nulldevice

There are scanners that can scan books still bound but the images are prone to distortion. If you just want text and don't mind the lines of text having some waves in them as the curvature of the pages is captured, not a big deal, when trying to capture images in books in high resolution, you need to have loose pages that you can feed into a flat type of scanner to prevent distortion. I recently saw a Chinese book scanner that was able to achieve flat scans while keeping the book in tact, it used air suction to suction a single page to a wedge-shaped scanning apparatus and as the scanner ran up the page, it scanned the contents and the page was turned as the scanner reached the edge of the page and the obverse was then scanned using the same method. Despite being quite a cool contraption, it was huge and bulky and very much out of reach for me and my nihonto books. The problem with unbinding a book is that re-binding them can be quite expensive and you do have to cut some of the page material initially to remove the glue and or stitching holding the binding together. So the page block going back in the binding after scanning will have a few mm of page missing and could lead to re-binding causing some of the tight text to become hard to read. Usually not a problem on big nihonto books as they usually have quite large margins around the images and text blocks, but something to be aware of.

Time for the answer:

The mei reads Hizen Kuni Tadayoshi - 肥前國忠吉 IMO the mei looks very roughly chiseled and for a Hizen blade, typically you'd see the mei on the other side of the tang as Hizen smiths tended to sign tachi mei and not katana mei.

As for a final hint: There has been a dozen guess and a few that are what my non-official kantei brain would call "almost dozen"

I'll throw a hint in spoiler tags of a few features highlighted in the sayagaki that I can't photograph correctly:

Its signed: 兼継 - Kanetsugu 昭和十九年五月 - Showa 19th year, 5th month - May 1944

There are 2 screws/pegs on the handle of the sword. The top one below the handguard is a screw that can be removed with a screwdriver and then one more down in the lower 1/3rd of the handle. These are tapered and pop out 1 way and can be pushed out with a piece of wood or plastic. Once out the sword should come free from the handle but if it is still stuck, you can watch the below video for help. (Skip to around 6:30)

Interesting. The boshi is slightly pointed (togari) on this blade.

Nagasa is 68cm Sori is about 1.4cm I don’t have the motohaba or sakihaba but it doesn’t taper much and has a thin kasane. it has an old gakumei that was removed

Last 2 for now

More photos

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good Kantei quiz here in NMB. Some of you have seen this sword or know it but keep your answers in spoiler tags and I’ll post the answer later.

You need to provide the model with enough context to know what it is translating. Your free online AI translations go in with minimal, if not zero context when given a task to do. If you give an AI tool proper context about nihonto terminology, the results can be quite excellent if not near perfect.

It is the longest extant Shigezane tachi out there. But this appears to be a typo or glitch. A lot of translations will also mistranslate Shigezane as Shigemasa. I've seen it across a few vendors now. Other names with Sane/zane will also get the same treatment.

It is signed 国俊 - Kunitoshi. Looks like the signature is in the style of Niji Kunitoshi, a very famous Rai school smith.