GRC

by the way... here's some reliable "pseudo-datable sources" for specific iron kiku rays tsuba (that we typically wrongly call Saotome tsuba). ↑ tsuba signed by the armorer “yoshido” who worked during the Tenbun era (1532-1555)... note, we have no idea when he produced this specific piece, and that his working dates include 17 years after the first arrival of the Portuguese. ↑This was a tsuba that was on a naginata that was on record as having been donated to a shrine by the Ashikaga clan... but no exact date, nor the exact generation of Ashikaga is known. Now again, I must point out that the Ashikaga reign lasted a full 25 years beyond the first arrival of the Europeans. Therefore the ONLY sukashi tsuba that can be directly connected to the Ashikaga, and therefore the Muromachi period, are these simple kiku form tsuba. There are NO examples of ANY elaborately patterned sukashi tsuba that can be associated with the Ashikaga. I would argue that it is entirely likely that these tsuba were only being made in the last 25 years of their reign (after the first arrival of the Portuguese with their elaborate openwork hilts). If these were being made since the 1400s, surely some other themes and patterns would have/should have developed over the course of 100+ years, but there is NO evidence of their existence in this time period. This also supports my earlier statement that the more elaborately patterned sukashi tsuba developed under the reign of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi during the Azuchi-Momoyama period of the late 1500s.

Sorry @SteveM, that's not correct according to current thinking in Japan... it was stated in a recent book published by the curator of a major Japanese museum, that this painting has no known date of production and that the rider is unknown (politely implying that the attribution to the second Ashikaga was just conjecture by some). I will dig up the title of the book and post a translation of the passage later... might not have a chance today though, so it'll have to wait a bit. This is exactly the type of myth that needs to be undone... This is precisely the type of unverified conjecture that our current "house of cards" is built upon. and @OceanoNox I'll "dig up" that info about the Ashikaga excavation later. I suspect it was from the same book that was outlining the development of the Japanese sword. ...and I didn't make any judgements about what your prior beliefs may or may not be I knew you were just posting quotes from books so my response was to what was in the quote specifically.

That particular painting had no date of production, no artist signature, and no description of the helmet-less samurai being depicted. All tsuba-related conclusions based off of this painting are pure conjecture and wishful thinking at best. People are seeing what they want to see in order to justify their pre-existing beliefs. It's important to note that there are NO other paintings in the pre-Edo period that even look remotely similar to the style of this painting... so it's literally 100s of years ahead of its time in terms of painting style, if it was indeed a pre-Edo piece... which is extraordinarily unlikely... next to zero percent chance.

Arnaud, a few years back, I looked into the possibility of carbon dating. I did some calculations based on the amount of material needed for the technique, and you'd need to use almost an entire tsuba to get an accurate result, not just a small sample from one... so that possibility seems dead in the water.

Nice one Thomas I couldn't agree more. It's definitely based on a Japanese social construct. I think in some cases the order should be re-evaluated into a more logical "progression of development" rather than the perception of "best first". ... and to make matters worse within the existing system, "best" can sometimes be subjective

@Curran I started a new thread for discussing the sukashi timeline Let's keep this one on the topic sukashi walls

