Hoshi

No money issue? A collection that traces the great Soshu experiment. It starts with Gotoba's smiths that went to Kamakura, then goes to Shintogo, then moves to mainline Soshu, before branching out to Shizu in Mino and Chogi in Bizen in Nambokucho and then fades off in the obscurity of Muromachi with its hitatsura death rattle. For me this is the most epic story to tell in Nihonto. All compressed into a hundred and fifty years of peak art and influence, and then dies down in the dark ages never to resurface again. Now realistically. I take what I can get which has high emotional dividends and comparatively low rent. I have the Soshu and Awataguchi bug. Worst of all, I put a big premium on storied pieces with honami attributions and tasteful Koshirae. This ultimately means I need to spend less time on the forum and more time making money. Perhaps my tastes have evolved beyond the point where I will not be able to afford anything anymore in the future. I accept it.

I think there is a fair chance we're still midway through. The customs of the sword world are strange because they come from the warrior's world. An interrupted hamon means a blade no longer suited for battle, as it would pose a great risk of breaking. This is where these 'fatal flaws' come from. It's like a rifle that is are great risk of irreversibly jamming or misfiring. In fact, one could even say these dimensions of valuation should now be completely obsolete, since they come from the Feudal times and nobody would use such a sword in war today. The dice has already been rolled. The polish doesn't throw the dice, it reveals the result. If you prefer certainty, then look at the roll. If you prefer to live with the uncertainty, then keep it hidden. There is no shame in testing the market. In the West fatal flaws are a hard sell, in Japan there is a more balanced view. Who knows what the future holds. You suggest you have time on your hand. You're probably better off investing the 10K into top-class restoration and making the blade discreetly tour the big Japanese collectors for a year or two. The alternative is to wait for offers from Western collectors, who are more timid when it comes to flaws. As Ray says, I hope it survives and gets the best care it can ever hope for.

After careful examination it looks to be a potential Soshu hamon, even though it's a bit strange (gaudy) and seems like it could have been etched in at some point with acid (as it looks on your first thread). I'm assuming it's mumei, the nakago is passable, and there are no fatal flaws hiding in there. High probability: Muromachi Shimada Low probability: Tametsugu It's a decent lottery ticket.

These are quite likely to be Goto dragons but they're slightly subpar quality wise.

It's already TH. It objectively ticks all the boxes. The problem for the western market is that 18K is too expensive for hozon. So Nick is forced to spend 500$ in transportation and shinsa fees just to get the TH paper. It's hassle and its expensive. This sort of thing makes me happy I'm not a nihonto dealer.

The owner must be pulled in each in every direction by a plethora of email-bound 'advice'. I understand the desire to touch base, get the blade back, summon the family members and make a safe, consensus-based decision. Now, trying to put myself in the shoes of the owner: What would my grandfather want for that sword? To keep it as a family heirloom, as a remembrance for acts of bravery past, and perhaps as a symbol of what treasures awaits those who take risk in life. To be kept as a piece of inspiring family history. That is a family heirloom. But in its current state, does it really represent those things? Forgotten in an attic, rusted and left alone for decades without a glance. In its current state, it is not that family heirloom. It deserves to be restored to the highest standard, and placed behind glass alongside the medals and honors of this illustrious warrior. To become something beautiful and inspiring for generations to come. To be that Heirloom. Of course there is some risk in the polishing. Maybe the blade could become too thin in places, perhaps it's monetary value could be dented somewhat from previous ballpark estimates? But this is only a concern if one wishes to sell it as is. It's symbolic value as a heirloom can only grow in Polish. Left in its current state, it will continue to degrade and could be sold off by a descendant who does not know better, or one who knows but needs money now. It's hard to dispose of something beautiful because beauty begets respect. Now, there may be other considerations a play. Life has its lot of bad and expensive surprises, and money could be needed and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it makes for a great family story. When things got dire, Grandpa turned up one of his treasures and saved the day. Getting Japan retail price on this sword is going to be a long process and this is where people lose a lot money because they have a short time horizon. Patience is key. If that's the goal then I can only recommend Darcy as the best guy in the western hemisphere to make this happen for your family. In either case, this is a fantastic story and I'm eager to read on about its next chapter. It's the sort of thing which could be turned into a short documentary. I already have a name for it: The Sword of the Beast.

