Hoshi

It is because they are afraid of the law? Or because they fear that their sword will be one day confiscated if they are registered?

Great, keep us updated. I'm also pursuing a daisho project. Finding matching fittings from the same school (same maker for the masochists...) with a matching theme is the REAL struggle. I have returned to Japan recently and I did the grand shop marathon. And I didn't find everything I wanted despite the relatively common theme / school (Goto or Kyo/Scenes of the Gempei war). Then even IF you find a piece that fits your need, it may be grossly overpriced depending on the business model of the shop. (Boutique style). Now I'm just hoping for dealers to email me. And it's easy to forget such a request. I expect it will take me at least two more years...

Hi Nicole, Welcome to the board. There is a thing in the nihonto world that enthusiasts employ words in Japanese to describe things they see, which could be translated or approximated into common english easily. It's confusing when you're new. Short summary without the jargon : There is no pattern on the blade showing folding history. The temper line is scratched. It's not a hardened edge. The collar of the blade is not of the correct shape. The file marks on the hilt are not Japanese. The groove on the blade doesn't end correctly at the tip of the blade. The horn fittings on the wooden sheath are not finished correctly.

It grabbed my attention also. Five bidders and five days remaining. It will be interesting to follow this one. See how much the market is willing to pay. Sublime shape.

Its interesting to see the diversity in Koshirae. So far from our standardized westerner perception of the late Edo or gaudy Tachi koshirae.

How costly is it to register a sword in Japan? I would surmise that if the cost exceeds the benefits (avoiding the putative fine and opening to a wider market) then they're unlikely to be registered. I saw some rust buckets Guntos in flea markets. Clearly unregistered. Now for potentially valuable blades, I do believe a vast majority of them are registered for the purpose of liquidizing these assets. I presume the only "disincentive" for registering valuable blades would be the rankings that prevent it from being exported (Bunka and Biju, not Kokuho). How do prices compare between Tokuju and Bunka/Biju? I would assume Tokuju to be worth more, due to having more potential customers and hedging against Japanese economy turmoil.

Next step is to get in contact with Paolo. We'll see where to take it from here. Jussi, I agree. But Shinshinto work isn't exactly easy to distinguish due to the steel - I was aiming for period as a start. If I can't get in touch with Paolo and get up to date with his project, I'll use the AOIart.net site to build a small database and explore what can be done with it. Thanks everyone for your help!

Very ethical indeed. I am however unsure of the ethics of the website on which it was posted. Seller states on his website "And has a healthy temper at the point" If anything can be gleaned from those pictures is that there is no boshi. Why would a seller emphasis a "healthy boshi" in the absence of one really does befuddle me. Unless it's for deception purposes. Unless of course there is a boshi-like hadori line that we really cannot spot from the pictures. It's tricky.

The data gathering is the issue. But for a starting run, AoiJapan.net has 1600 blades with text-base descriptors. Quality labels. When I get the time I will build a simple web-crawler and see if I can extract the data from the website. Its not about giving a hit on a particular smith, I think that's way too advance and would require a far, far larger database which is outside the scope of this small project. The most time consuming part is gathering and cleaning the data. The rest is easy nowadays, with very powerful classifiers that run out of the box in Python or R. How it works is quite simple. You'd have a dataset, with blade characteritics as predictors, or features (X's), period/school/what have you as dependant variables, or labels. (Y's). From there you train the classifier on a portion of the data, and predict the kept out portion. Depending on the classifier, you'd have a probability assigned to each category. That would be a very simple first run. If its promising then it can be extended.

Thank you Carlo. That's very valuable information. No need recreating the wheel from scratch when you can learn from others. Could you send me a link to the program, or the post discussing it?

Thank you for your input. I think I have a far easier solution to this little project. AoiJapan.net has a collection of 1600+ swords. I wouldn't use the raw images, but mine the text provided into a comprehensive dataset. It wouldn't be an exercise in image classification as I had in mind, but it would certainly provide interesting insights and better effort invested/accuracy ratio. Since when has AoiJapan.net been operating, btw? I recall discovering this treasure trove only recently. It's very unusual for sellers to be so transparent on things such as price realized, as this is the sort of "private" information used to provide an edge in trading. It's valuable.

This is very interesting. Creating the Kobuse construction by using a "pipe-shaped" high carbon steel envelope, in which a rod of low-carbon steel was inserted I find quite fascinating.

It's possible, of course. But probably better handled by a native Japanese speaker, in terms of setting up the pipeline, and so on. I'm sure there is a lot of OCR work related to recognizing Japanese/chinese characters in calligraphy being done.

Beautiful. Have you considered adding a dynamic pan/tilt with lighting at the end of the video to bring out some of the details of the steel structure/hamon?

Hi all, I'm testing the waters to know if enough data is available to try a little exotic project. I do a fair bit of work in data science and I'd be interesting in training a classifier to make approximate nihonto attributions. For this sort of project, one needs a lot of data and it needs to be labelled. Something realistic would be to have a database of Oshigata accompanied by periods (Koto, Shinto, etc). It's unclear at this stage how much data points would be needed, but close to five hundred representative oshigata per period would be a good start to achieve accuracy above the obvious. Another feasible project would be Godaken attributions. Smith school attributions would require high-resolution images with proper lighting, and additional information that can't be easily captured easily by camera for "standard" images. (e.g presence/absence of Utsuri, mune thickness, etc). And lots and lots of data. I'd be willing to undertake this little project if there is sufficient interest. Of course it would require someone who has, or is willing to digitalize a vast quantity of Oshigata for this purpose. One solution I have been considering would be use AoiArt as a database, and continuously download their labelled data with a web crawler (with their permission). And perhaps over time we'd have a large enough dataset. But given the turnover it would take a very long time. In principle, if we had all the existing data on swords with high quality pics and accompanying information about elements that are not present in the picture, we could have an interesting new Shinsa method. After all, what judges do is a form of very sophisticated classifying. But, in all likelihood, we will never get such immensely valuable dataset. Nihonto is unlikely to move in the age of big data so soon. One of the most interesting aspect of training such a classifier, is that we know a lot about the proper order of judgement leading to attribution. This can be implemented into the system. I'd be interested in pursuing this as a side hobby if there is sufficient interest. Let me know what you think.