I should start by being more specific about which "sukashi" I am referring to. I am talking about iron, ji-sukashi tsuba (majority of the plate cut out), like an Owari or Kanayama, or the more elaborate Katchushi and Tosho, or even Yamakichibei which tread a fine line between ji- and ko-sukashi. There is absolutely no evidence of their existence before the Azuchi-Momoyama period. There are varying dates for the Azuchi-Momoyama period depending on the source: 1573-1603 1568-1600 1573-1615 The major work of reference written by Sasano in Japanese and English theorized that there must have been elaborate sukashi tsuba during the "golden age" high art period of the Muromachi period (1336-1573), under the Ashikaga shogunate in the Kyoto (Heian) area. He asserted that the themes and aesthetics of sukashi tsuba showed some similarity with some of the imagery and styling in the paintings from that period. I would argue that these were perfectly reasonable theories, but they simply aren't backed up by any hard evidence. So without any corroboration, we simply cannot continue to rely on this theory as fact. Given that there were no period documents to confirm or deny the existence of ji-sukashi tsuba before the Azuchi-Momoyama period, I had the idea to go looking for legitimate, dated paintings from the Muromachi period. In all the examples, what was depicted was the following: 1- samurai posing for a portrait all had the fancy narrow tachi tsuba 2- samurai in battle on horseback had large solid round tsuba on their long swords 3- samurai on foot using shorter uchigatana typically had no tsuba at all, and if they did, they were solid and round. There were absolutely no sukashi tsuba of any kind in any of the period paintings that I could find. If anyone can find another example of a period painting with legit dating, that does show even a single sukashi tsuba, then we could potentially start pushing the date back to that time period. So what did exist during most of the Muromachi period? There were sophisticated tachi mounts with elaborate filigree work. There were also some soft metal aoi/mokko shaped guards with "four corners inome" ko-sukashi (boar's eye small cutouts), but that's about it for sukashi. There may have even been some solid leather guards that may have used a thin metal plate as a core. Now there was an excavation of a destroyed Ashikaga castle, where they found some simple brass "kiku" sukashi tsuba (chrysanthemum pattern openwork). But, it's important to remember that the Ashikaga were overthrown by Oda Nobunaga, who took control of Heiankyo (Kyoto) in 1568 and expelled the Ashikaga in 1573 (hence the two start dates for the Azuchi-Momoyama period mentioned above). Retrieval of these artifacts was then used (wrongly) to justify the existence of ji-sukashi tsuba throughout the entire reign of the Ashikaga during the Muromachi period. So when did the production of ji-sukashi really begin? There is a growing number of collectors who realize that the most likely time period of their first production was during the Azuchi-Momoyama period of the mid to late 1500s So what was the driving force of this significant shift? The arrival of the first European (Portuguese) ship in 1543... when foreigners landed wearing their rapiers with elaborately sculpted arabesque hilts. If you can find a high res image of this, there are samurai in the far right of the painting, some of their tsuba just aren't visible, but none of the visible ones are sukashi tsuba. Why is this an important event? The arrival and influence of the Europeans, along with pirate raiding along the mainland coast of of the Asian continent, both together are referred to as a period of "Nanbanism", and whose influences fed into this period of change where the samurai had risen to prominence and overthrown the shogunate government of the past. The Azuchi-Momoyama period was a time of accelerated change and personal expression. Paintings of samurai during this period show a tremendous diversity in the way samurai were wearing their swords, including the first foray of samurai wearing a daisho pair (katana and wakizashi). It's precisely this period of time when tachi were mostly swapped out for katana that were worn through the obi, which positioned the tsuba at the front and center of the samurai's body rather than slung low and at the side of the body (in tachi style). The now prominent positioning of the tsuba plus the general zeit-geist of change and personal expression is when ji-sukashi were most likely produced... and inspired by the elaborate hilts of the Europeans who had arrived in 1543 and were trading regularly with the Japanese through the port of Nagasaki from 1571-1639, until the country was put in near total lock-down and isolationism during the Edo period. So back to Ashikaga find... The Ashikaga had from 1543 till 1568... some 25 years of interaction and influence from the Europeans, that they likely began producing those simple geometric ji-sukashi tsuba like the kiku (chrysanthemum) forms, and mayyyybe some simple geometric kyo-sukashi type tsuba at most (but none were found in that dig). It probably wasn't unitl Nobunaga and Hideyoshi were in control that the classic ji-sukashi tsuba like Owari, Kanayama, Yamakichibei, Heianjo-sukashi/kyo-sukashi were born and explored... otherwise we should have expected to see some more elaborate sukashi tsuba in the Ashikaga ruins, which we did not. So at best there were simple ji-sukashi forms like the kiku sukashi in the last 25 years of the Muromachi period, but not earlier. I'd love to see any evidence that can push the date further back. Conjecture and doctrine simply won't due at this point.

Oh now you've really peaked my curiosity... On what grounds do you date your tsuba to a 26 year window that was 600 years ago? I'd love to know how you can even remotely justify that. I don't think anyone could do that for an older unsigned piece from almost any era in history... short of maybe a subset of tsuba with very particular aesthetics produced in the very late Edo period.

I would argue that the only thing that matters here is the method of construction... like chisel angle and finishing method. The type of rust doesn't tell you much other than old rust/new rust and maybe that the tsuba were subjected to similar poor storage conditions at some point, or that maybe there's some similarity in the metal composition such that it rusts in a similar way to another tsuba. Otherwise, I would say it's wishful thinking that you could date a tsuba by the type of rust in the the sukashi. And even if you could, you should still get that rust off the tsuba otherwise it'll just keep eating away at the iron... you're just destined to have no evidence of construction method at all if you let the rust continue. As Luca asked above @zanilu, I have yet to see any published work showing how this could be done with any degree of certainty... I have only ever heard it stated in tsuba lore of old... wave the magic wand and all shall be revealed when you look deep into the eye of the sukashi I bet if we did a controlled study showing only images of the insides of sukashi, without showing the rest of the tsuba, we'd get purely random results on attributions for dates.

