GRC

That last one with the ship's rudder and shells that looks "coated" may actually be heavily coated with something... but if you get lucky, there could be a decent surface underneath it. That other Tosho style one with the stylized snowflake has some really nice subtle mokume ("woodgrain") lines showing the folded layers of the plate. That was a nice lot to pick up at that price, congrats

That's likely the most accurate description. It's definitely a hybrid combination of karakusa vines arranged in a stylized wheel/guruma pattern You've also got pairs of curling warabite (young bracken fern shoots) along the inner edge of the rim, with what looks like abstracted hanabishi flowers along the outer edge of the rim. Kind of like these ones on a Higo tsuba (yours is not Higo though... just using this as an example). I think your tsuba is likely a Hizen or Shoami tsuba, but it's definitely giving me more of a "nanban" influence so I'm leaning more towards the Hizen attribution. They also made some large tsuba like yours.

The workmanship of the tsuba reminds me of Inshu Suruga work... I think the original kuchi-beni sekigane (lipstick style copper inserts) was knocked out from the top of the nakago-ana because you can see the sort of "horseshoe" indent that is there, which would have held the copper sekigane.

Wow Manuel @Manuel Coden, Great utsushi for starters, plus your patination is excellent, and how on Earth did you mange to get that long rib along the face of the mimi? The answer to that last question might shed some light on a number of discussions floating around this message board that never get a straight answer other than conjecture. Congrats! After seeing this one, it now makes me wonder what #1,2 & 3 look like!

The first one is not like the other three at all. It doesn't have the exaggerated soft marshmallowy look to the surface. It has a completely different seppa-dai with no exaggerated crater-like punch marks along the sides of the nakago-ana. The copper sekigane is not the same and doesn't have the same punch marks as the others. The other three are by the same the same guy and made recently (all three have the same sekigane in the nakago-ana with same punch marks to set them in... except the middle one of the bottom three also has some star-shaped punch marks as well. The first one looks like a proper Yagyu piece to me and the punch marks around the copper sekigane are a lot like the ones in Florian's example @Teimei. The bottom one in particular is nearly identical between the two examples (shown below). These are the kind of details you have to start observing, gathering examples of and comparing to tsuba that come up for sale or auction. The nakago-ana, tegane (punch marks) and copper sekigane (if still original and not replaced later!) are really important details... Tsuba smiths were quite particular and consistent with the way they would execute these actions when they produced their tsuba.

The one Dale posted @Spartancrest is a very rare example. It looks like deliberate inlays of metal blobs to me. Here's a nice variant of the etched toadskin effect that is actually in the for sale section on NMB. I keep looking at it lol. I have a similar one in yamagane copper. It has the sort of splotchy fractal-esque pattern that you get when some solutions are subjected to conditions that cause them to clump and separate like that, using something called a "reaction-diffusion mechanism". Maybe misting on drops of something hydrophobic to cause the initial resist solution (maybe urushi lacquer?) to recede into clustered pools? That kind of process makes sense to me because it already exists in various "irregularly spotted" patterning effects seen in nature like in tabby cats and cheetahs. Varying the degree of the effect gets different patterning results, from something more stripe-like to something splotchy. I did my M.Sc. degree on pattern development in plants so it's something I am familiar with On a similar note, but different, misting water is also used in Western-style Raku firing of ceramics to get a linear fractal-like crackling effect. But, that's more because of rapid cooling and heat differential when the spray of cool water hits the red hot glaze, rather than hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions. Hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions will get irregular spotty blobs. I have also done this in person so have first hand experience with this too. Lots of fun.

@ROKUJURO Jean, I'm with you 100%. I also think that the degree to which the slag is initially hammered out of the billet, along with the way the edges are folded over to shape the plate will be the other key components... maybe an acid bath in some cases to get a more pitted look from the mixed composition steel. This effect has to be the result of multiple factors, otherwise it would have been sorted out by many other people already.

