Jussi Ekholm

I've greatly enjoyed this ongoing series on JSSUS newsletters. I think your part 8: Ōei Bizen was amazing. Of course my personal preferences skew my judgement for which part is/was the best.

Looks top notch. That über res...

Sounds like it was an amazing show.

I agree with Gordon, while hada is really standing out in those pictures it is very hard to get a look on the hamon.

Nice pictures and very visual hada, looks great in new polish.

In general older papers are not really recognized by NBTHK anymore. However that does not automatically mean they are incorrect. Of course it always affects the value and general opinion about the sword. However I must comment that I'm really liking that Yoshii school sword (as a package when you consider all things). To me it looks very fitting to the attribution as my own personal thought about it would be Yoshii school, so at least I am agreeing with the old attribution. The downside is it is a suriage mumei wakizashi with old papers and Yoshii is not the most highly praised school. I like the Yoshii school and I think it's a quite nice package. John gave some good info above. As you might have decided to go with a wakizashi which is a good choice for getting quality for money invested, I think another important thing would be comparing the condition the swords are in. And then of course you will have to decide on which sword suits most your collecting intrests (time period, smith & school, overall look etc.). Welcome to the forum, I hope you will enjoy your stay in here.

I think it's bit transitional like Paul said earlier and we tend to be bit too caught up on classifications in general. I know at least I am. I was looking at Nihonto Kōza and there the cutoff for later group seems to be at Muromachi as early part of Tegai is told to be until end of Nanbokuchō. There are several Ōei dated examples listed under Sue-Tegai. Of course these classifications are not set in stone and I believe it's pretty much impossible to say if the suriage mumei sword was made in 1386 or 1402. However they have to draw a line somewhere. I've thought that Sue-Tegai = Muromachi and Tegai = pre-Muromachi.

肥州八代住兼照作 - Hishū Yatsushiro-jū Kaneteru saku

I believe at least in kantei bids a cutoff from Muromachi is noted. Here are two quotes which indicate that there was a demand for either specifying Sue or Muromachi.

Thank you Markus, that is very helpful and enlightening.

Well this is something that I've noticed on many pages of the group translation project at Hidensho. It has gotten me a bit puzzled and I've decided to ask for proper translation for this. XX氏蔵 I have thought this would be: from the collection of XX family. Would this be an ok way to translate this? When present, this is always mentioned on the bottom of the page. So I believe in this pic the 32 is 戸田氏蔵 from the collection of Toda family and 33 疋田氏蔵 from the collection of Hikita family?

Nice catch Randy I am sure this would be very interesting for Derek as he is the NMB Muramasa guy.

I believe the other side is 昭和十八年十月十五日

Nice looking weave, will be very nice to see more sageos in the future.

Very solid appearance by Nick. It's great to see Japanese swords getting some mainstream time.

Yes I was referring to your sword as the thread was mainly about it. The one problem that converted polearm will have to go through is re-establishing blade design. Creating proper feel & balance to the new form Now when Kunisuke made this in the beginning as a naginata he created this as a polearm and geared proper blade design for it. Shaped and sized it so it would function and feel as it should when used as a weapon it was originally designed. The problem begins when you cut off a lot of the tang yet the blade remains the same size. This will completely change the dynamics of the weapon. Therefore you need to compensate this as much as you can with naoshi. You create new harmonics for this newly established weapon. Altering a sword will always change the dynamics of the sword, sometimes more sometimes less. Of course back in the day they did the best they could to remodel polearms to be used as swords. They knew how they needed to adjust the weapon to make it more wieldy in it's new use. However they had to face the limitations sometimes. *EDIT* used a bit wrong term as it's 1.40 so I had to correct a bit

I wonder how the blade feels in hand because of the offset of differing sides. I believe the long hi on one side is compensating the weight reduction on the other side. Would be very nice to get a feel on how your sword feels in hand. Of course it's not too big factor when considering artistic merits or quality of worksmanship of the sword but for me it is important how the sword feels in my hand.

I could jump in on a group project like that. Sounds like fun and I guess I might actually be of some use. :D I could tackle some easy to low medium stuff and leave difficult stuff to more qualified folks.

I knew Darcy had done some statistics research on Norishige. It seems Norishige has 94 blades that are Jūyō or better. So I believe a Norishige submission would have a lot of competition in form of already passed blades. So I could understand well that a sword of his with a kirikomi might not pass for Jūyō as there are already so many blades that have passed. Where as kirikomi could be almost totally overlooked when it's a question of a blade with historical signifigance. For example if there are only few signed works of a particular smith remaining then the condition will not be as important as for a smith who has a lot of signed works remaining to this day.

Yamanaka Newsletters Book 3/4 has 14 missing Kokuhō and 25 missing Jūyō-bijutsuhin on pages 239 - 252. (EDIT just finished reading the great article by Jim Kurrasch and he has also oshigata and pics of the missing JB and cross referenced them to Yamanaka)

伝尻懸則長 - Den Shikkake Norinaga

I wouldn't get too caught up on terminology. Couple cm either way does not change the sword much and there are no exactly set limits what seems to be called katate-uchi and what is bit over that limit. Longer swords for two handed use (morote-uchi) usually started coming back and trending during Eiroku -> onwards but of course there can be longer examples even at the heart of katate-uchi era. Spears & rifles were just so much more useful than swords in warfare. Tenbun is mentioned usually as an era when swords gradually started getting slightly bigger again. Sources for that information are NBTHK and Tokyo National Museum.

I'm not really collecting at Juyo level (and wont be for a long long long time), so my advice is not that viable. I'd just recommend trying to enjoy the sword as it is and after studying it and comparing to works that passed Juyo by this smith, maybe give it a go in few years if you feel like it then. Getting Juyo status does not change the actual sword in any way so you can enjoy it as much collecting point of view regardless of the papers it has. Of course Juyo status will affect the monetary value. I tend to view the world with collector glasses and business with swords ain't my strong suite. Looks to be quite nice sword and I am sure you will be happy with it.

I think they should have included brackets for 5k and 10k for this survey too. I think investing 20k is a major investment for most of collectors. I know for sure that if/when I have that much savings to put on a sword it will be towards a neat antique. However I do know that there luckily are serious collectors of new swords that help to keep the craft alive. Unfortunately the survey didn't have much questions for me as I couldn't afford 20k blade. I'd think they would have gotten more usable data by including lower tier options too.

I know we are not really supposed to comment ongoing sales but I would second Jacques on the date to Keiō on ura side. Also I think it's the same thing on the blade featured in 1972 Metropolitan Museum volume 5 blade that has similar inscription start on ura side. I believe that Keiō is written here is sōsho script similar to this. Here is an actual mei which has Keiō written in similar way: http://iidakoendo.com/1195/ I wish not to hinder the sales in any way. I think it's nice piece signed & dated (at least I think so) and papered.