Beside the fact that these school names didn't even exist before the 1920s, here’s a prime example of how some/most of these pre-Edo school are merely constructs of convenience: **NOTE: Unfortunately I received this info from a long time collector of 30 years, so I don’t have a precise reference or quote to give you at the moment. If anyone can find it, it would be much appreciated. The collector thinks it may have been in some of the publications from the meetings that occurred in the early days with Akiyama and the group of collectors he would meet with. I do not have these documents so I can not verify his statement. Apparently there is a publication that sates that Akiyama saw that the 3rd generation Yamakichibei (the only one who signed with a location and a sakura flower) was from the Owari area in the early Edo period (mid to late 1600s), so he presumed that all unsigned sukashi tsuba from the Azuchi-Momoyama period 100 years earlier must also be from the Owari area (eg. All the Owari and Kanayama tsuba which had some similar aesthetic sensibilities, as well as all the signed Yamakichibei tsuba). So technically, we don’t even know for certain that the Owari and Kanayama tsuba were even produced in the Owari area… we just all presume this to be true and throw it around like a fact. In addition to that, we can’t say for sure that there was a single “school” that was producing these “Owari sukashi tsuba” or how many smiths were involved, or when their production of these tsuba started and ended.

I started off writing about the "schools issue" but then it was really hard to separate it from the "NBTHK papers" issue since they are the major perpetuators of these school constructs... So here's a little starter to think about: The MAJORITY of the supposed "schools" of sukashi tsuba makers have NO period documentation to prove their exact timing or duration of production, nor their area of production. Kanayama, Owari, Heianjo-sukashi/kyo-sukashi, and especially the "ko-shoami" (one of the most laughable attempts to "create a school" I have seen yet). These were all 20th century CONSTRUCTS that were created on suppositions and inferences starting with Akiyama, and were perpetuated and "refined" by many of the tsuba collectors and authors he influenced, like one of his later students Torigoye. Sasano also adhered to these categorizations and published his works in English, which then set the “doctrine” in stone for most of the English speaking collectors around the world. Most people would assume that Japan’s NBTHK is the foremost authority on the identification and classification of tsuba, and often defer to their perceived authority as though they have access to secret tomes and manuscripts that they must be referring to in order to make their judgements. Unfortunately this is not the case and they clearly don’t even take the time to look into their own past attributions because they frequently contradict themselves or offer up different assessments for the same tsuba that has been submitted on more than one occasion. They probably take more time to write the paper itself than they do to assess the tsuba in front of them. It’s just a “cash cow” for them… easy money. Unfortunately the NBTHK is predominantly (maybe even exclusively?) populated by people who have adopted these Akiyama-type school names and labels. Keep in mind they are a private organization, who get paid to "certify" that a sword or sword fitting was genuinely produced by a specific maker, or by one of the "schools". So, it is safe to assume that they will inherently act in their own self interest to perpetuate the system they have created. As a result, they have either knowingly or unknowingly magnified the problem of attributions for unsigned tsuba, because there are a limited number of groups to choose from in the Akiyama framework, so they have frequently “expanded” the original grouping to include a variety of “outlier tsuba” with significantly different characteristics, but somehow similar enough that they thought they could all be "acceptably" grouped together under the same banner. Somewhere along the way, people within this organization decided that was the right way to go… which makes sense, because I could see that if they didn’t do that, people would stop paying money to an organization that frequently gave back papers saying “unknown maker or school of production, but here’s a pretty paper that says so…” Unfortunately, there is no visible attempt by this group to do any further study based on detailed comparison. And thanks to the internet, the accumulation of contradictory examples of their attributions is continually building and revealing the serious flaws and contradictions within this paid, for-profit system. Under a better system, these groupings should be split up into separate groups of makers (based on the shared common characteristics in the manner of the tsuba’s production), and each group given its own name or title rather than being lumped together under the same artificial banner for the sake of simplicity and maintaining the established system. Something like Haynes’ systematic numbering of known tsuba smiths who signed their work. For example, I bet we could start parsing out all the examples of “Kanayama” and “den Kanayama” by looking at details such as the tegane (punch marks) around the nakago-ana, the seppa-dai dimensions and proportions, the manner in which the corners and edges of the sukashi are done, the position of “iron bones” along the face of the mimi (rim of the- tsuba) etc… I'm certain we could even start grouping them by individual smiths within the larger group. Ideally, a non-invasive technique should be used to identify the percentage composition of the elements found in the steel, so we can more easily group tsuba together by location of their source of sand iron that was used to make the steel (even if we probably couldn’t know where that specific sand iron came from within Japan…).