By the way, those images came from this forum thread: along with this one as another Higo utsushi example:

Well technically, Ford may not have been entirely correct at the time. The Japanese smith Kazunari Nariki clearly rediscovered the technique and became quite proficient at it. It was more along the lines of the smoother Kanyama and Ohno type tekkotsu, but not the more extreme "explosions" or "volcanic craters" such as the ones in the Yamakichibei Low-Crossbar smith's work I posted above. Unfortunately that potential for gaining information is now gone because Kazunari Nariki passed away in 2022. He was dedicated to sourcing sand iron from the specific regions where certain types of tsuba were made in order to achieve the different look of let's say a smooth black iron finish from Higo or the melty-looking lumpy surface of Kanayama-esque tekkotsu. Utsushi of a Higo tsuba: Utsushi of Yamakichibei with an otafuku-shaped guruma motif: Utsushi of an early Hoan style irregularly spaced rays motif (a variant from the more typical guruma motif): So that seems to hint at getting back to the idea of material composition as a significant contributing factor for the outcome. I have a strong suspicion that the effect will not be effectively achieved by using modern produced mono-steels with fairly even distribution of component materials in the alloys. i suspect using the right grade of steel from the right type of sand iron formed in a tatara will be a critical key to unraveling it all... but we shall see... i hope

@FlorianB in the two examples you showed, the top one got the yakite heat treatment while the bottom one did not. We see that in tons of Yamakichibei tsuba, but even the so-called Nidai smith, who is renowned for producing this amida-yasuri effect, apears to have eased off his use of yakite treatment over time, likely as trends shifted in the early Edo period and the lumpy-bumpy tekkotsu started to lose favor in place of a smoother, more regular surface which we see almost ubiquitously in mid and late Edo period tsuba (except for the "late Edo revival period" when tekkotsu came back on the scene). And as @ROKUJURO and @OceanoNox pointed out, it's pretty easy to scrape unhardened iron or steel plate using a hardened steel point on whatever tool you use to scrape it with... and repeated passes along the same guide position would get deeper grooves. Scribing tools are used all the time to mark lines in metal work... this is just a decorative application of using a scribing tool. Re: "Fancy surface" for @OceanoNox... what type of metal were you using when you tried to get the desired effect? I haven't tried it yet, but plan to this summer, but I strongly suspect you need the less pure grade of tatara steel that has much more variation in its composition. I think you'll get a relatively uniform effect using purer forms of steel like high grade sword steel, but a lot more variation in the position of crystal growth... maybe resulting in some of those "explosion" type tekkotsu we see most often in the works of the Yamakichibei "Low crossbar smith". Here's an example from one of his "ring of soybeans" tsuba. This is just part of my overall hypothesis for now... I need to try it out to see what happens.

Found it... 1- straight line guide on a practice plate 2- Wavy line guide on a tsuba in progress

As far as Yasuri lines go, I see the thick kiku-petal outline type and the irregular thickness + placement ones as being done with deliberate chisel strokes, while the very fine, regularly spaced ones would have been scraped by pulling out from center to rim using a "guide rail" that pivoted in the center of the tsuba where the nakago-ana would be. Like @ROKUJURO said, Ford demonstrated this guided scraping technique in one of his video tutorials. I suspect there is no one on the planet who could free hand engrave each of those fine lines and be that consistent in their linearity and spacing. Personally, I wouldn't even bother trying to free hand it because I know I couldn't do it.

umm sorry, but likely none of the above. That's way too clean and crisp everywhere for it to be that old. Even the inside of the sukashi is way too smooth. "ko-katchushi style" for sure but most likely made relatively recently.

