Tsuku

The judgements of the early Hon'ami – Kōtoku, Kōjo, Kōchu, etc. – are held in very high regard, but they are also rather rare and often falsified. So blades purporting to have these old origami or kinzogan-mei must be studied carefully. The best case would probably be an old Hon'ami attribution that is specifically supported in modern NTBHK papers. The wazamono came from the 5th generation Yamada Asaemon, who were the executioners and sword testers retained by the Tokugawa shōguns. The majority of swords subjected to tameshigiri testing in the Edo period were recently made. The old Kamakura/Nanbokuchō masterworks had survived through the Muromachi era and didn't really need to be tested, everyone knew that they could cut. As a result, the wazamono list cannot be taken as a real "reference of quality." (Try looking up the Kamakura/Nanbokuchō saijo-saku and see how many of them appear on that list!)

JAL will transport swords with proper paperwork in either direction — at least between the United States and Japan. Obviously, they must be checked. I am not sure if a hard case is required, but I have always done it that way.

The certificate is a torokusho and it just says: wakizashi, length 44.2 cm, sori 1.1cm, 1 mekugi-ana. The inscription column (銘文 meibun) says 判読不明 handoku fumei, meaning illegible.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “moderate.” By my wife’s standards… (I jest, she is very supportive!) I think I accession 0-5 blades a year and de-accession 0-2. For me, the real utility of focus is ensuring that I have sufficient ability to pick up something exceptional should it arise. I suppose I realized that I couldn’t acquire everything I liked if I wanted to acquire everything I loved.

This exact thing happened to one of the few extant Tokuju Taima. The only way to know is to compare the oshigata (or Tokuju photograph) with the blade as it sits, with a very critical eye. But for a TH? You could detect a repaired/reshaped kissaki by virtue of the geometry being off, but you could not say whether the repair predated the kanteisho or not.

I guess I have two principles. The first one is that I try to maintain focus. There is a particular story that I want to explore (thankfully a pretty broad one) so by default every new blade has to contribute something to that story. There are some exceptions, where I have come across something remarkable. The second one is that in a perfect world I want every blade in my collection to be able to stand as a collection of one, and be of comparable quality relative to the others. Sometimes I do acquire placeholders, but if I find a better example of a placeholder's niche, I help it find a new home.

May I suggest you sit down with your favorite book on the topic (or one of the online resources) and start trying to match up what the card says with what you can observe? Here are a few hints to get you started: There is no maker's name inscribed. (Kogai signatures usually don't mean anything, as they are often honorific.) It is called out as mumei; what does this mean? Shinshintō is a period; what does that tell you about when the blade was made? The hamon is called out as suguha. What does this mean? Does it look like that to you? The boshi is described as hakikake. If you look at the boshi in good light, what do you see? Does this line up with hakikake (hint: it literally means "sweeping"). The end is indeed is squared off, as you noticed. Bonham's observed suriage nakago. What does this suggest?

I am not sure why you think this. Regardless, you could do worse than starting with Dmitry Pechalov's Sōshū-den Museum page for Yukimitsu.

You’re of course completely correct, my typo. Sorry about that.

@Bruce Pennington — by the way, the V&A blade you posted looks like a 本阿弥光忠 Hon'ami Kōjō kaō, as Michael said. The second one you posted I think is one of the Jūyō Bunkazai, and the kinzogan-mei is definitely 本阿弥光徳 Hon'ami Kōtoku, as his kaō is very distinctive. Kōtoku is, I believe, the first Hon'ami judge we have attributions from; he is extremely well-regarded, and his surviving attributions are very rare.

The brightness and clarity of the hamon is a big deal at Juyo. Maybe it would help to think about it this way — jūyō means "important," but also in the sense of "essential" or "principal." (It doesn't really mean "nice sword.") So for a blade to be "important" in this sense it needs to either have some historical context that justifies its importance, or be an exemplar of what those blades should be. So you can ask "is this an example that shows everything important about this school's tradition of work?" If you say "yes, almost all of it" then it's likely a decent candidate — but you also need to understand what "almost all of it" means. For example, Western collectors often neglect the boshi, but it is one of the most important fingerprints we have of school/smith, so this is actually quite important. What sticks out to me about this Naoe Shizu is that the geometry of the kissaki does not look geometrically correct. Perhaps the blade was chipped, and this was how the togishi tried to save it. Take a look at these two resources and then look at the kissaki again. What do you see?