This just adds to the puzzle to me. As others have said, it seems improbable that these heavy blades were used on horseback (I'm also skeptical that swords at this period were of much use on horseback, when they had spears, and the key technology to carry momentum on the spear from the horse, the stirrup). Furthermore, "foot soldiers" in the classic sense (those who can't afford a horse, i.e ashigaru) would not have been able to afford them. I read somewhere that the Japanese had a focus on single combat, even during large scale battles - where you would "call" your opponent and engage him. No real formation fighting - which would in part explain the lack of shield walls and spear lines so often found -across cultures- with an emphasis on battle formations. This was further incentivized by the gain in status following victory. The long, heavy blade makes a lot of sense in the context of one-on-one combat, where the opponent can be expected to be heavily armored, in some cases and where reach is key. This would match the phenomena observed across Europe towards long blades for purposes of duels. I remember reading somewhere that "blade size inflation" was so pronounced that the English Crown issued an edict on the maximum blade length allowed. In Germany, the professional duelers recruited to settle "Trial-by-combat" had especially long blades. These long swords were produced as a response to improvement in armor technology.

Interesting. It looks like one of the curio sold to foreigners, but of much higher quality than the usual "bone daggers" I've seen in the past. It could also be the remnants of a ruined blade unfit for the Japanese market. And it was re-hammered (look at the nagako, deformation of the lower-most hole) and basically re-packaged for the foreign market by some cunning artisan-recycler.

You make an interesting point about the lighting conditions. That may be part of it. The Muramasa did not strike me as impressive, either. The jewels to my eyes were the Rai work and the Ichimonji. Also, I particularly enjoyed one of the less famous piece - the very dignified Motozane tachi with ko-nie as bright as diamonds.

What was the challenge that spurred the creation of massive blade in this era? Must have been in response to the armor arms-race - but do they coincide with revolution in Yoroi armor? Or as text book would have it, due to the challenges posed by "Thick, boiled leather armor" encountered during the 13th century. I know that the authorities became paranoid about the risk of mongol invasion and hence spent its coffers on improving its arsenal. However, I don't understand why "Thick boiled leather armor" would pose a greater challenge to sword structure compared to the iron-platted yoroi. Does anyone have an explanation? Why were thick swords not developed earlier in response to improvement in soldier protection? Was it because the Mongols had every foot soldier outfitted in cheap to manufacture "thick boiled leather armor" while only warrior elite had the ressources to wear Yoroi plate? Finally, why not focus on thrusting weaponry as a response to development in slash-resistant armor? As many civilizations have done in the past.

I really admire your work, Brian.

And two more : The different picture styles (and poor quality) makes it even more difficult to compare. http://www.sho-shin.com/kanenag.htm Tokuju, Kinzogan mei this time. http://www.sho-shin.com/kanenaga.htm, Juyo

Thanks Peter. The Japanese sword section has a lot of errors, but the metallurgy part is good. On a different topic, I found the part about the Ulfberth swords to be most interesting. Fascinating stuff.

Thanks for the tip, Jean. Struck ~135% of the reserve price. 1.7KK. A quick search at other blades from this smiths tend to be associated with much higher prices, and (judging exclusively the blade from the pictures/descriptions, which is difficult if not impossible...and not from the papers...) It's hard to see in which way this shu-mei would be (much) inferior to some of the previous exemplars. Except for the last example, which appears in a league of its own. https://www.aoijapan.net/katana-mumei-den-kanenaga17th-nbthk-juyo-paper/ 3.6KK http://www.sword-auction.jp/en/content/as16206-%E5%88%80%EF%BC%9A%E7%84%A1%E9%8A%98-%E5%85%BC%E9%95%B7-katana-mumei-kanenaga 3.2KK https://www.aoijapan.net/katana-mumei-kanenaga46th-nbthk-juyo-paper/ 3.6KK https://www.aoijapan.net/katana-mumei-attributed-as-kanenaga/ (This one is a real stunner) 4.8KK These are all swords that sold. Here the only TH Kanenaga katana I could find for comparison. (which makes for a very biased sample of the Smith's work...) https://nihontoclub.com/discussions/2013/08/30/Kanenaga-with-NBTHK-Tokubetsu-Hozon-paper So perhaps there is an elephant in the room? Since it papered TH 15 years ago, I surmise its previous owner tried Juyo shinsa once or twice, and it just didn't fly.

It's very nice, its close to the price of making the koshirae and a touch up polish... A true bargain.

I was somewhat dissapointed by this sword when I saw it. There were many magnificent swords on display, and I intently kept the Masamune as the last piece to study. Maybe I built up unrealistic expectations, or my eyes aren't honed enough to notice the finer points of appreciations. The Koshirae however was wonderful, and the historical background of the sword was interesting. Thanks for sharing pictures, they are better than mine!