@FlorianB that all sounds like there's definitely some potential in those documents, especially with those specific date ranges too, which focus on some key points in time that we might gather information from. @ROKUJURO I think you may have misread my intentions, or maybe extrapolated them to an extreme point? My goal is not to discard, but rather to encourage a "ground up" evolution of the current system, rather than sticking to an institutionalized "top down" adherence to an outdated and antiquated system that has obvious flaws. Essentially, the idea is to slowly "force" change by gathering enough evidence to make specific cases for modification and refinement of the current system, because the evidence will speak for itself. Think of it like debugging a program after its initial launch... I think this program is in dire need of an update after 100 years of relative stagnation and maintaining "status quo", and I'm not the only one who sees it that way. And if "we" the dedicated collectors from around the world don't do it, then who will?

That's points precisely to the problem with the current system. It's set up as a sort of "dichotomous key" based on sets of relatively broad characteristics that were set up relatively early in the attempt to sort and classify tsuba. I think these criteria are too rigid and oversimplified, which directs us to put things in label boxes that are likely not correct. For example, It assumes that all "movement in design" is restricted to Shoami smiths (and some early Akasaka), which seems like a patently false assertion to me. It doesn't seem even remotely possible that they were the only smiths to use movement in their designs. So using "little to no movement in design / structured geometric designs" plus "visible evidence of folding in the plate" gets us an Owari label. This type of system does not allow for styles to evolve, unless you start throwing little qualifier words like "mostly" or "often"... which muddies the waters so much as to render the system "mostly" unusable, unless you are looking at "archetype" versions of tsuba from specific schools. To me, that's a crazy way of doing things, because it does not allow for any variation or evolution within multiple groups of smiths from large geographic areas like Owari, or take into account any aesthetic shifts in Japan's culture over time. I think I have gathered enough examples of Kanayama and Owari type tsuba that show a clear departure from the more structured geometric patterns we see in the majority of the Momoyama period, that show that a certain point in time, there was a general shift in aesthetic and artistic expression that was experienced in many regions of Japan. It was more of a general "zeitgeist" (spirit of the times) to borrow a German term that is such a good word in my opinion. With regard to Shoami specifically, most Shoami schools, where the smiths signed with "shoami", really only began in the mid to late 1600s. From various information sources, it's seems possible that the Iyo Shoami group may have started a little earlier, maybe by a decade or two. Certainly "movement" is present in many Shoami (and Akasaka) designs, but I would argue that the Shoami smiths were certainly not the originators of this type of design, but merely following in its footsteps. The designs of the tsuba I posted above don't fit with any specific style of Shoami work, and can be separated even more when you start looking at the plate characteristics, which fall entirely within an Owari type of categorization (following our supposed "dichotomous key" of classification based on broad descriptive characteristics. Also the hitsu-ana shapes do not fit with other examples of what most people view as Shoami tsuba or even ko-Shoami tsuba which tend to have more geometric shapes. Personally, I think the size differential of the hitsu-ana align better with the look of ko-Akasaka (who also had their origins from some type of Owari area lineage)... so I suspect it's possible that the ko-Akasaka and this "mystery smith" had similar Owari roots in that regard. So to make a long story more succinct, I feel that the tsuba above pre-date anything that we would consider Shoami works, and show a divergent shift within the smiths who came from an Owari area. In discussion with @Steve Waszak, we both feel this proposed period of time fits well with cultural shifts and influences that lasted a brief period of time at the very end of the Momoyama, and very beginning of the early Edo period, when there was even a rise in "distorted" modes of dress and mannerisms and went so far as to skew body posture (look up "kabukimono"). There was also a similar shift in "expressiveness" in other artisan crafts like painting and textiles.

That's so ironic actually, given how many "unknowns" are magically given the label of Shoami or ko-Shoami. I love that translation result, it makes me chuckle, thanks for pointing it out @MauroP

That now makes 11 examples from this one Owari "Mystery master"... These clearly represent a point in time when there was an aesthetic shift away from the typically more symmetrical geometric patterns of traditional Owari and Kyo-sukashi, exploring a much looser and expressive design theory.

interesting thought! Certainly. the annual koku (rice) stipend that various daimyo paid out to their retained craftsmen has been used in the past (when the records were available) to link certain smiths to certain times (and to presume their their relative "esteem" in the eyes of their daimyo). I wonder if tax records were kept at those times and even if a person's occupation was listed beside their name? The main problem is we don't have actual names for most Azuchi-Momoyama and early Edo period smiths...

