Hoshi

No idea if he owned Nihonto, but I did find one of the swords he owned. http://www.hermann-historica.de/en/general_george_s_patton_jr_1885_-_1945_-_a_de_luxe_model_1913_cavalry_sword_a_sp/l/154520?aid=154&Lstatus=0&ord=result_d&currentpos=2

Enough is enough. I realized just how utterly lost I am when it comes to keeping up with auctions. The most promising auctions are the mortuary ones, where the heirs of a deceased collectors bundles his treasures and sends them off to the wind to get a quick buck. These are the events where its worth it gamble and you get decent odds. You get the chance to make valuable mistakes and pay for it or find the occasional treasure at a discount. It's fun and exciting. Bidding on Ebay or Yahoo Japan is just asking for trouble. Bidding on AOIart and you're paying the boutique premium but you get some modicum of safety. What are the auction houses that deal with the liquidation of high quality collections? (aside from the rare Christie's and co auctions which everyone knows about and happen once in blue moon). I will start. Hermann-historica is a german auction house based in Munich that liquidates large collections of arms and armor with the occasional Nihonto from general arms and armor collectors. If you're a general arms and armor collector this is really the place to be. Nihonto in general are low to mid-grade. http://www.hermann-historica.de Example of relevant past auction : http://www.hermann-historica.de/en/objekte?aid=147&Lstatus=0&Accid=1787 I hope this gets us somewhere towards a general directory of auction houses to watch out for.

Now if we start introducing more variables... Skin to core steel ratio in cross-section is interesting. A lot of soft core steel would offset the brittleness of a wider hamon. I think I read in one of Darcy's post that the RAI school has very little skin steel compared to its Yamashiro predecessor. Possibly giving their blades both an economic edge in terms of production cost and a reduced risk of breaking. I can imagine that core steel showing up after a few chip repair wouldn't cause screech of horrors in the samourai of old as it does to the modern collector as long as the blade remained with a viable hamon thickness. Then there is of course the hardness of the core steel and skin steel itself and the hardness of the hamon quenching process. I read somewhere that Koto Bizen used a relatively soft steel that had the good ductile properties even for the skin, compared to centrally-produced/imported shinto steel which was much harder. From there we can assume that for the same hamon thickness and irregularity, the shinto blade was far more brittle compared to the koto bizen sword. I think when the Soshu tradition emerged they didn't have access to the quality raw materials of bizen and hence had to adapt their style out of necessity due to the new iron deposits they were using. It just didn't work and hence they had to change the formula towards thicker swords to survive the more intense quench resulting in harder hamons that would chip more easily. How their steel differed from the yamashiro and Bizen deposits I'd like to know. I'm also curious if the nie-deki was a necessity to make this steel work or just the byproduct of their experimentation as they tried to adapt to the new deposits.

Please share! This is extremely interesting. Thank you.

it's the swindler premium

Another one for an unscrupulous seller in the west. Forged sayagaki is probably so bad that it would never fool a native.

Fantastic innovation.

Not sure I understand. You can't make it "go away" structurally. Paying a polisher to make a hagire harder to see strikes me as deceptive. But maybe there is something I don't get.

Thank you for your inputs, I now have a lot to read in order to wrap my mind around this question!

I would add that collecting so far has been a journey in self-discipline. How many time was I ready to pull the trigger on a "sideway" item unrelated to goals... Thankfully each time external factors have kept me from pulling the trigger. Who knows how long my luck will last. It's very much like investing in the stock market. Set yourself a target and stick to it. You lose money when you let greed or fear take over. Every step you take downsizing and refocusing will cost you. If you do it multiple times you're basically going to pay double for the next round. Sure there is a dividend you get, which is exposure to the sword and hence a study value. However the value of study increase steeply with the value of the swords to my understanding. The fact that swords carry about 3k-5k overhead each for polish, shirasaya, habaki, etc all of which are prerequisites to enjoy and preserve the sword, coupled with the fact that price increases much slower w.r.t to quality compared to other art markets makes it even more rational to stay tall. When you think about, at 3k you're basically paying for something worth as much as an oddly shaped rod of mixed iron if you exclude the overhead. All of this makes it in my view that the rational thing to do is to build tall.