Great to see those numbers, thank you Jussi. The Shinsa policy on Den has shifted over time, which is interesting. With these numbers I think we can safely rule out that 'Den' reflects weakness on a mumei blade for bad sessions. It's likely that as you say, the usual suspects of third tier groups that began to creep in, which drove the devaluation. This means we need to be especially wary of these attributions during the weak sessions and apply very careful scrutiny to these items up for sale.

Tokubetsu hozon should not be a criteria for ascribing value above hozon provided one has the knowledge to understand the conditions under which TH is awarded. Namely, a blade without objectively described key flaws in a given period. This is why 10-20K is the danger zone. It's the middle of the ladder where dealers would make you believe TH sits only to draw a sucker on a "cheap 8K for TH". In this range, you get the bad session bottom barrel fluke Juyo or the overpriced, ladder-theory-infused TH. At 20K we enter the the domain of the Juyo 23 Tegai, Naoe Shizu, Mihara, Uda, Enju and co. Dealers buy these for 10K and sell them at 20K+ and tell you cheap for Juyo, Juyo is 40K, it's a deal! This is the level where the most profit is made from ladder theory arbitrage by drawing on greed, this is why its so dangerous. Now there are some great blades from these makers, but this is the domain where expertise is needed to sort the good from the bad, and where getting burn is exceedingly likely as a beginner. It's a minefield.

Yes, it's not current practice. But given the exceedingly small size of extant signed work by this group, it would make sense to use as as +/- 5% Hosho archetype. The only case in which it wouldn't make sense is if the variance between Hosho smiths is such that +/- 5% gets eclipsed. In which case attributions to this group barely make sense at all. I agree that Tanobe/Kunzan/Some of the early Honami judges > NBTHK. And back to the broader topic, yes: It seems Yamato Taema and Tegai are exit point out of the graph for Soshu. But Hosho is its own thing and it's unique. Kenenaga and and Norinaga could also be singular points.

Stunning. It imitates Japanese painting on silk. It's very refined, I love it.

It's worth its own thread, but the more I think about it the more I think the motto 'Buy the Blade, not the papers' is too ambiguous to be of any value whatsoever as advice. 1. Buy the Blade, not the papers = Don't succumb to ladder theory? (Valid) 2. Buy the Blade, not the papers = Buy what you like? (Mostly Invalid: preferences change over the lifespan) 3. Buy the Blade, not the papers = Trust your judgement? (Mostly Invalid: judgement evolves) The two problematic interpretation only become valid for seasoned collectors and experts (at the asymptotic limit of expertise they become true). For beginner's, it's irresponsible and just sounds wise. In it's less favorable interpretation, I'd be tempted to say this is our version of virtue-signaling. Do it like a pro. I overturn Shinsa judgements for Breakfast. Most people want to lose the minimal amount of money possible by paying rent while enjoying a sword. If anything papers give your a floor guarantee. Because let's face it: when you start, you're clueless. Better to buy something valued by others than what your embryonic aesthetic appreciation of Nihonto tells you. I mean, what do you know? If you're a beginner in a vaccum: Buy the NBTHK attribution, not the blade If you're a beginner with access to knowledgeable people with your best interest in mind: Buy what you're told to buy Does it sound cool? Certainly not. Does it erode your sense of agency? Probably. Will this avoid costly financial mistakes compared to Buy the Blade, not the paper? For sure.

