nulldevice

Only if its a medium format Hasselblad. The Lunar, Stellar, and HV cameras were a disgrace to the photography community. As a sort of derailing thought, if Go died at 27 and wasn't making swords for very long, have we already reached the point where we've surpassed the realistic number of blades he could've produced as an individual smith that have been attributed to him? There are deeper discussions to be had on students, daisaku blades, and "forge mates" who may have been all working together, but I've wondered as new Go come about and appear in Juyo and TJ shinsa, how many existing Go aren't actually made by his hand? Even smiths with big schools and forges and with long active periods are now sitting at 200 or 300+ blades attributed to them with more and more appearing each year. I would love to see the NBTHK lead the charge as they have the best access to the most amount of fresh blades coming in each year hoping for Juyo and the elusive Toku Ju status in capturing higher quality and higher resolution images of these swords. Especially with the passing fees for Juyo Shinsa being quite a big chunk of change, a highly optimized setup for photography could be created where more than just sugata and nakago pictures could be captured. Even the TNM link posted above will have some very high resolution TIFF files for many of the JuBun and Kokuho blades, but these again are always just sugata pictures where sometimes the hada can be seen clearly as well depending on the smith. There are never any hamon shots that clearly show all of the hataraki, utsuri, and boshi that are key points in sword appreciation and kantei.

My dumb physics brain: "Just find some distant place 700 lightyears away to look at the exact place on Earth where it was forged and then send you the video recording." That might be easier than convincing the various Japanese authorities, museums, and private collection to let a gaijin with a camera photograph Kokuho swords in their current state!

I've got the camera and the lenses, just work on getting me access to all of the Kokuho, JuBun, Gyobutsu, and JuBi pieces and I suppose I'll volunteer as tribute

I just pulled up the dates for the shodai Yasutsugu who signed with Nanban Tetsu and who’s active period starts in 1594 and continues into the 1600s followed by later generations who also signed that way and also used the Aoi Mon.

以南蛮鐵越前康繼 The first kanji are a bit hard to make out but based on what I can see this is likely it. Motte Nanban Tetsu Echizen Yasutsugu Echizen Yasutsugu is a very famous smith lineage from the late 1500s to 1600s who used "nanban tetsu" barbarian steel to make swords.

That is an interesting development for sure! I wonder if they would even go to include the Hon'ami origami in the TH kanteisho like they do at Juyo+? That would certainly add a lot of new variety to the Hozon/TH shinsa.

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.

The 1st gen was active around Tenbun era (天文, 1532-1555)

Hon’ami Kōon (光温)

@Bruce Pennington This is the Hon'ami OG - Hon’ami Kōtoku (光徳). Sesko has him active from 1553-1619

I think that is a Juyo Bunkazai sword and not the Heshigiri. The Heshigiri Hasebe with the koshirae as described looks like this: The blade you showed is a JuBun Kunishige owned by the Kurokawa institute with ties back to Tokugawa Yorinobu. Both are relatively "straight" but one retains 0.9cm of sori and the other 1.0cm. Not a lot but again both are greatly shortened with mekugi ana present near the nakago-jiri on both examples. Adding a good 15-20cm to the nagasa of each of these would no doubt bring out a bit more sori. I think you'd find quite a few shinshinto smiths who tried to emulate these blades but only the famous 2 or 3 most likely who could approach them in quality. I'm not a big shinshinto guy so I don't know if any of them tried to emulate hitatsura utsushi mono of Hasebe school Kokuho and JuBun blades. A place for more study for me as I need to spend more time in shinshinto.