nulldevice

備州長船__景 Bishu Osafune ___ kage?

Looks like Yamashiro no Kuni ju Minamoto Kunishige

About half way through so far and it's a wonderful read just like the last article. Thanks Hoshi!

1. I believe it's: 因幡國住藤原兼先 - Inaba no Kuni ju Fujiwara Kanesaki 2. There are a number of generations signing Inaba/Inshu Kanesaki from ~1620 into the mid 1700s 3. See above. This sword also has old papers which can be a caution, so make sure to do your research on the different smiths, and their signatures knowing that these white papers are considered outdated.

_ _ Kanenobu

That blade is going to be gimei (false inscription). There are a number of smiths that signed Hizen Tadayoshi and they are very collectable swords. This is claiming to be the 1st gen which is a huge red flag without papers and real 1st gen Tadayoshi blades will go for 5-10x what this is listed for. You should avoid any blades as a beginner that don't come with modern NBTHK papers authenticating the signatures. You could get a much nicer blade for $5500 with a legitimate signature. I would continue to advise you to avoid this seller and probably eBay and auction sites in general as 99% of the blades on there are going to be un-papered and gimei if signed. That's not to say they're not real antique swords, but oftentimes they are lower quality swords with a fake inscription put on them trying to get more money out of the sword than it would ever be worth. Not to mention the sword listed is not in a great polish and is quite scratched. The tang (nakago) also looks to have been cleaned at some point if the lighting isn't deceiving me which is another big red flag and detractor from any old sword.

The date looks like March 24 1937? Although its written using quite literally 1937 and not Showa 12. 一千九百三十七年三月二十四日 Is what I'm seeing.

This reminds me of the other Russian sword $100,000,000 tachi or whatever thread from years ago that made its rounds that has been mentioned already. I found it funny while trying to read the poorly translated "Test Report" that the blade is both 600mm long and 3855mm long. I want to see a 3855mm long tachi. This would dwarf even the Masayoshi Odachi!

We looked over a couple of nice blades of his at the SF show

After looking up a few threads on Horyu papers and meanings. What is the difference between a Horyu result and a To mei ga aru result? To mei ga aru at least papers so is it: "we're not 100% sure so we leave a footnote but will still paper the blade" and horyu is "we can't come to a conclusion at all?"

I'm excited to see this when you get it in hand and after a fresh polish in Japan!

It would be: Showa - 昭和 10 - 十 9 - 九 Year - 年 10 - 十 1 - 一 Month - 月 All together, Showa 19th year, 11th month (November 1944) Showa was an era of Japanese history corresponding to Emperor Hirohito (Showa) from 1926 (Showa 1) to 1989 (Showa 64) when he died.

The koto books follow the gokaden and typically go from early schools to later schools. The Shinto books are similar but the gokaden is substituted for provinces since we know Shinto blades saw a blending of many traditions. I have not yet indexed volumes 6 or 7 as I’ve been focusing on the sword volumes first.

The JSSUS website also has the books indexed in their Index of Japanese Sword Literature meaning you can search for a smith's name and if its is in the Nihonto Koza or Nihonto Zuikan, it will show up in the results.

I started by making a basic index for the Nihonto Koza with just the name and page number for the blades portion in each book. This serves as a good starting reference for looking up top blades by prolific smiths. im working on adding more details to it such as the full mei reading or mumei classsification, papering of blade (Kokuho, JuBi, etc.) and the measurements. It’s a manual process as I can’t get AI image recognition to correctly recognize the characters. but I started with just a name, book no., and page no. in a simple excel index which I have saved on my phone. As for the contents of the books, the blade descriptions very much follow the Juyo books and Google translate can get probably 60% of it for you and as I’ve learned the sword term kanji, the other sections become easier to understand. (Nakago, Boshi, hamon, kitae, etc.) the sections in the beginning of the books are something I’d like to learn better. It’s all instructional material on various schools and lineages of smiths and the information there is top notch and google translate again does an okay job but I can tell lots of important information is lost. I’m hoping one day tools like AI can give us better translations of these sections of the books.