Bugyotsuji

Recently I have seen a spear in shirasaya which looked decidedly odd, as you say, and I was very suspicious. It was also very cheap. Spears tend to be cheap recently anyway, but is it possible that someone has found a way to make cheap spears (and import them?) and pass them off within Japan as traditional Japanese spears? If the blades are short enough they will not need paperwork either. :|

If those aren't scratches in your photos, maybe you have too much oil on the blade?

Wow, amazing hamon. A lovely thing to have in anyone's collection! Welcome home!

Great link. Thanks.

Hi Malcolm, great site for boxes, & nice little link there for a NSEW four-hole box. Essentially the same. Go straight into the bow without our Western intermediary step. Thanks. Actually someone gave me a quick lesson last night in tying the knot (after that picture was taken). Personally I love old boxes and have quite a few around the house, much to the wife's annoyance.

Just your 2 yen, maybe, but your opinion carries the weight of two of those large heavy silver Meiji yen. The rarer ones. Even if I fix it, as I am planning, in deference to you Brian and Stephen, the offending photos will still be staring brightly at everyone, so maybe they should be photoshopped, but I don't know how to do it... Ah, yes, everyone please wear sunglasses when observing the new Tsuba work...

OK, OK, got the message............... grrrrrrrrrrr ........ I'll ask the wife to make my egg runny tomorrow morning!

Stephen, does the brightness bother you? I really like it, and am planning to enjoy it for a few days, hehehe Might as well enjoy it while you have it!

Hmmm... well, there is something! Thanks for the link.

Dunno, Stephen. I could wait for it to go dark green like the other one... brass goes dull pretty quickly, doesn't it? Gold to smoky gold to bright green to dull red to dull green. Might take a century or two, though. :lol:

The Momoyama wheel Tsuba on p.2 of this thread has been 'refurbished'. Someone (a previous owner) had taken a file to it and zealously removed the rust, but this rough & ready removal process had also taken off most of the patina and much of the iron Ji and the Shinchu Zougan. The marks of the file could still be seen here and there. A collector friend asked me if I would mind lending it to him as the sight of it offended his sensibilities. A week later and here it is. First Impressions: 1. The remaining Zougan looks brighter. 2. The iron looks darker. 3. The Tsuba feels very soft and smooth to the touch. In the phone call of Sunday he said the rust needed to grow a bit more so could I wait a few more days? Today he called to say that it was ready. I don't think that the Shinchu is actually any brighter, but the loss of the bright shine of the exposed iron has increased the contrast between the dark rust patina Ji and the remaining Shinchu Zougan. It looks a lot better, IMHO. He smoothed off the surface file marks so that now it also feels a lot better between the fingers.

Awright already folks! Here she is with her extra bit replacement in Shinchu, hot off the workbench. (Usual apologies over photo quality.)

Interesting that in the States there's no duty if it's old, whereas in Europe there's a heavier duty for 'old' stuff! Malcolm, I am not sure if Sanada Himo is what they gave me. Look at the picture and see. In the meantime I will ask on my next trip!

For Malcolm. The wife doesn't like the Teppo-bako so it serves as a compromise. Body 130 cm long, or 133cm if overlapping lid measured overall. Total 38.5 cm high, and body 32 cm wide (34.5 if lid measured). As I remember there is some brush writing underneath attesting to being a gun box, with a Keio date putting it right on the end of Edo. The box is quite battered, but retains the iron rings for carrying from a long pole. PS Went round to the sword & gun shop today and showed them the Katana box, hoping for advice on how to tie it up. They pulled out a roll of flat grey-green obi ribbon and whipped up something exactly suitable. The Banto looked long and hard at the box inside and out and then pronounced, "Quite an old box." I said that it might be Edo. "Certainly Edo, yes, of course, but kanari noborimasu", he said, "judging by the worm damage etc." He seemed to be suggesting very early Edo or even older. "It's made of Kiri" (Paulownia wood) Then he rather wistfully added, "Of course it's not worth much. Too big. No-one has the room for this sort of thing nowadays. Maybe worth 10,000 JPY". I imagined it getting trashed from lack of a willing owner and quickly said that I will be giving it a home. Now, how to keep the wife happy? Get rid of the Teppo-bako, and replace with smaller (!) Katana-bako?

