francois2605

I have some questions regarding this shin-gunto koshirae. How do you name this type of koshirae ? I'm referring to the one with the brown granular surface under the leather. I thought that this was some sort of unfinished saya but recently stumbled upon a similar one on the net and realised this was probably a "regular" finish. The surface of the leather cover also indicates that there is a semegane (you can see the bump on the 3rd sword in the picture). This makes me wonder about the overall state of the saya under the leather. I don't intend to remove the leather but I was wondering if you knew of people who removed the leather and what they found. Thanks,

I frequently receive packages from abroad and am still learning about the things which have to be explicitly added to the item descriptions. The process at customs will depend on who handles your package. Among the things I've recently learnt: - Explicitly mention that the item being imported is not considered "war material" - Break down the structure of the address for the sender (especially if from Japan because our and their addresses are so different) so that the sender doesn't have to guess how to fill each address field. That sounds silly but I ended up with a package where the address field CITY was left blank and the sword got a round-trip between France and Japan ! I guess this experience goes into the "things you learn the hard way" category.

Gorgeous fittings ! This hada is quite something 😍

Nice fittings, Dave. Thanks for sharing and keeping this thread alive

An auction website similar to eBay: https://www.catawiki.com/

Thanks that makes sense. I naively thought the item descriptions on Catawiki were trustworthy.

Hello, I just noticed this auction on Catawiki where the nakago of this gunto is suspiciously shiny, as if the blade had been forged yesterday. Also the pictures with the blue background have a Komonjo feel. What do you think ?

I just received the horse kozuka and it's absolutely gorgeous, it instantly became one of my favorites. Thanks Alex !

It is a service for buying from Yahoo auctions, not an auction website. This allows foreigners to buy Japanese items without the administrative hassle.

At this stage, you have to wonder if keeping "un-shippable" items and reselling them isn't a business model...

Despite all the recent drama, I hope we'll get to see the polished sword 😀 I know I'm looking forward to it

I found the post: here. The 7000 px are apparently made possible by the use of a very high resolution camera (Hasselblad). Is this really a problem ? Lightroom knows the distortion for most of the lenses and can fix it in post-production. Your photo setup looks amazing BTW

I also struggle to shoot swords but one thing I've noticed is that to "see through the hadori", you need to shoot the sword sideways. The hamon is the whitest when shot this way. While shooting sideways will show more details of the hamon. Pictures from https://www.aoijapan.com/wakizashisunnobi-tantoise-tamaru-junin-fujiwara-nagatoshi-saku/ Edit: I'm thinking that maybe the first picture is not a photography but a scan of the blade. I know Aoi's photo setup has been discussed before but I forgot what was said.

Next monday in Grenoble.

2 months to get from Japan to Australia ?!? This is crazy slow 😱

The price seems to be 6200 USD according to this eBay sale.

Matthew, please also note that the link "View Additional Photos" doesn't work

Robert, it's the same tsuba (not refinished) but with a difference white balance. The color (assuming my screen is "correct") is pretty faithful to what I see in hands (the WB was adjusted in Lightroom). I never really considered using a "grey card" to calibrate the white balance but that's one of those situations where it could be useful 🤔

Just noticed Adam posted the tsuba but adding some pictures I took this week-end.

I just uploaded pictures of that exhibition if you want to have a look: here. 2 years later, better late than never 😄

That was fast ! 😱

I think Ken is referring to the sequence number identifying each reply in a given topic. As in "see reply #23 in thread X"

I know this is a big no-no but as an engineer I just can't help wondering what a rust removal laser would do against such a rusty blade.

I'm surprised because what you describe as a new behavior has always been what I experienced. I always had to click on the grey circles to jump to the first unread message.