The shape of the nakago is unexpected; bulbous, chunky, even inelegant. I do not see any hint of activity in the steel, and the hamon seems artificial.

It’s maru ni mitsu kashiwa mon — a three-leaved oak crest. The Makino clan used it quite a bit but this is a quite common motif.

Why do you think this blade is authentic?

I am remembering (no joke) a Buddhist monk in Kyoto, who asked me what does it mean for something to be "perfect?" Or "beautiful?" Is it in the object, or the day, or is it in the person who experiences it? Everything that goes into a Nihonto is flawed, from the iron sand, to the charcoal, to the hammer-man, to the smith, to the polisher, to the collector. Every step, every year, has imperfect elements. They are reflections of the time they were made, of the people and material that made them, and of the journeys they had to our hands now. So in that sense, they are all imperfect — but they are also perfect, in that they embody what they are and how they came to us.

Restricting my answer to truly in hand only. “Best” is hard. I don’t think I can objectively answer — it’s almost impossible for me to say whether a top-notch work by Ichimonji Sukezane is “better” than, say, Masamune, or Hisakuni, or…. From a purely emotional connection perspective, I saw an O-Sa tanto once that I would have traded a substantial part of my collection for.

This is a nice, but not iconic, Awataguchi… and it is one of the shortest. Why not iconic? The jigane is a little more coarse and open than one would want. Exemplar Awataguchi nashiji-hada looks almost like sand or sugar in its fineness. It’s hard to see in these photographs but exemplar Kuniyasu work explodes with detail in the hataraki; this seems a bit more quiet. Might be stronger on one side than the other, but again, hard to see. It is really quite short, I think certainly in the shortest five of Awataguchi daito. On the other hand: it’s very attractive, the Tanobe callout to Kuniyasu is a plus, and the price is quite competitive. You could compare against Eirakudo’s example, which is a little longer and has apparently finer but also less distinct hada. A top-notch Awataguchi is going to be at least twice this price, as a floor. And for the price this is pretty appealing work. We have a bit of an abundance (eek) of Awataguchi on the market right now so you can consider your options. This is a good example and IMHO worth the price of admission, but it depends on your collection aims and means, of course.

I have a few swords with some sort of provenance. Sometimes it is obscure — a habaki with a peculiar mon and a corroborating copy of an old Showa 26 torokusho. Sometimes the paperwork or a trustworthy sayagaki calls it out: “This was once an heirloom of the A clan that ruled B province.” And sometimes there’s old clan paperwork or a day book entry or an old Hon’ami appraisal that calls it out. The gold standard are the meibutsu but good luck finding one….

The Juyo and Tokuju shinsa have been exceptionally difficult the last few years. Blades that one would normally expect to sail through – koto, top smiths in top schools, kenzen, zaimei – still failed.

Prices at DTI were relatively high this year, maybe driven by dealers trying to capitalize on a strong dollar, but I also think dealer inventories at the high end are pretty low.... So I think the market at the high end is quite strong, and we are seeing some upward drift in prices as a result.

I was contemplating, the other day, the nature of collecting things — perhaps it was too good of a bottle of wine for a weekday. But it got me thinking. What makes, in your mind, for a truly outstanding collection? What are the "ingredients," as it were?

Sorry for the delay — here's the whole thing.

Fantastic — thanks much!

I'm trying to puzzle out this inscription on a kogatana. I can maybe make out the third character as 州 (maybe), the 六九代 in the middle, and 作之 at the end, but the calligraphy is giving me some trouble here. Anyone mind lending their eye?

I would like to push back on the idea that you need a huge budget to go after a topical collection. If you want to pick a topic like "pristine examples of the early development of the Rai school," yeah, that's going to be expensive (and I would definitely like to see it). But you can pick other topics that are also interesting, but far less capital-intensive. For example, you could try to put something together from each of the three major sword-smithing cities in the Edo period (Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo/Tokyo). After that you could expand to cover the other four major regions. Are we talking about an immense fortune to put this collection together? Not necessarily. But it's, I think, more interesting than "here are three blades chosen at random because I got a good deal on them." That's just my opinion though, and I am just some random person on the Internet! Ultimately, I think the important part is that each collector finds something interesting and significant in the collection process itself, so that they stay engaged with it and keep learning. Whatever fills that niche for you is a good collecting model for you and your collection.