nulldevice

Or if its a valuable mei, to cut out the mei and then to insert it into another blade and create high quality, fraudulent, gakumei

Here is some lacquer work on a saya of mine I find particularly spectacular.

I've captured quite good photos with a D850 and 105mm Macro. Got it all at a fraction of the new mirrorless. I would love to check out with mirrorless cameras the new pixel shift features that can take a 48MP sensor and output 200MP+ images and see how that works for high res nihonto photos. But in the meantime I'm more than happy with my "old" DSLR

Lovely photos showing some wonderful activity in the hamon! Did you have the blade laying flat on a cloth and positioned the light and camera to get the angle/focus correct?

Signed Naganori - 永則 The sword looks to be in quite rough condition and someone may have used a slight abrasive on the tang at some point. Many smiths signed Naganori, notably the Bizen Yoshii school.

This is not an authentic Japanese sword. I'd suggest reading here to learn more: https://www.jssus.org/nkp/fake_japanese_swords.html

Nihonto Wordle My new addiction. Great work!

O-hada (large grained hada) and hada-dachi (standing hada) aren't the same. You can have a ko-itame hada or regular itame-hada that is standing but not large in form. Shintogo tanto often display this characteristic of very fine ko-itame that is also standing with tons of chikei. From what I've gathered and am still trying to learn is that clarity of steel and nie formations such as chikei can result in a standing or prominent grain unrelated to the size of the grain itself. A lot of early Soshu (Shintogo, Yukimitsu) show these traits as well as some Masamune and Sadamune. Outside of Soshu-den, we see schools like Aoe and Awataguchi also showing these traits as well as others. On the flip side, scanning the translations of the Zufu that I have, o-hada and hada-dachi are linked more often than not. So while its not a requirement to have big grain to have standing grain as seen above and in the example below, there is a trend that o-hada tends to also be standing by nature more often than not. Take this one for example:

Yup. There are periods of Japanese history where Tametsugu would IMO easily place as Sai-jo saku if he wasn't competing against the traditionally held cream of the crop GOATed swordsmiths. Frustrating even when you deal with Soshu-den in general where its 97% mumei works to begin with. Its all a nebulous mess when work starts crossing over. Roughly (and probably wrong as this is from my own brain without verifying zufu translations) speaking: Tametsugu with lots of sunagashi and some masame tendencies = den Shizu/Shizu Tametsugu with top-class nie and strong tempered boshi = den Go/Go Tametsugu with a narrower hamon (not overly flamboyant) but excellent nie with a bit more standing hada = Norishige. Once his work crosses this threshold of certain parameters of quality and hataraki being met, it can no longer be Tametsugu and must be something else at TJ level. Honma Junji writes in his Soshu-den Masterpieces book:

On Tametsugu specifically it’s interesting because he has very few signed pieces, and also zero swords at TJ. But when a “Tametsugu” is deemed good enough it gets an “upgrade” to some other Soshu smith at TJ. What that’s essentially done is concretize Tametsugu as a lower tier Soshu smith (which according to Fujishiro and other rankings he is) without allowing his stuff to just naturally pass into TJ as a Tametsugu. Instead he almost has this fate where the NBTHK has said without saying “Tametsugu cannot go TJ” because if it is that good, it must be some other smith. I don’t personally like this view when we’re dealing with 99% mumei blades because were no longer classifying a smith based on his traits but rather a tier system using names as placeholders rather than numbers with 0% certainty who actually made the sword other than it was made by a Soshu master.

The NBTHK has no problem upgrading swords from TH to Juyo, Juyo to TJ, or even Juyo to Juyo if a sword is resubmitted down the line. There are many such examples of swords changing attributions. These are just some Juyo / Juyo and Juyo / TJ “upgrades” I’ve seen Tametsugu -> Norishige Naoe Shizu -> Shizu Morikage -> Chogi Kashu Sanekage -> Go Sanekage -> Naotsuna den <smith> -> <smith> And many many others.

Just Tadahiro and Masahiro alone have over 60 dated Juyo blades.

I'd be happy to see AI kantei blades from Aoi level photos. But as it stands and in my opinion, you can't see enough of the fine activities in those photos to make trustworthy judgements. Maybe the next Fable model can make out the finer details from a compressed, artifact-ridden JPEG, but I don't think the AI is the main limiting factor, its the data being fed (the photograph) that is the underlying problem.

I don't underestimate it. I'm one of the biggest proponents of AI, but within reason. What I mean is that, you have to be meticulous in how you direct it or it can quickly go off the rails. When AI is well confined in its task and has good underlying research and data to work on, it will do wonders and continuously blows my mind with the things I've found using it. I've built things that would've taken teams of devs years in previous employment in a matter of months. But based on photos alone, in its current state, photographic kantei is hard. Very very hard. I won't say it won't ever happen. But right now, even with Fable and other top models, they struggle hard on kantei even when provided with top notch photos. Now what I've found interesting is that if you have good underlying data, you can describe a blade to AI and it can reason through what schools/smiths did what and actually give you some good options for possible matches. The amount of underlying data and analysis of 10s of thousands of smith's/school's work it takes to get to this point is no small endeavor.

The good thing is that @Hoshi is very open to feedback! As for the content, its impossible for 1 person to write literally the whole book on every smith out there in a way that can give you a clue on kantei and workmanship. If there are errors in a smith's description, I'm sure he'd be happy to get it fixed!