OK, perhaps... I guess that is just my assumption about the the organization, from an outsider's perspective, with a little dash of frustration and maybe a little too much "curtness" and "brevity" in the way I express it I'll try to tone down my commentary about the organization and stay focused on trying to "improve the system" as a whole.

Thanks Florian I agree 100% that there are LOTS of "particulars" that people, including the "experts" at the NBTHK, are using to make their judgements. I'm not proposing to discard everything and start over... but proposing more of a gradual refinement of pre-existing categories that were mostly conceived of by Akiyama, which essentially became a sort of ratified dogma over the years. I suspect that Akiyama's intention was to build such a foundation and have it continue to grow and evolve (especially because most of his work developed through regular meetings and discussions with other dedicated tosogu collectors at the time). I think that original intention somehow got skewed along the way, and needs a more conscious and deliberate effort to reopen the door to critical thought and grow into something even better. And that can only start with an open discussion that revolves around evidence based analysis, but also requires the participants to be aware of what has come before and what the current system is built upon. i suppose I have been pushing these thoughts on NMB for a number of years, in the hopes of pulling in as many people as possible, and hoping to push more people into this type of discussion. Thanks to digital images (even with their shortcomings due to viewing angle and lighting issues), we have access to more tsuba today than Akiyama could have ever seen in his entire lifetime... so I think it's inevitable that some of us will start to see some groupings and patterns that Akiyama did not pick up on. It's way easier for us to send each other some images of specific tsuba we have, than it was for Akiyama and his group of enthusiasts to meet in person once in a while, or send each other some oshigata rubbings! So to be honest, we can and should do more than just stay settled in with what's comfortable, and keep hanging onto those papers, even when we know the judgement seems to be off at times.

Thank You!!!!

I know I have seen it several times before (maybe even on NMB) but I don't seem to have a good image of it in my files. If you actually have the two set encyclopedia from Kanzan, that would be great, but It may have been published elsewhere as well. It's in his Owari section.

About “advancement of knowledge” in the field: People like Mitsuru Ito and Eckhard Kremers who have published books on specific collections of tsuba from particular smiths in a more analytical manner rather than just producing a picture book of accumulated tsuba from a particular school with no real analysis included. Markus Sesko of course needs to be mentioned because of his relentless efforts in translating Japanese texts, and the many years of him posting his blogs that frequently revolved around comparative analysis of small groups of similarly themed tsuba, sometimes by the same smith, and sometimes by different smiths. I always learned something whenever I read his posts. And then there's Steve Waszak with his years of dedication to Yamakichibei and Hoan tsuba... with a definitive book on the subject sure to come sometime in the future, which I hope to play some part in as I have also been diving deep into Yamakichibei, and separating out types of acid etched tsuba that often get mislabeled as Hoan. I have also been diving deep into all things “Owari-related”, trying to sort out the mess that is Kanayama, Ohno, Owari, and Ko-Akasaka (since they clearly had Owari roots), and trying to associate these with approximate time periods, trying to tie it all to cultural and artistic trends at various points in time. I apologize if I have left out any other publishers and bloggers from the list (like the “Zenzai blog” by Keisuke Nakamura, now that I think about it… he does this too, and I’m a big fan of what he puts together) Then there’s also some thoughtful insights and sharing of information on sites like this of course! At least this forum allows for the potential for some kind of proper, positive discussion. And just as an example, I realized I had two tsuba of clear Owari lineage, but that were also obviously divergent from the typical Owari tsuba. In comparing them, I realized they were made by the same smith who has yet to be described or named in some way. After posting the pair and pointing it out online, it tuned out that Eckhard Kremers had realized the same thing about this smith when looking at specific tsuba published by Sasano. Then he and I spurred each other on to do a deep dive into other publications and accumulated image banks, and we found a bunch more by the same smith. He has produced some extraordinary, unique designs that show a lot more "movement" compared to other Owari tsuba. His tsuba have gotten a variety of attributions from different sources, but as soon as you line them up, they are clearly all done by one smith. It's the "gut feeling" mislabeling under the current system that I think (hope?) can and should be course corrected over time, by doing comparative analysis in exactly this way…. I have also identified several other groupings of tsuba that I think point to the work of individuals smiths, rather than a broad label like "Owari" or one of the other Owari-linked groupings I mentioned above. Owari was after all, a significantly large geographic area with so many smiths with different styles over the course of the 1500s and 1600s. Anyway, It’s doable, but more people need to have these thoughts in mind when they are looking at examples and gathering up images of tsuba that allow for comparison (hopefully including some oblique and side views, and not just straight on black and white images!) Blah blah blah… when will this guy shut up… sheesh? I apologize for blathering, I will stop now Oh and no, I am not just presuming to throw my name in with all those that I mentioned above, out of some sort of inflated self-worth. But I'm putting in the effort to gather evidence, and trying to make sense of it all with an open mind and a critical view... which is what I share in common with all those I mentioned above. I hope to put together some kind of publication one day, but for now, I'm still gathering information and examples, and enjoying the obsession.

