Bugyotsuji

There were three of these, but on my way home with my treasures, a friend took one off me, ...so now there are two. One is Edo, the other is probably WWII. Both seem in good nick, soft leather.

Sorting through boxes and boxes of tsuba, fuchi, kashira, menuki etc. today in a warehouse and discovered this little wakizashi tsuba. 6.5 x 6.9 cm. 0.4 at the seppa dai, 0.35 @ mimi. Can you see what is special about it. (Well, special to me anyway. No-one else seemed to notice... :lol: )

I think I might be going slightly mad. Tsuba by tsuba, the box has been filling up. What am I going to, or better still what is my wife going to do with things I have collected over the months and years? A friend told me today that there are three kinds of collector, viz: A) Those who buy something and then shut themselves in a closet with a light and magnifying glass and gloat over it. B) Those who buy and get pleasure from showing everyone what they have bought. C) Those who find pleasure in buying but as soon as they get home become bored, so they then find pleasure in selling it. Am I B) then? Anyway, as a kind of catch up, here are some of the recent additions to the box. The Nanako silver on copper Wakizashi tsuba with the chip I found a week ago. The rest assembled themselves today. One of them was a really exciting surprise for me, for personal reasons; I will post it over in this week's Edo Period corner. PS Shots of just one side, out of concern for bandwidth. Any reverses upon request.

Talking with a NBTHK teacher last night and he was saying he stopped using Choji oil several years ago because it oxidizes. He only uses "silicon oil", whatever that is, even on museum and top quality swords. He did say that if you do make the swtchover, be careful not to mix the two oils. He also mentioned as a regretful afterthought that centuries' exposure to residual clove oil is a key ingredient to giving the Nakago its present character.

Mmmm... nice finds, Guido.

Before using any of Ian's magic ammonia solution, here is an illustration of the cleaning process to date. One side shows the Hasami-bako virtually untouched. The other side is after many hours of hard work. Sure it looks scrappy, but there is a warmth in it that is not really visible in the photo... (BTW, please ignore the top as that was an earlier experimental attempt.)

Hi there, ... perhaps there are too many things to address here, so people have been unable to answer. The first thing is that the photos are too small (for me anyway) for any consideration to be made. The reason for this is either you have just appeared and as a newbie do not yet have full facility usage, or that you have been unable to strike a happy medium with the photos. Which is it, I wonder? Have you tried using a hosting site with links, which would cut down on bandwidth usage? Secondly there is a rule here about signing your posts with a real name. Once you get used to this, it becomes frustrating if people arrive with no name. Thirdly, there is a hint in your post, ie 'multipics' that there is a large volume of pics. Perhaps people are shying away from being asked to get involved in potentially heavy work by someone appearing out of the blue? Hoping that the above comments will help to get some kind of ball rolling for you.

Yes, the seated figure could be Lui Bei, not Kong Ming. There were three who swore an oath in the garden, but in the illustration only two left, possibly then after Lord Guan was killed? Is it the swearing of the oath and the idea of loyalty to the lord? Or if they are Kong Ming and Zhang Fei, they could possibly represent the two military qualities of raw courage, and clever tactics. Since it's an illustration on a Kozuka, then the latter might make sense, as two ancient virtues for the samurai. (?)

Well, to clarify a little, it says nothing apart from what I wrote earlier: on the top of the lid it says that they are sleeves for wearing underneath the Kote armour/armor.

Thanks again. I can picture it a bit better now. No, the text doesn't say any more about what they were used for, as far as I can see, but it does suggest that there should have been a Tsuba in the box, which was not there when I bought these sleeves. Archery would make sense. What really caught my eye was the hidden Christian mark, the very one I had been looking for...the Hachisuka clan is famous for their swastika, but how many know their Daimyos were Kakuri Kirishitan?

