Wolfmanreid

Beautifully executed file work and mei! lovely piece overall.

Given the stringent regulations on swordsmiths in Japan, cost of new Tamahagane etc. are fatally flawed or otherwise “dead” swords commonly reused as material for new blades? I’ve seen some eel catching tools made from old nihonto but they were all pre-Meiji as far as I was aware. I’ve read about smiths scrounging Edo period iron from old nails and similar vintage scrap but I’ve never heard about repurposing unsalvageable historic nihonto into new shinsakuto. Do the economics of this just not work cost wise?

For whatever reason nihonto always sell and usually above what they are worth when RIA sells them. I bought a gimei Sanemori in nice kyu gunto fittings from them and sold it again at rock island a year later for over double what I paid for it. They have sold some juyo level blades over the years I think.

If you want an auction to take a punt on the below auction has several dozen nihonto in varying states of neglect... I can only imagine that the owner of the collection must have bought every bringback blade he stumbled across at garage sales and flea markets. Rock Island Auction Sporting & Collector Firearms Auction #1045 February 16th, 2024-February 18th, 2024

Definitely bearskin. Deer hide would be a poor choice for such an item anyway as the hair tends not to stay in tanned deerskin very well.

Definitely an older blade that has seen a lot of polishes… Note that the ha machi have just about vanished after numerous polishes.

My mistake! Thought the photos were of this sword’s nakago although a closer inspection reveals the third one is of a different sword entirely.

Based on the remnant of a mekugi ana in the tang of that blade I’m inclined to think it is a repurposed nihonto in sadly neglected condition. I’ve seen similar tangs on old blades reshaped to fit in Japanese civil official koshirae and also western saber style fittings.

In the 17th century there was a fairly large semi-militarized Japanese expatriate population in what is now Vietnam. I’ve seen a couple Katanas in interesting Vietnamese made Japanese style koshirae (see attached photos, I think it’s in a museum in Amsterdam but may be misremembering) Would make sense that your sword could be a repurposed Japanese blade or Japanese influenced blade from Vietnam.

Have a simple black koshirae made for it, find a square tsuba that fits and then sell it as a genuine “ninjato”! You’ll probably make a mint :D

Slicing with a draw cut or similar motion is the most efficient means of severing the spine, muscle and tendon of a large mammal and removing the head using a sword or swordlike blade. A properly sharp blade will have no trouble in that situation naturally sliding into the intervertebral space, especially if the sword is curved. However, IMO the cutting edge of those “kubikiri” and nata is on the wrong side of the curve in order to do that efficiently. If you look at a skinning or boning knife which one might use for just this sort of thing you will see the cutting edge is on the outside curve, as it would be on a wakizashi, katana, saber, shamshir etc. that is pretty much the most efficient blade geometry for that sort of cut as far as I understand.

Sword looks genuine but paying for a proper polish would likely cost you several thousand dollars. Not worth it from an investment standpoint most likely. I’ll leave it to more knowledgeable persons than I to provide a translation of the mei.

Wikipedia actually has a detailed explanation of the historical background of ninjato. They appeared in the 1950s… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninjatō

I defer to those with more expertise than I, but the “classic” depictions of the black clad ninja assassins date to the mid-late Edo period and owe as much to Japanese theater and popular culture as anything else. Even in the famous manga woodcuts of Hokusai and Kunisada which show ninjutsu and black clad ninjas they are all carrying typically curved katanas and/or wakizashis. Plenty of almost straight bladed nihonto from the Kanbun era out there although I don’t think any that I’ve seen would be called “ninjato”. In short I think the modern popular culture image of the appearance and equipment of ninja is mostly cut from whole cloth in the late 18th and 19th century, was further elaborated upon in the 20th and bears little to no resemblance to the Sengoku period clans in Iga and Koga provinces. It’s rather comparable to if our entire historical understanding of pirates was based on Howard Pyle’s wonderful late 19th century illustrations, the Gilbert and Sullivan play “Pirates of Penzance” and one or two vague references in actual period legal reporting to the hanging of a pirate crew somewhere…

If not too expensive that looks like a sword that might be worth taking a punt on. I suspect the blade will tidy up quite a bit with the application of nothing more aggressive than a soft rag and a bit of choji oil.