Interesting. I decided to follow two rules : Every new sword higher quality than the previous. Every new sword by the mentor or inspirer of the previous. Eventually this will lead to a very narrow and long collection with a 3-10x price increase from the previous. For now I have : High quality shinshinto blade (some malevolent man decided to weaponise it by removing the signature, punched another mekugi ana, and aged the nakago to make it pass as Koto, hence its basically worthless) by a sai-jo Saku shinshinto smith. This blade which my was first love was in Soden-Bizen style. So that sets a direction towards Soden-Bizen direction. My second blade is by Kensho, and the third will be by Chogi hopefully. This way I have a horizontal collection of the soden-bizen school. After I reach the last nod of Soden-Bizen, I branch out to seek two very prototypical blades of Bizen and Soshu. For now that's where I am in my thought process. If its unachievable due to me being unsuccessful at grinding cash then so be it, it will stay where it is. This is a luxury hobby which I see as a reward to motivate me to do well. Swords are not investments alas, I fully expect to be paying the renting cost before it moves on to the next owner. Purchases are made with the conservative notion that 20+% of the money invested will be lost. Unless of course, I manage to partake in some of the money-bleeding auctions from deceased collectors where bargains are had - but given my "detection rate" this is unlikely to happen. Hence, boutique purchase with all the overhead that comes with it.

Hello Darcy, This goes against the general saying of "form follows function" - which I've often read, if we compare koto swords to watchmaking complications The notion that customers were after swords that will afford them many re-sharpening opportunity is something I didn't give much weight to. It's interesting because then you'd expect the Hamon thickness to coincide with strike areas, and this is often what you see. Shallow Hamon at the base, wide hamon in the middle/upper segment. Both the re-sharpening factor and the creation of a geometry that would be bend at the base then coincide. I agree that the mongol stuff is mostly overhyped in terms of actual battles. However, the psychological factor I believe at the time was monumental, and spawned levels of anxiety with regards to military preparedness (and hence, quality of arms) that was unheard of. The fear of another invasion attempt was very real. This is an existential threat and you need to do the rational thing. Study the tactics, arms, and armours of your foe. Reproduce them if you can and train against them. While this may be unrelated to the fall of the ichimonji it is highly likely that it is related to the trend towards more robust and designs. The more I think about it and the more I think the best way to think of a Hamon is in terms of wave frequencies. If you do a Fourrier analysis on a Hamon you can decompose it into different frequency variations. The repeating high and low undulations are in the high frequencies, while the asymmetry from the upper, middle, and bottom segment are low frequency variations. What sort of insights can be derived from this formulation I am still uncertain, however this can be very for the purpose of creating a stress simulation. Unfortunately I'm not a stress engineer and getting all the parameters right is probably far above my punching weight.

Tempting.

Hi Allan, Thank you for your input. It's because breaking is such a disaster compared to the other outcome you describe that surely that was the number one priority to be optimised. Edge chipping is no big deal in battle. A broken blade tends to cause death. And we know just how shameful it was for a smith to have his blade break in usage, the ultimate dishonour and for good reason. What you mention (Cold weather performance, cross-sectional profile, material availability, blade length and shape) all of these are parameters which are featured into the odds of breaking/bending calculus. The singular goal was to create a blade that cuts (hence, hard) which at the same time does not break (hence, bends). Hello Carlo, The amount of broken blades against reinforced boiled amor was such that is spanned a mini revolution in sword geometry. I agree that sword smith classification in the koto era correlates with durability - and presently I'm focusing on the top smith to see if I can find patterns in hamon formation made specifically to mitigate break in favour of bend. As Arnold pointed out, the wild ichimonji hamon failed w.r.t to durability. This corroborates the notion that unstructured midare is poor design. The key to a successful midare was perhaps the structured midare (shallow towards the area of high stress) - maybe even superior to the descending suguha (suguha that tapers off towards the habaki). Because otherwise I just don't see why midare even came about during the Koto period, during which battle functionality was the prime and only criteria. As for the Ichimonji, I have a theory. Because of the unique arrangement with the exiled emperor, the smiths therein were engaged in something closer to a beauty contest compared to a functionality context against hard targets that would damage the sword regardless. But I digress.