Ian, that's brilliant. Many thanks. I have been working so hard on it that my right shoulder is semi dislocated and quite sore today, and the results are slow. One side is almost 'finished'. Luckily they've had a rerun of old cowboy movies so I've been polishing and watching, watching and polishing. I was toying with using something stronger on a corner to see what would happen, as I've tried to err on the side of conservatism, but I will now follow your instructions and see what happens. What 'detergent' are you referring to? Something acid, alkali, soapy? Incidentally, these are the Kote undersleeves I was mentioning a couple of pages back. Page 45, a couple from the top. Why aren't there post numbers on this site, I wonder? There seems to be a steel shoulder piece inside. The frills are interesting... viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2554&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=660

Chuck, thanks for taking it in the right spirit. All I wanted to say was that Nobody is not just anybody around here! As to the photos, they're a lot better than I could do and it would be a miracle if you could extract any more than that out of the Mei. Good luck with the search, even if you do not get the answers that you are looking for right away.

This is just theory until I get a pic up here, but I have this large (9 x 8.9 cm) round iron tsuba with two hitsu-ana, and the Mei has been rubbed off almost completely. Well, except that down the right side of the Nakago-ana seppa-dai, you can make out Sendai Ju Nin. "鉄地円形金彩大鍔 (銘仙臺住人？？) 江戸期" with -dai written in the old Kanji. The iron is all plain, but the two hitsu ana have the remains of kin zogan round the edges on one side. Does this ring any bells? How many candidates can there be, I wonder? I have been told that the tsuba is good quality, Edo, or maybe even Muromachi. Any hints appreciated.

Chuck, if Koichi san (Nobody) says it could be Minamoto, then I will go with that judgment. He is way beyond most of us here, and will not say something unless there is a reason. He will always hedge his bets if he is not sure. I trust him. If Minamoto is his guess, that is probably as close as we will ever get with those photos. Peace.

I am guessing

Last night I was bringing some life back to the Urushi lacquerwork by lightly buffing with camellia oil when suddenly in an angle of the light I noticed the outlines of two large Mon which must once have graced the surface of the lid. Whether they were erased through constant use, or whether they have been deliberately defaced, is too early to say. One side is a Yotsu-me, and the other is 5/7 Kiri Mon. So, I did some digging around the books today and it looks as though this box belonged to one of the four branches of the Kyogoku family.

I'll PAY shipping. lol please show detail photos when ready, thanks Stephen, apologies for not addressing this. I wasn't quite sure what to say. Since then I have spent several hours on it, but the process is very slow. Since I am not 100% sure what the materials are, I have been fairly gentle. On the 'brasswork' hot water and soap applied with two types of toothbrush, followed by application of a very fine compound with a towel. The overall black coating gradually turns into a russet sunset colour, revealing a series of reds and blacks and golds underneath that polish up to a burnished, nicely dappled surface. I do not want to remove any of the plating, or any more of the patination, so I reckon this is a good medium place to stop. I have rubbed a light film of camellia oil on the parts that are now in this semi polished state. Many happy hours to go! The photos should come in due course.

Thanks, Grey. I couldn't see where Joe was from and figured it could be either a few thousand $A or $US or GBP or Canadian dollars, which would change the sums a little. Granted it doesn't change the meaning much as either way not a lot.

A few grand what?

Ian, good to hear from you. Hoping you have some free time in early August, or early September and I might just jump into a car and whiz up to Leeds. Yesterday I was advised by our leader to add legs to the box and use it as a Yoroi-bitsu! (Not planning to go that far, but he would certainly do it himself without hesitation, to the disgust of another of our members, a well-known collector of Kabuto and Menpo, who keeps muttering about destruction of Japan's 'bunka-zai'.) Even without the legs, however, I am planning to use it for armour just as you do. The legs would get the box up off the floor to a decent height, and allow air to pass underneath in the humid season; stopping woodworm etc going from the floorboards up into the box bottom, so I will probably raise it up on ceramic tiles and blocks. Yours sounds even more gorgeous, Ian, especially with the silk(?) cords. You are like a mirage, always many steps ahead of me!!!

