Absolute novice

It's definitely copper wire, we were debating on how to get to the peg back in and were tossing around unwrapping it back to the hole and re wrapping it, but not sure how it would handle the abuse, or how we would recreate the construction. The wire end also appears to be soldered to the inside edge of the tsuba which would need to be unsoldered before anything is attempted. The coating feels like a soft metal, akin to pewter, easily scratched with a fingernail, heres to hoping it's not lead 🤣

Of the two things I picked up about Japanese swords, I'm happy to report that cleaning under the handle being sacrilege is one of them 😆 I'll see about getting a better lighted tang picture. I thought I had one, but it cut off the bottom characters under the major blemish. While I was scrolling through this website during my initial investigation, someone mentioned that some of you had magical x-ray vision deciphering badly blemished tangs. They weren't wrong 🤣 I just had my friend send me a better photo of the tang The leathers is what had me thinking WWII in the first place, but everything else about this had me confused. My friend and I had the idea after seeing a post about a "post-war farmer modification" that it probably got the same treatment at some point. While far from traditional, whoever made the handle certainly knew how to make a comfortable one, just wish the pin was accessible so we could simply reattach it.

So I'm new to checking out military swords and now this one has caught my interest. A fried of mine had this one show up in his random sword collection and I've never seen a handle construction like this. I'm curious if this isn't a weird fake, or a something someone customized in the past. Since this place seems to have a plethora of people who know more than I do, I figured I'd ask for any insight you might have.