Alexey

Dear all, Here are some new photos including those of the full-legth bare blade. I hope this will be helpful

The million dollar question, indeed...

Hi Ken, Photos have been taken by the seller. I have not bought the sword yet, just intend to. At the moment the sword is located in Saint-Petersburg, so I cannot inspect it in person. I made a reservation, and am waiting for a moment to see it (now it is a bit hard to travel between cities due to quarantine). Thank you for your recommendations. I'll ask the seller to photograph the full-length bare blade.

Dear Geraint, Thank you for a warm greeting and a detailed response. Your suggestions encourage optimism. Let me share all the information I have regarding the sword. Indeed, the seller told about Mino province and also mentioned Meiō era (years 1492-1501). The sword doesn’t have NBTHK papers, only tōrokushō. I was provided with the high-resolution photos of the fully assembled sword (attached) but not a bare nakago. Please do not be confused with the tsuba shape. It is not a nazi symbol but a Japanese manji. I definitely do like the tsuka and saya designs. However, it seems that both saya and tsuba are of modern production (not sure about the tsuka). But the most intriguing question is a blade authenticity

Dear nihonto connoisseurs! Could you please help me with the documents translation and mei identification? Unfortunately, I do have only low-resolution images of the sword passport (tōrokushō) and nakago. Here they are The seller interprets this mei as ‘izumi-no-kami-kanesada’ but I would strongly doubt in this. Also I’m not sure that the tōrokushō data really correspond this sword. All Kanesadas’ signatures that I have found were dissimilar to this mei. When trying to read the mei using hiragana/katakana symbols in google translate, the only reasonable variant I find is Noriyuki. Maybe the mei is just corrupted here?