About “mass production” and crossover between schools: I'm going to start most recent and head back in time... From my personal research over the years, true mass production of the generic rote kind, really seems to have kicked into gear around 1700, mid-Edo period. There were lots of sociological, economic and technological shifts around that time that facilitated that. More rampant crossover between schools and smiths seems to have kicked in around the mid-1600s (after the establishment of Edo as a new capital city and the "sankin-kotai" which was the forced pilgrimage and residency of daimyo and their entourage of 100s-1000s of attendants including craftsman, every other year. That all started in 1635 but was expanded to include more daimyo as of 1642. So that's when many craftsmen from different schools were all in the same place at the same time, for extended periods of time and sharing ideas and techniques with one another. From my personal comparative analysis of tsuba from the same maker (of known smiths, with a known mei), from the Momoyama to early Edo period, there seems to have been more of an "exploration of a theme" in the creation of multiple variations by one smith, but they did not seem to make rote copies of any specific design (maybe some did once in a while, but I don’t have any examples of that yet). Successors in a school lineage do revisit certain themes from their predecessor/s but they seem to put their own little twist on the design, perhaps to distinguish their work from others and put their personal "stamp" on it.

About these specific tsuba: I posted these three tsuba in particular in the hopes of gleaning some input from some other eyes besides mine and the papers and/ore attributions they have (which I generally do not trust, especially when “alarm bells” start going off in my head when I see what they are labeled as). I didn’t post these thinking I know the answer, not at all. This was “crowdsourcing” with the hopes of generating discussion. These are not common tsuba at all… sure there are plenty of cloud and geese tsuba out there, but this is a pretty specific variation on the overall theme. At first these tsuba all jumped out at me as being Higo tsuba because of the hitsu-ana shape, which is quite particular to them and is often a key point to identifying one of their tsuba. I was taken aback with the ko-Akasaka papers on the second one, but there is a distinct shift in the size of the hitsu-ana and the fineness of the chiseled karigane, and the relative proportions of the sukashi thicknesses… so I could see it as being something other than Higo. Until this point, I was unaware of Akasaka smiths doing Higo style hitsu-ana, I thought they typically stuck to their own shapes. Higo did have a strong influence on Akasaka afterall… something I sometimes see some people viewing the other way around… but I have always viewed it as Higo being the influence on Akasaka. I’d like to dig into the tegane-ato around the nakago-ana to see if I can dig up some similarities with other Akasaka smiths and Higo smiths… more evidence to gather to help build a more specific case for each or maybe keep the door open... time will tell.