I don't have the quote or source quickly at hand, but at the time of the registering of nihonto in Japan, the average number of sets of fittings per sword was 6. This is just from memory... researched it almost three years ago now... but I'm 99% certain the average number was 6. And as @Dereks points out, there's no way to "know" that a sword has all its original fittings. In fact, it's highly improbable that any sword has its original fittings... especially given that tastes and styles changed over time, and that there was an average of 6 sets of fittings per sword, so which set would be the original (if any of them were indeed the original)?. It makes sense to assume that the further back in time the sword was made, the lower the chance that any of the fittings were the originals. There is a long history of sellers and collectors swapping out the fittings for both aesthetic reasons and reasons of maximizing profits. So even at an estimate of 300 years, I'd say the likelihood that the fittings are original, is next to zero... The only possible exceptions I could think of off the top of my head would be swords and fitting sets that were made as extravagant gifts to someone of major importance, which may even have documentation to back it up.... this was made in the year "X", and gifted to person "Y" for occasion "z". I have even seen such a set in person... a tanto with gold fittings presented to a certain modern day Japanese princess on her wedding day (I forget her name...).

Myself and @Sabi were then critiqued for mocking Haynes, the appraiser who was cited. This was my response to that: So I am hoping that this idea reaches as many tsuba enthusiasts and collectors as possible, so that we can put an end to this harmful practice.

@sabi commented on the flawed reliance on the apparent "age of the sukashi walls" in the selected passage. Using this flawed logic, the appraiser switched their initial appraisal time from early Edo period (sometime in the 1600s because the Edo period was from 1603-1868) to the middle Muromachi period (sometime in the 1400s because the Muromachi period was from 1336-1573). So the appearance of the sukashi walls (INCORRECT METHOD!) overrode the appraiser's initial judgement of an early Edo period production date, based on the the aesthetics and characteristics of the tsuba itself (CORRECT METHOD!). In doing so, the appraiser backed up the date of production by some 200+ years, and presumed that the tsuba he was appraising must have been an early forerunner of the typical tsuba of this type. as @sabi pointed out, a tsuba can easily be rusted (through any number of means... feel free to search for methods online... so the degree of rusting of the sukashi walls cannot be reliably used to date a specific tsuba. An additional inherent flaw in this approach is that it must assume that all tsuba have been held under similar storage conditions for their entire existence, and that they their surfaces have never been altered or resurfaced (which we all know is not the case as we have all seen many examples of resurfacing and repatinating). This is an amazing assumption, especially given that the appraiser also identifies that he thinks the hitsu-ana may have been altered at some point. So why assume the surface treatment would be untouched while other features of the tsuba could be altered? It just doesn't make sense. The other problem with the selected appraisal passage is the very idea that such a sukashi tsuba could have been produced as early as the middle of the Muromachi period (a topic that will be tackled separately...). There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that a sukashi tsuba like this was produced at such an early date.

Back to rusty sukashi walls... This post by @Tim Evans is what sparked my initial post on this topic: Just for context, Robert (Bob) Haynes is one of the foremost Japanese sword fittings authorities in the US, having studied with Dr. Kazutaro Torigoye in Japan in the 1960's. There is a lot of useful tsuba material by Bob on the Shibui Swords site, Elliott and Bob collaborate a lot since they live near each other.

Hi everyone, I would like to start a series of threads that anyone can contribute to with their own observations or topics to then dive into. This began on a separate thread that started to get sidetracked and the idea to start a separate thread was proposed by Steve @sabi. The thread was "Water wheel and cherry blossom" if anyone is interested. I would like to propose that each topic get its own thread so that the discussion can stay focused on that idea, rather than having one extremely long thread that meanders and jumps between many separate ideas. So let's use the same title format: "Established ideas that need to change - #: topic to be discussed" Here are some ideas I have, just off the top of my head... Established ideas that need to change - 1: Rusty sukashi walls Established ideas that need to change - 2: The timeline of tsuba production Established ideas that need to change - 3: Pre-Edo period schools*** Established ideas that need to change - 4: Reliance on papers ***this one may even need some subcategories to tackle each school specifically (Owari, Kanayama, Ko-shoami, Kamakura-bori, Ohno, Kyo-sukashi/Heianjo sukashi)