Thank you Arnold, this corroborates my intuition. Studying hamon geometry lately moved my inquiry away from simple midare versus suguha, towards structural soft areas of steel incorporated into the design as PoBE. The Hasebe sword and the Kuniyuki illustrate this. How do I even find your reference... I wish such things were indexed by google scholar. John, soft medium was the wrong word. But body and bone do not pose a large risk of break if the strike is well executed, and it was given that it was performed by professionals. A Kabuto, plate amor, or mongol reinforced leather, or another sword, are a different matter in terms of stress and risk of catastrophic failure. This is why I don't think the wazamono index is appropriate to measure durability. It's a different thing. Michael, I haven't found any particular in depth discussions about the physics of stress applied to sword manufacture besides the oft repeated observations of Masahide. Large Shinto hamon make brittle swords. There has to be more than that to it. I'm starting to think that the midare geometry as designed by some master smiths of the koto period were specifically made to increase durability as per the argument laid above. As a side argument, if the theory that the base of koto swords were (in some cases) designed as PoBE, this would be another argument devaluating Suriage swords. We keep hearing about "true shape" being altered, and in some minor accounts balance. But in fact, we may be facing swords that are largely inferior to their ubu counterparts due to the added brittleness.

At this price keep in mind it wasn't produced in Japan. Commissioned in China. EDIT: for the price it looks great :-) the gold is a tad too gaudy for me, but the design is nice.

To go back to the Hasebe, the theory seems to hold. Almost UBU sword. http://www.sho-shin.com/hasebe-kuninobu3.jpg Area of shallow Hamon at the base designed as PoBE. Of course we'd need more data points from the top smiths with excellent repute for durable swords. I am not sure the "wazamono index" is fitted to this - as it was not created as a measure of durability but of cutting ability in soft medium. As to swords being designed to absorb impact through vibration, of course I agree - but there is a point of failure where the vibrations alone cannot absorb the stress and this leads to catastrophic failure (breaking) or, if well designed - a good bend.

I think I have a theory. Let's assume a sword is struck. If you have a even structural rigidity, the point of break (PoBR) is the same as the point of bend (PoBE). If you want to maximize the odds of bend at the expense of break, you should voluntarily introduce a PoBE that is different from the PoBR. If you have an undulating hamon, you're basically distancing PoBE from PoBR. This means the sword will take a bend rather than a break with a higher probability as the PoBE will absorb impact. Undulating hamons will create multiple dissociated PoBEs at each shallow valley. Furthermore, if you know don't know where the impact occurs and you're unsure about the area of likely maximum stress, you're better off creating multiple PoBE compared to just one. Moreover, a bend could be distributed over multiple PoBE rather than a single one, further reducing the odds of shattering the sword. If we take the Kuniyuki, The hamon geometry at the base of the sword is clearly designed as a PoBE. For the Hasebe, let us remember that the sword was massively cut down from its original size. There probably was an area of shallow hamon at the base designed as a PoBE. If we assume that indeed both swords have a PoBE at the base, we can further observe that the upper segment of the sword has a more shallow hamon as well, perhaps another PoBE designed to absorb kissaki strikes?

Hi Ken, thanks for your input. I'm not referring to post-unification blades - but old swords. Steel in the hamon is harder than steel outside of the hamon. The harder the steel, the higher the likelihood the blade will break and not bend. If hard steel is not equally distributed, so is brittleness. Hence, where the hamon is deep, the blade is more brittle. Masahide observes and records that large hamon make for brittle blades - but my inquiry is not about these exagerated shinto hamon, it's about the koto blades with undulating or uneven hamons. From a purely engineering perspective, why would you favor an undulating or flamboyant hamon rather than a simple but sound thin suguha? I presume it's through trial-and-error, and that for these traditions it simply "worked" - but I don't understand the physics of this at all. One explanation is that it was already at the time, aesthetics that prevailed. But this goes against the common saying that swords were foremost designed around function at the time. I must be missing something and this is why I'm puzzled. Let's illustrate with some of Darcy's incredible pieces- Take the Hasebe/Chogi. Hamon is thick in the first segment, shallow in the upper segment. This was a massive sword and durability was critical. There is no way this wasn't done for functional purpose by the smith. http://www.nihonto.ca/hasebe-3/index.html Take another masterpiece, the Rai Kuniyuki. Again, you would assume that Kuniyuki designed the uneven geometry of the hamon for functional purposes. http://www.nihonto.ca/rai-kuniyuki-2/index.html Here we have the exact opposite. Thick hamon in the upper segments, shallow in the lower ones. So we have two great smiths with a complete opposite take on hamon geometry. We can notice that the Hasede (on top of being massively thick) has no taper, while the Kuniyuki has a slight taper. But would such a difference in taper warrant the completely at odds hamon geometry? Why? Why not opt for a fine and even suguha, like so: http://www.nihonto.ca/omi-daijo-tadahiro-4/ I must be missing something. I doubt this is purely "artistic freedom" and has to be product of trial-and-error and data accumulated from customer feedback over generations. How do swords even break? Do they break at the point of impact or point of maximum tension (lower close to the base)? I know very little about material stress, but I assume its the latter. The diminishing suguha towards the base would then make perfect functional sense, and we could surmise that the optimal hamon has this shape (I faintly recall reading somewhere that kotetsu tended towards diminishing hamons, and he was an empirically-minded smith). But then, the Hasede doesn't make sense...