Mark's series of questions can perhaps be answered better by the sword people here. To buy a registered sword you don't need to pay any tax other than the nominal 5% consumption tax. If you find a sword and declare the find and then have it registered you will have to pay 20 or 30,000 yen, but it's not a lot. The heavy problems occur if someone dies and very valuable swords come under probate. To get around this people lend their swords to museums to avoid having to pay death duties on them. There is another aspect to Mark's questions that I cannot properly answer. Japanese have a dread and a fascination with blades and guns. In TV dramas the camera catches the gleam of the steel of a kitchen knife or a pair of scissors about to be used to attack someone, and plays with the light in a way that in the West would puzzle us. When they go abroad, one of the popular things to do is visit a shooting range and fire real live bullets. The continued existence of Boryoku-dan gangs and right-wing extremists who would like to use these weapons as the feeling takes them, means ever present danger. The laws become super-strict, as if the people themselves are not trusted. (The drug laws are similar too.) And yet there is still this loophole to allow collectors to own them. And still you get accidents, and nutcases who suddenly attack someone with a blade. Almost as if the heightened tension of everyday life suddenly spills over into uncontrollable horror. There is so much bound up in this, and the Japanese identity, that this may not be the place to discuss it, and perhaps I am not the one to do it. PS A couple of weeks ago I had some of the students carry the gun boxes to the classroom, and after a short warning about not ever pointing any kind of gun at someone else, even an 'unloaded' one and in play, and a quick handout on the history and construction of Tanegashima-type matchlock muskets, they got to see the real thing(s). There are three Chinese students and one Korean exchange student in this class, but regardless of nationality, their written comments afterwards showed that they were quite struck with what they saw.

Stephen's question first about removing patina and whether it affects the value. In this case I did not pay a lot for it. If I clean it up, it will be worth a bit more. Within Japan's marketplace, that is. On a grander scale, however, you could argue that this should be in a museum and professionally cared for as a piece of history. Possibly on the world market it may be more appreciated than it is by the majority of Japanese today. Would it sell in London for example? Japanese antiques do not seem to be very popular. A difficult one indeed. I spoke to a friend this morning and told him about what lay under the dirt and he said that he had actually seen the box before me and had considered buying it himself. But he passed on the chance. Nowhere to put it. The problem is that people simply do not have room in their houses/apartments for objects like this. I have another largish highly-decorated nesting lacquer box from the Muromachi Period which should be worth a lot, but I paid peanuts for it. Women tend not to want them in the house. It sits in my office. Lacquerwork, even though it may have taken countless people-hours to produce, tends to fetch no premium, even with intricate metalwork. If the piece is not perfect, it will get thrown out and junked. Someone has made a decision with this Hasami-bako that it has crossed the line of no-return. I believe otherwise and want to rescue it, but it may only be a temporary reprieve, as with the old Katana-bako earlier in this thread. If I die suddenly, the wife may just chuck it all as the easy way out.

Found a black lacquer box today, battered & filthy dirty; managed to persuade the dealer to let me have it at his best 'friendly price', but when I got home and started cleaning the 'brasswork', I discovered that it is copper with a thin layer of gold on top. There are Mon in the metalword fittings, Four-leaf Mokko, and 5/7 Kiri Mon. The box is fairly large and has strong metal handles for carrying to and from Edo in the Sankin Kotai (started in 1635). Here are two shots, one showing the dirty face, and one with windows opening up in the dirt.

What Mark said. Follow the links in the Kanji pages above and then look at the first Kanji in section 9 here: http://www.jssus.org/nkp/kanji_for_tosogumei.html

Nuts, isn't it! Actually we can't even carry a live gun much anymore. The police are getting so strict it isn't funny. The last place on 14th June we had volunteer uni students to carry the gun cases from the changing rooms to the field. The red guncovers we were carrying contained bamboo staves to look like guns. Then a special security team surrounded us and escorted us to and from the display pitch. Only within the coned/taped-off area are we allowed to do our thing. Members of the public sometimes try to hold the guns and the police don't like it. I have also had people pull my sword out suddenly when I was surrounded by people, so in the interests of safety it makes no sense to carry a real blade. Everyone has tsunagi, although in the past I know previous members sometimes broke the rules. Come to think of it, on top of all the kit and clobber, a wooden blade is thankfully much lighter. PS They used me on the poster again this year, an old photo though... http://toki-week.com/