John, yours is really nice, and ideally that is what I have been wanting.

Hi Malcolm, yes, all the 5 dividers move and there are three sets of slide guides. The central solid double-viaduct one could go at one end. The others are interchangeable. It's surprisingly large, nearly as big as my Teppo-bako. Stephen suggested it could be used for Futon!!! :lol: 126cm long, 34cm high and 26cm from front to back.

Have you been drinking the spice? You have just read my mind! AAAaarrrggghhhh... no escape! Funnily enough, I shut it earlier and bound it through the holes with something (un)suitable, and it locked itself. Had a sweaty moment! You are not going to believe this, but another acquaintance is a traditional locksmith and made a replacement set of 'old' keys for my Edo Period ship's strongbox. You have just given me an idea... Okay, okay, so you don't have to stretch your belief, here are the keys he made. Nothing much to look at, but I was real pleased to see what was actually possible in this life!!!

And here she is a couple of hours later:

You have a way with words, Stephen. Here are the before shots:

Lots to report from the last two or three days, But allow me to post something simple. Up in the hills this afternoon, dropped by a little roadside market which has a junk corner in an annex outside. Occasionally the owner has something interesting hidden in the cobwebs, and today I noticed a fairly large Katana-bako which I had not seen before. It was covered in dust, all the metal fittings were heavily rusted, and it was full of woodworm holes, but it looked as though it could be cleaned up. A quick haggle and it was mine, much to my wife's horror, as I lugged it over and stuffed it into the car. What a fine way to spend a Sunday arvo. In the sunshine a bit of restoring soon got me warmed up. First I opened up the lid and tipped out the contents, which included piles of dust, some bills and old stamped letters from the Taisho Period, and a section of wall-to-wall Washi paper along the bottom which proved to be reusable. Pulled out the five bridges. Banged the whole thing with a rubber hammer to wake the woodwormies up from their hibernation and also to give me saw-dusty holes to aim at. Fired long bursts of insecticide into all the worm holes. Wire-brushed the rust off the lock, the metal hinges and reinforcements. Squirted rust preventer all over the metal fittings and rubbed down. Finally used a little olive oil on all the wood and metal surfaces to bring back some colour/color. Been wanting a Katana-bako for some time, but they don't often come up, and when they do the price is never quite what I had in mind. Will post pics if anyone wants to see a few before and after shots.

Having sent this tsuba for refurbishment I had a call to say it is ready. The missing Hitsu-ana strip has been replaced. (The other tsuba is a large Heian-jo wheel tsuba which had been badly damaged by someone with a rough file in an attempt to remove rust and dirt. Much of the Shinchu zougan was removed; the steel was showing brightly and scores/scratches ran across both faces of the tsuba. This one is not ready yet. See jpegs 842 & 843 in the middle of this page. viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2499&start=15 When it is, I should be going to collect them both, probably early next week.)

Carmen says: "Box is of suitable (exceptional) quality." It looks like a regular Tsuba box to me...

By a stretch of the imagination it could be a stamp or seal based on a Kanji but elaborated. The character for king was 王 and if he held a precious stone in his hand the character showed king + stone = 玉　meaning a precious stone, or jade, and if you add more of those dots you could end up with a king holding four precious stones, and it would have some meaning to yourself and might be a recognizable mark for an artist, for example! Just playing with ideas here... ***** On the subject of this week's Edo Period corner (not the translation section here) I was offered something quite special yesterday. It is a set of Ko-te and Sune-ate, but of exquisite quality, the sort of work you would only ever see in a museum. It was way over my budget, but a fraction of what they would have cost in better times. It started me wondering what is happening now with this high yen and people losing their jobs. Is the old pool of customers flush with cash drying up, at the same time as foreigners are losing interest over the exchange rates? Could it be that the dealers are being forced to let go of better material in order to try and scrape back some of their outlay, in the need for ready cash?

Except that Ludolf has kept the patina intact!

Do-te has the original meaning of defensive man-made (river/fortification) bank, as I am sure you are all aware. An apt word to describe what we are looking at.