I'd venture to say I would be very, very skeptical of such a specific attribution as Tegai Kanekiyo. First, it doesn't even fit with the standards of conservative snipes on specific smiths. Let's face it: that smith maybe has one tachi extant with his name. Boom. No uncertainty. No Den. This is noise in the flight trajectory when the dart is throne on the board. Den Hosho would have been the better attribution because 1) it acknowledges it's not 100% slam dunk and 2) it's conservative and doesn't snipe on a smith with no data. In fact, I would not trust any specific attributions to smiths, except for Kanenaga, Norinaga and to a lesser extent, Nobuyoshi.

Thank you Jussi, fantastic. And we need to keep in mind Tantos are more likely to be signed than Daito, which would cut our signature counts by a least 1/2. Hosho and Taema are complete darkness. Kanenanga and Norinaga, provided these sign works aren't in their great majority tantos, could have enough work to create a sensible corpus to attribute towards... But this really goes on to show just how little data there is on Yamato...

My thoughts: Worst case Meiji mumei from a nobody. In which case you lose a bit of money but it's not a catastrophic loss either. Easy one to put back into the lottery pot for the next guy hoping Koto Bizen. Not removing the handle looks a bit like a slimy move to me, I would be suspicious of the 'experts' in this auction house. In all likelihood it will not justify the cost of a new polish which is required to appreciate it. Upsides: in my opinion not many. It's not younger than Shinto. The Boshi doesn't follow the Choji pattern, and while this isn't a 100% foolproof sign of Shinto+ it does bod very ill. But this is enough to rule out the Koto Bizen golden goose in my opinion.

I beg to differ. 10K-20K is the danger zone. It's not entry level and it's not treasure level either. This is where big costly mistakes happen. What's the attribution you're looking at? A lot of the danger, as in downward moves, can be explored if we know the attribution. It's also possible to take a few pot shots at the lateral moves. In either case, knowing the attribution is key to discard the 'they didn't like the new result they got' argument that was brought up here. Be careful of downward moves. I do not like the motto of buy the sword not the paper. It reminds me a lot of 'be yourself' and 'follow your heart' which feel right but end up being empty assertions, and in some cases dangerous. It's irresponsible financially as we all try to minimize rental costs on our swords. For some of us, paying an unfortunate rent on a 10-20K sword of 50%+ devaluation over five years will hurt. The name indicated on the paper determines a lot of the attributes of the sword. Sure, there is within-smith variation, and the healthiness of the blade to appraise. But attribution tells you the range of what to expect. Your tastes will change and you will to regret buying what you like. My policy is to buy the sword with the highest emotional dividend + learning dividend ratio'ed over rent costs. So this leads us back to defer to the judgement of experienced scholar as to what we ought to value, which brings us back to Fujishiro and market willingness to pay, which brings us back to the truism etc...

It's not just me. It's also the Shinsa panel. There aren't thousands of signed Yamato school blades. There are a handful of signed Hosho school blades spread across four or five different smiths. That's not enough to build a representation of the variance within and between smiths for the school and probably even less Tegai Kenekiyo. The sampling space is just too small. Now if I'm to differentiate between some Hosho smith who has, say, a grand total of four signed blades, and a Tegai smith who has three, and try to find what's closest to my mumei blade, I might as well toss a coin. If I was training an algorithm to make that call, I would be fitting absolute noise because it is exceedingly probable that the variance within the smith precludes prediction based on the variance between the smiths. My point is that in the presence of so few datapoints, what you do is that you seek out the most highly reputed example, in physical form and across old books. Look at what was valued, make this your tier 1, and then form a ladder downwards where blades with similar attributes that don't quite make the cut get bucketed in. This is attribution by quality levels. In Yamato blades it's particularly acute. This is why Shinsa says your sword is Tegai Kanekiyo, which is a way of saying 'we're not sticking our necks out at Hosho' and why Tanobe says its Hosho. Hosho T1->Tegai Kanekiyo T2. Those are the sorts of relationships I want to parse for the Yamato school.