Something that has been nagging at my mind. Perhaps a naive question but I can't seem to come up with an answer. Why the wavy midare hamons? If you want to maximize structural strength you need to ensure stress is evenly distributed. From an engineering perspective this means suguha hamon does it best. Why the wavy stuff in the Koto period? (Shinto is a different story as aesthetics begin to trump functionality). Straight and shallow suguha minimizes risk of catastrophic failure assuming the blade has no taper on either dimension. Now, I figured out smiths probably knew where impacts are the most likely to be had. Even if you derive some sort of probabilistic heat map of the odds of structurally threatening impacts, you would then again do a variant of suguha to ensure stress is minimized on this surface. Wavy midare adds spots of brittleness to the blade, where the hamon is deep. Why? Some elements I've been considering which may lead to unforeseen non-linearities in impact stress response. The hada gain orientation usually correlates with midare versus suguha, why? Some smiths have produce differential thickness of martensitic crystals on the valleys compared to the apex of the waves. The orientation of the martensitic crystal could change as a function their point along the curvature, which may change structural properties. We're assuming frontal impacts. How does force reverberate across lateral impacts? More broadly, how does impact vibration contribute to stress? If someone has an engineering simulation that would be just wonderful. It's hard to imagine nobody tried to do it. Software to model stress on steel of differential hardness exist for sure... In fact is someone did come up with such a model it would be fantastic to see what the model predicts as optimal structural form against how famous schools designed their blades.

Very interesting however the argument hinges on a key assumption... What's the correlation between number of sword accepted to juyo per session and number of Tokuju upgrades of those same sessions? if its very high then we can use the amount as proxy, but I would expect that its not the case. Early session probably have a overwhelming conversion rate compared to latter ones. For various reasons I'm somewhat skeptical that it's a very good proxy at present. For instance, I do not believe session 61 Juyo are much better than session 57. Since you do not know the amount of swords submitted (or do you?) to calculate the pass rate, it's hard to say whether a high output sessions are due to low standards or high inputs. And even if you did, the problem of the average input quality still looms. You can avoid these confounding factors if you get the Tokuju conversion rate per juyo session then you should get a good idea of how much you can derive the ballpark value of a sword from a given session. Have you assigned a unique ID to each sword such that you can track how many have upgraded to Tokuju per session? That would really be fantastically informative. I understand however that the work involved in attributing a unique ID is pretty daunting by hand (and supremely annoying...). But if you filter by smith with some measurements you could get a pretty good guesstimate of what went where. And this can be automated such that the search automatically goes through all possible sets to find a match, or give you a degree of match such that you can incorporate uncertainty into the ID, looping over the 900 or so Tokuju. That way if the match is uncertain you can give it a lower weight into the calculation of conversion rates.

I concur. THANK YOU! I just devoured everything and now I want more...

Another one missed...

Muramasa blades were banned on pain on death by the tokugawa shogunate. A lot of signatures were either erased or replaced in this time in order to hide the true maker of the blade. There aren't very many makers for which a fake signature is used to camouflage a higher quality blade from unwanted scrutiny...

Smells of an elaborate fraud... I absolutely cannot see most of his "Masamune patterns" Videos were posted 8 months ago, and sometimes years ago. In that time I'm sure a few masamune experts carefully looked at them, and concluded it was most likely a fraud. Still, the legend is alive. The first thing to do would be to compare the exact geometry of the Oshigata with the blade. I don't see this anywhere... However, Masamune or not, the blade does have a lot going for it under the surface. Bright chickei and some probably sumptuous activity. I surmise you could have a similar result with the likes of a good Shizu in need of polish. EDIT: and indeed, it's an old fraud. https://www.reddit.com/r/SWORDS/comments/2fbfv4/youtube_user_fiddlin4you_claims_to_have_the_lost/