is the most valued item, followed by the tanto, naginata and shortsword. More or less in that order. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and luxury kyoto smiths such as Yoshimitsu who have only tantos left may well have produced a plethora of Daito which were all destroyed or lost. I would be interested in reading the sources on battlefield casualty. During the unification of Japan, it has to be firearms > Ashigaru Yari > everything else insignificant, and prior to that it's most likely Arrows > Battlefield weapons (Naginata, Nagamaki, O-Dachi). Chogi as an attribution is rare unless it's slam dunk chogi because the archetype is so recognizable and the NBTHK is conservative compared to Hon'ami. I think it goes something like this: Chogi T2 ->Kencho (T3) /Hasebe (T2.5), depending on the flavour of Chogi. If it's big shape but 'Den-ish' it goes to Hasebe, if it's slamdunk soden-bizen but hamon is offtrack it goes to Kencho. Chogi prices and Norishige prices are close. Chogi is the nambokucho archetype and was emulated in Shinto times, and then by Kyomaro. Highly valued. This leads us to another attribute which can be valued to certain degrees by different schools of appreciations. There is a simple and parsimonious way to value functionality if we take the resistance of the blade. All else being equal, it correlates with the strength of the shape. The Nambokucho geometry simply has more meat to it and is thus more resilient and 'battlefield optimized' although cumbersome to carry in court and requiring significantly more strength to use. On a symbolic level, nambokucho shapes are more masculine and evoke violence. Strength/Masculinity premium: blades with nambokucho suguha evoke strength symbolically and are robust mechanically

Many interesting perspectives expressed here, thank you. I'll sum up a few things. Michael cites the 'Eternal Return to Ko-bizen theory' The work of Ko-bizen masters ought to be valued above the the other great masters, because if you study long enough, this is what you will come to appreciate most. The question that comes to me immediately is what exactly do you appreciate more? This is interesting. I would also welcome a source on the matter. Kirill states that attribution is quality in mumei blades, this is an important point which Darcy has insisted upon many times. Tier 2 smiths with Tier 1 work had their signatures erased to be attributed to Tier 1, and so on and so forth. This became especially egregious during the mid-eda Hon'ami era where inflation took place and Tier 3 could be promoted to Tier 1, etc. Just as gold coins were devalued by reducing the gold content while keeping the weight constant. Attribution as quality means that we basically have things like Masamume (T1)->Norishige (T2)->Tametsugu/Sanekage (T3)->Uda (T4) or Masamume (T1)->Shizu Kaneuji (T2)->Naoe Shizu (T3+) depending on the Soshu-flavor. NBTHK cleaned the house, mostly, except for Museum, Shrines and other confines out of reach. Corollary to this is that remaining signed Soshu work which are not T1/T2 are likely to be lower grade production for the smith. If a T2 smith produced a T3-level tanto, you want to preserve the signature because it wouldn't go back up to T2 if it was erased. I don't know the extant of this. In any case what this all tells us is that the database of signed piece has been heavily corrupted, and the distribution of work quality we observe isn't representative of a smith's true distribution. This actually is a strong argument to rely on sources which predate the inflationary crisis. While ancient sources have less data available to them, they do not suffer from the data corruption of later sources.

This is great. The English-speaking sphere for Japanese swords is basically monopolized by AOI, which I suspect scores 90%+ of internet foreigner sales. Competition in this domain is vital to improve the quality of western internet purchases.

Disagreement is more interesting than agreement. You can agree because its what your teacher always said and that's the most logical thing to do in most case. But disagreement is more interesting because when it comes from experts, one can assume that they have well-articulated reasons to do so. The problem with Hawley, Taikan and Fujihiro is that they didn't work with the same data, thus disagreement may simply stem from the lack of exposure to certain smiths. This is why I was focused on modern views, where the data is arguably the same for everyone. In fact, we should now upgrade Fujishiro in light of NBTHK judgements, but that's another topic. If I understand you well: Premium on preserved shape, and especially instruments of war (as opposed to court-carried EDO period conversion) because they preserve their battlefield intent, and thus possess greater historical value. This means that more broadly the Jussi school of valuation puts emphasis on maximally preserved Naginata, Nagamaki and O-Dachi. It's interesting because except for the O-Dachi (barely any left at all), even well preserved and barely modified Naginata/Nagamaki blades are valued below Katana, and this shows at Juyo and above. For you they should be valued a notch above because they are instruments of the battlefield. However, O-suriage large shape ex-O-Dachi from the Nambokucho era, such as Chogi would be overvalued for you because they do not preserve length/shape of their original military purpose. Thanks for sharing that's an interesting take.

Conjecture: because of the plethora of Seki Kanemoto, including far less skilled later generations, the owner preserved the date to point to a good generation Kanemoto and paid the extra money for the difficult Suriage. Does this make any sense?