There appears to be some misunderstanding: I am writing about smiths as statistical distributions. Of course, each sword must be judged on its own merit. But If I handed you a bag of sue-seki sword with a masamune in there and asked you which one was likely to be of best quality, you'd say the Masamune one and you'd be right ex-abrupto everytime. For most cases it's a statistical process with some probability of being right. I've seen these threads in the past go all the way down to "Everything lies in the eyes of the beholder/Quality and or Beauty has no basis in reality". Let's just say this would be a thread of its own more suited for a forum on the philosophy of aesthethics. There are many proxies for quality: Old records from acceptable gifts to Fujishiro/Meikan and various others, to Darcy's pass factor... Which is interesting to me. The fact that the fungability crosses through traditions and into a school. The big difficulty with judging through entire school is that some schools have very varied master-smiths, while for others there is an outlier who produces incredibly work and gets all the Tokuju while the rest are completely unknown. Shizu is a good example of this, so is the famous Bungo master. For Yamato this is made even more difficult because we simply don't know a lot about individual smiths given the paucity of extant work. Tegai Kanenaga and Shikkake Norinaga produced excellent blades and have probably become a way of saying top quality for the school more than anything else, but even this is problematic for me. Comparatively we know even less about Hosho and Taema lines. This is to say the fungability becomes extreme and judges are most likely loathe to stick their necks out and give a specific attributions at all. What has likely happened over time is that the few signed exemplars of the Yamato tradition ended up 'attracting' similar blades forming clusters of attributions based on quality. This leads us to clusters of blades attributed based on proximity with very few original and signed production. When you have so little data, you know nothing about the variance in the production of the smith compared to or those of another line. While classifications is expected to at least correlates with smith ground truth, it will be driven mostly by an appraisal of on the execution of some desirable trait (let's call that quality). So this is a hypothesis as to where we are with Yamato: clusters of blades judged based on some similarity, hovering around very few examples. I want to understand those clusters, when an attribution is made, what are the second and third guesses?

I like that he focuses on getting attractive packages of a sword and its Koshirae. Nick puts a big premium on cutting tests, interesting horimono, beautiful Koshirae and all sorts of things which add to the collectibility of a blade. He also offers great deals to members of this forum.

By T1 I mean 'Tiers' as in levels of quality. This isn't tied to the history of schools or makers as with sub-schools and offshoots, but rather it is a way to understand the process of attribution. What I mean by this is that attributions are a judgement of quality and this becomes more true the more fungible the categories for mumei blades. There are different paths blades can take based on their level of quality. For instance: Go T1->Tametsugu T2->Uda T3. If you get 'Den Tametsugu' it could be up on tier, meaning Go, or down one tier, meaning Uda. Another one is Norishige T1->Sanekage T2->Uda T3. Masamune->Shizu Kaneuji->Naoe Shizu. It also applies to other traditions, such as Awataguchi->Rai->Unju. Bizen as well, where the Soden-Bizen category gets quite flexible with Chogi and Kanemitsu on top, and the top students hovering nearby and Hasebe looming over the very soshu-like pieces. Basically if you think of attributions as a dart thrown at a graph for which nodes are makers (more precisely, one of the maker's style) and edges are 'paths' which can be taken for attribution when the work of different makers are correlated. There is embedded in this graph a hierarchy of quality, with T1 makers epitomizing the highest value. This brings us back to 'Den' which means you're not slam dunk on the node but your dart landed on the edge between two or more nods. The path of the dart has its own component of randomness in its flight path, which is the error in attribution and this is a way to think about blades that get upgraded from Juyo to Tokuju to a different maker. For instance, Tametsugu->Go. For Yamato, while the schools are very fungible, it's unclear to me how the graph is organized. I know Hosho sits on top, but what is sub-hosho? As in, Hosho but one level of quality less. How are the paths organized? Which school stand completely aside, and which ones are so close that its a tough call. Yamato is a big fungible cloud and I don't have its structure figured out right.