Hi Florian. Please note, I am most certainly NOT mocking the person. I have the utmost respect for what Haynes has contributed to this field. We all stand atop some of the foundations he has laid. However, I will unhesitatingly point out flawed theories that don't hold up to scrutiny or that are unsupported by evidence. So on a general note, a person's overall contributions to a field of research should not prevent others from pointing out any ideas that are incorrect. The whole notion of reliance on and preservation of rusted sukashi walls needs to be undone. This idea will lead to false judgements of age and worst of all, lead to the eventual destruction of the very art objects we all seem to appreciate. So from my perspective, i see this particular idea as "dangerously flawed". Now let's move this train of thought to a new thread, as was suggested by Steve, so we don't continue to hijack Deanna's thread Starting one now...

Fair enough Steve. My apologies to Deanna. I will start a new thread and add more thoughts on the matter tomorrow I hope. Oh by the way, I wrote "Wakiyama" as the original source of many of these theories, but it's actually Akiyama ... was just looking at some wakizashi before that and had that word on the brain

lol thanks Evan ... "rusty sukashi walls" as justification makes me laugh and cringe all at the same time or "don't clean the rust away from the inner walls of the sukashi, otherwise you won't be able to tell how old it is"... ughhh

It's definitely an Edo period tsuba that was made in some quantity. Especially given the "peace and tranquility theme" "Kyoto area" seems reasonable... but could have been made anywhere really, and likely by a "shop smith" from an atelier of some sort. ...which fits with Haynes' attribution to "later Heianjo" attribution. *Note that people once called sukashi tsuba made in the Kyoto area "Heianjo sukashi tsuba" because they were assumed to be from the Heian area (location not time period)... which also means that it wasn't a specific "school" per se, just likely made in that area according to the trends in "tsuba fashion" of the time. The broad "Edo period, unsigned Shoami" bin would also be a likely default attribution by an organization like the NBTHK. There's no way this was made in the Muromachi period. There were no sukashi tsuba that looked like this before the Edo period. Certain aspects of it yes (like the dot inlays), but not the whole package together, especially the carved waves and that type of sukashi aesthetic. That's pure supposition and fantasy on Haynes' part... largely because he's following the hypotheses of Wakiyama in the early 1900s, which later became doctrine through the writings of Torigoye and also Sasano (who wrote in English and therefore established these ideas for English speaking collectors and enthusiasts). ...and hate to break it to you, but the site that was listed as an excellent reference from the foremost expert and associate, is rife with errors and false attributions for unsigned pieces. They are certainly a wealth of knowledge on signed pieces of the Edo period (for which there are often records and supporting period documentation of smiths and their genealogies), but are often egregiously wrong on many of their statements and attributions for unsigned pre-Edo pieces. I don't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers, but the we need to start course correcting some of these false assertions as a community. It's the only way we'll be able to make any progress in this field that still has so many unknowns. oh and good morning everyone, hope you all are having a lovely weekend

Wayyyyy off topic, but just finished looking through this thread. um... did anyone else notice this, or was it just me?

Not unfinished at all... it's very much intentional, and I have seen that exact motif and design multiple times. I like the modernist simplicity of the design, with one fan completely cut out as a negative object in the design, and the other filled in as a positive object, but with a "broken/punctured" look that refers back to the empty space of the completely cut out fan. I think it's a very appealing play on positive and negative spaces. I have to say yours is one of the nicer ones I have seen... I say that mostly because your "broken/pierced fan" looks more "natural" than others (ie. better executed in my opinion), and the plate of your tsuba looks like it has some "surface texture" to it, rather than a typical mid to late Edo period smooth plate that I have seen on others. So at the very least, I can definitely say this particular one was made with more care and attention to craftsmanship than others I have seen. No one can tell you the "school" with any certainty (just best guesses based on accepted tropes with no evidence to back it up ).. especially when it comes to unsigned pieces like this. Personally, I have never seen one of this with a school name, so the "school" is arbitrary... ...probably opened a can of worms with this last statement, but it's the truth.

And I have always had a soft spot for this Sado island mokume tsuba, with high relief flowers that were shielded from the acid etching.

ok... hope to fan the flames a little with this finely acid etched one... but I need to do some work to derust this one and get it looking the way it should

Hi everyone... haven't been on in a loooong time...life gets in the way sometimes Here's my contribution: a whole botanical garden in this kamakura-bori tsuba...