Hi Rivkin, I gather that you value consistency in production. I've heard that Soshu-den is at higher risks of kizu due to the more extreme production methods as well, and that it was particularly difficult to make with Bizen ore. It makes sense in a way, since Bizen had a lot to lose from bad QA. If we are to put a premium on schools for their production consistency I would tentatively propose something like this: Shinto Hizen early generations: with their leading Suguha-based product. Rai industries: Completely wiped out Awataguchi. Encoded smith ID on the blade brand on the tang for QA. Saved on production costs by using thinner of skin steel, ensured consistency for demanding clientele. Osafune Bizen: for the reasons above. In fact this raises a good question: if you were to rate a smith, would you rate it on 1. his average output 2. his max - the best sword he ever made 3. his best (let's say the 10% top work)

Hi Jussi, Thanks for the reply. You make me realize I wasn't clear at all in my initial post. By school of appreciation I don't mean smith schools to appreciate, but systems to judge the importance of nihonto. For instance, Fujishiro, Hawley, Wazamono ratings, are systems to judge the quality of the work produced by smiths. It's more obvious in Nakaraka vs. Yamanaka because these two disagree and suscribe to two different schools of thoughts on what constitutes a great nihonto. It's clear that 'Uroie' is a way to appreciate certain for of Jihada typical of Soshu, and to a lesser extent Awataguchi. Or that the emphasis on the consistency and depth of the Noie-guchi and Utsuri are aesthethic criteria mainly aimed for the appreciation of Bizen. These are both opinionated criteria which seek to have an objective grounding - not simply because it's 'nice' - but because they purport to reflect functionality and skill.

Hoping to get a conversation going on the topic of Schools of Appreciation. Often books written on Nihonto are in my view quite dull, no risk and read like academic lexicons. I've combed through a few now, and what I notice is that there aren't many opinionated treaties on nihonto appreciation. The two that stood out so far are Facts and Fundamentals which everyone here knows, and the Nihonto Newsletter. Both push a very different story on what to value, and why we should value it. Yamanaka (Nihonto Newletter) Soshu preference: Bizen steel looks weak. Soshu were a technological revolution at the time and surpassed all other swords. Thus we should value them more because of their functional advantages. Jihada premium: The best sword has 'uroi' jihada, which looks deep like looking in a frozen pond in winter. Only a few masters achieved this uroi jihada, and most were Soshu school. It's important to value this quality as it reflects the functional soundness of the steel. Archetype of perfection: Sansaku Nakaraka (Facts and Fundamentals) Bizen premium: Bizen has been the top sword producing province. Hon'ami's emphasis on Soshu is convenient to print money because most Soshu works are mumei and thus conducive to attribution inflation. Signed and Ubu premium: Suriage was performed for attribution inflation. There is far less certainty in attributions compared to what is assumed in Kantei-sho and what you think. Consistency of the Noie-guchi: Consistency of the Noie-guchi is critical because it honestly reflects the skill of the smith. It must not be too deep, or too shallow (basically it needs to emulate the work of top bizen smiths). Archetype of perfection: Top Bizen (Mitsutada, Nagamitsu, Kagemitsu...) Note: When I write premium, I mean above market average. Everyone values signed and ubu or a beautiful jihada, obviously. Moreover, I do not put both on equal footing: The Yamanaka school of thought goes back at least to Hideoyoshi. While some of Nakaraka's conjectures ought to be taken with a grain of salt, I am fond of his 'economic' explanation to explain out puzzling details in the history of Nihonto. Greed is strong. Now, my questions are: Are there other schools of appreciations? if so, what do they place their premiums on? We're all at least superficially familiar with Hawley and Fujishiro. If you were to extract what these old treaties value above the market average, what would it be? And do they differ from each other, or from the Hon'ami canon? Are there other opinionated treaties worth reading with a translation available? Where do you stand presently? And what attribute is in your view fundamentally underappreciated, and why should we pay more attention to it?

If you're goal is to acquire the best examples of masame for the money, go with Mumei Shinto and Shinshinto. Mumei swords of these eras are completely radioactive and thus you'll see an incredibly steep drop in the price - we're talking 70-90%+ discounts here, with rare exceptions for some freak smiths like mumei Kyomaro. That's incredible if your only concern is the quality of the work. Some of these smiths still have recognizable characteristics, and if you stick with the best exemplars of you'll get a solid hozon attribution to one of the top masame smiths of these era. Think about it for a moment. Take a top Shinto smith whose quality signed work is priced ~100K+ USD. Let's take Hankei, because his archetype Soshu style work is very recognizable and he's been weaponized as fake masamune/Norishige and the like so a lot of his work has been made mumei. Is the signature 'worth' 70K-90K USD to you? If your goal is only aesthetic appreciation, then definitely not. If you value the certainty of provenance, because its Hankei and its so specific and its the archetype then its not even in question. So what's left is only the mei and the fact that it wasn't used to swindle someone in the past out of his hard earned money. Is that worth 70-90% of the sword's value? If you want top jigane quality for the money with quasi certainty in the attribution, go with highly distinctive, hozon-caped mumei shinto/shinshinto.

I recommend doing it. It's a fun experience, but you need to keep in mind it's ~1.5-3K for the workmanship involved in making it for something tasteful, and you can of course spend a lot more for top end artisans. This is excluding the cost of Tosogu. You will not be recuperating that money the day you sell the sword with the Koshirae. Also keep in mind, your tastes changes.The more you study, the more refined your judgement becomes. This means that your dream Koshirae today could very well appear trite and charmless ten years down the road. Before building a koshirae, I highly, highly recommend buying a book on the topic, either from Grey in hard copy, or an E-book from Markus Sesko on the subject. There are many different types of Koshirae from different periods, and the archetype that readily comes to mind is more of a late Edo fashion. There are also codes for the proper assembly of Tosogu themes - some things don't mix, some things are auspicious, etc. The last thing you want to do is an 'American school Koshirae' for a Nihonto. It's important if you want to appreciate it for longer as you gain knowledge. And its harder not to do than it sounds. Something good about making a tasteful Koshirae is that you give boxed Tosogu a second life. If done properly, a Koshirae project will allow you to appreciate the Tosogu as they were meant to be appreciated. This is something special. In this sense, the cost of building the Koshirae is a little bit like investing in an expensive canvas to display your Tosogu.