I'm still a confused with Yamato school. I know Hosho is T1, but I don't know the relative placements of the other schools, nor which ones are fungible or particularly distinct. I know Senjuin is recognizable because of the period shapes whereas some of the others are not. Is Tegai a way of saying sub-Hosho? or is it's own thing. I know these blades have a reputation of being very hard to judge and abundantly mumei, and thus there should be a lot of fungibility. I'd venture to say something like: Hosho T1->Taema T2->Tegai/Shikkake T3 and Senjuin being its own thing. But that's probably wrong.

This would need further studies and some hard number then. Maybe it's a simple chronological effect, with earlier sessions with more 'Den' compared to later sessions. That would be interesting and I wonder what it reflects: more conservative judgement, more certainty in judgement, submitted blades being more 'slamdunkish' compared to ambiguous early session submissions? (endogeneity?) Early Shinsa: Den Tier 1 Late Shinsa: T2 Or is it more something like: Early Shina: Den T1 Late Shinsa: T1 I think we all agree it's not: Early Shinsa: Den T2 Late Shinsa T1 Which would reflect the Den +5% Darcy in his blog post draws attention to the Muromachi cloud during the bad sessions. Which is clearly for session 23 and 24 (the worst sessions) but not 25. My second hypothesis as to where to look for drop in standards during these high volume sessions lies with the sheer number of sub-Hosho Yamato blades. We have a lot such blades in there volume wise. Some are certainly great and worthy, but one has to wonder what the distribution of quality looks like here. As for anecdotal value, I remember Fred sold 'Juyo in name only' Yamato Wak with a sessions number close to number 25 which we can refer as the cheapest Juyo ever offered on the web. We also have a quite a few suspicious Enju on the low-value side, especially the Enju Wak is a strange one.

Thank you Jussi. Once again, great and insightful work here. What strikes me is the number of 'Den' at Juyo-level attributions in Session 25. I don't have hard data to compare with, but this could be another sign of liberal attributions / maker inflation / drop in standards, on top of the sheer volume. No less than FOUR 'Den Tametsugu' and not a single Tametsugu slam dunk. This is a statistical anomaly, and what I take this 'Den Tametsugu' to mean is mid-grade nambokucho soshu work. A lot of 'Den Shizu' and even a 'Den Masamune'. 2/3 of the AOE attribution are also 'Den'. There is the +/- 10% interpretation of Den, and these blades could be on the minus side. We also know that archetypes slam dunk get a far easier time at Juyo. Strange.

I also enjoyed looking at this piece. I find the Koshirae very attractive. Not sure who exactly is the maker of the blade. Sendai Kunikune appears to be both a maker and a school.

I think we should qualify this statement further. Every sword from sources accessible to the vast majority of westerners has been assessed. Assessed doesn't necessarily mean Shinsa. When in doubt, Shinsa is a gamble and you may lose money at Hozon. It's also a time sink. Money now is worth more than money later. What it is guaranteed to mean is that someone professional in the food chain had a close look at it, and in most cases it was purchased in the sword dealer internal auction, meaning that a lot of experienced dealers gave their best guess. The big fish in Japan find new swords every year. In fact, one of them even has a business of handling estates with a group of experts, a glossy website, and a reputation. This is where new swords are found, which go on to fuel the shinsa process for the latest session. This is where the whales compete and profits are made: in access to these estates. Fresh, new, top blades are still found there, and judging by the inputs in Shinsa, it doesn't seem like the supply of top blade has dried out yet. I haven't seen any evidence of inflation, and in fact quite the opposite, which makes me suspicious of supply-side gaming a la DeBeers but this is a topic for its own post. Collector Estate->Big Fish->Internal dealer auctions for triage->Dealers->the vast majority of us. That's the food chain we're dealing with. Everyone at each level had a look, and applied his markup in order to make a profit, or not lose money at the very least. Sometimes mistakes are made, the lower the presumed level of the item and the more volume oriented the business model, the more likely the mistake because it's just not worth it to spend time in study.

I really enjoy your posts Jeremiah by the way, especially the examples you post here for examination. And I also think you have fine taste.