francois2605

Aoi Arts just added a Mantetsu to their inventory: here. Attaching the picture here for posterity.

Thanks all for your answers, this is very informative. Neil, I'm stunned by the koshirae on your 2nd picture: what a beauty 😍

Thanks Thomas, this could be it. From Sesko's: Will try to find pictures to confirm. Edit: Found a similar koshirae here 👍

Interesting, thanks Bruce. The koshirae contains a sword by Ishido Teruhide, I guess this could explain the higher quality seppa ?

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 ?

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...

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 😱

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 😄

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 just tried the dark theme, I like it however I also noticed something which could probably be tuned to make it more user-friendly. The "grey circle" used for denoting forums / topics with new posts almost disappears with the new theme.

Indeed, the link has the correct text but wrongly points to this thread. URL: https://www.aoijapan.com/katana-mumeikatayama-ichimonji