Alexey

Dear all,

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

 ...but why is there such a large gap between the two characters? 

The million dollar question, indeed...

Alexey, your photos are quite good for someone new to this field. Please take a few shots of the completely bare blade, including the habaki. For now, we don't need to see anything else.

 

The sugata (shape) will indicate the age, the patterns on the steel (jihada & hamon) will indicate the school, & we can see if the signature (mei) matches with the rest of the blade. Even then, without sending it off to shinsa (Japanese evaluation team), we won't know, for sure, but we'll have lots of opinions.

 

The tsuka has no sign of wear, or body oils, so it's likely modern. Harder to tell on the saya, but probably also modern.

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.

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?