Robert S

Interesting: that's a brocade weave, but it looks like it then has been embroidered over the weave to achieve the raised effect and other colours. Hard to tell without closer inspection whether or not is is a jacquard or machine brocade, or a traditionally hand-woven brocade, but I'm leaning toward at least a Jacquard loom, which would make it no earlier than mid 1800's. Traditional brocade weaving is incredibly labour intensive - it can take months to set up the loom alone... and the loom is a massive thing. With the advent of the jacquard loom brocade became much more accessible. It's also hard to tell whether the embroidered element was planned from the beginning, or was an additional feature after the fact. That would depend on whether the embroidered features also exist in the underlying brocade. The embroidery itself is not top quality, but not bad - not up to the quality of top end kimonos for instance.. This is one of the things that is making me lean toward jacquard brocade and a late Edo or Meiji date - if it was traditional handwoven brocade I would expect the embroidery to be top quality. It's also woven with a relatively heavy thread, not the extremely fine thread of top end brocade. Overall, this is a significant piece of craft, but appears aimed at a midrange market - lower hatamoto or modestly successful businessman, not daimyo, if Edo period.

Yes. With a good CNC milling machine and scanner, you can get ridiculously accurate copies if you do some hand work after to correct microscopic surface details.

Thanks all for the correction on the plum flower / sorrel question. I took the information in the catalogue I had as meaning that there was a traditional representation of plum which differentiated it from cherry, but clearly that's not the case (and the catalogue from the recent Hayes Collection sale by Czerny's had it wrong).

Sounds familiar. A new 50% on Canadian goods, although a more limited range of goods... maybe. We're definitely not in Mr. Trump's good books either these days.

In general, you shouldn't expect much value, unless one of them turns out to be by a famous master, which is highly unlikely. #1 is an oddity - might even be a printed picture mounted on a hanging scroll - I can't tell. #2 - 4 all look on first glance to be relatively modern, although #4 might be a bit older... but again, hard to tell from these photos. #5 is likely to be an appreciation scroll given to a specific person... but a translation would tell for sure.

Ah yes, evidence of the relatively secret Tokugawa drone program. Mostly believed to have been used to spy on daimyo while not in attendance in Edo.

That's a lot of fretsawing and filing .

You're thinking of galvanic corrosion. It can certainly happen if there's enough moisture around to act as an electrolyte, and yes, it would corrode the steel, rather than the copper alloy. However, I'd be surprised if it only corroded that one point of contact.

That's a decent tsuba (sword guard), so someone thought enough of it to pair it with that. The blade itself looks like it may have been subject to some lower quality polishing at some point, which has altered the blade shape a bit... or the swordsmith had a particular and slightly unusual aesthetic in mind. Not a big flaw by any means - and could potentially be corrected with some work around the kissaki, if there's enough hamon left, which I think there is, and if the judgement of more expert people is that the shape has come off a bit. That is, if someone wanted to spend the not inconsiderable $ to get a professional polish. Looks a nice enough blade - as to school and era, I'll leave that to the experts .

T

I believe it's possible that that pattern may actually be plum flower - you can see the stamens in the middle. At least that Is the description that was given in a recent catalogue, and it makes sense.

Definitely not . I was doing some research on early iron casting the other day, though, and was stunned to find that there is archaeological evidence for iron casting in Japan going back almost a millennium. I didn't think they were using technology capable of generating that much heat until more recently.

Hmm... Maybe someday if I get kitted out for serious forging I'll have to try the meteorite that has been my fingering stone for the last 50 years or so . And no, I didn't pay a fortune for it - found it back in my rockhounding days.

I think my first question would be whether you could just run a dehumidifier in the storage room, and thus reduce the risk for all of the blades. As for keeping them out without shirasaya, I actually think that's the safest option, as long as they're not at risk of physical damage, in a humidity controlled space, and not touching anything which could host humidity build-up. With any saya there's some risk of contact or humidity build-up.

I'm interested why you cannot ship blades to Canada, as I receive them from Japan, the US...

Interesting. One of my Buto sensei's was an Endo, but don't know if his family was from Sendai or had any relation to the Date clan.

That's pretty much a treasure trove right there, not so much individually, but all of them together giving a picture of a complete "instruction manual" for both general samurai matters and specific matters relating to the family tradition and occupation. Amazing find!

Depending on the nature of the art medium, some artists have to be very good craftsmen first. For instance, in my early career I was a printmaker, and definitely had to learn and master significant craft before I could even begin to produce something worthwhile. Likewise with traditional sculpture and painting. Much, but by no means all, of the modernist and postmodernist work lacks this craft grounding... and it frequently shows. For a swordsmith, I would say it is the same - you couldn't even begin to produce anything which was art until you had a deep grounding in the craft... and between the fact that some swordsmiths just made swords - i.e. they weren't trying to make art, just a very good sword - and the fact that all swordsmiths probably had a long initial period where art was beyond them, I would guess that the majority of swords made did not intend or try to be art. And since intention is key, by some definitions they aren't art. The other big factor which makes the whole "art" attribution different in Japan was the degree to which outright copying was considered perfectly acceptable. If you run through the entirety of the V&A's tsuba collection, the number of designs duplicated multiple times is astonishing. In the west, this would de facto make anything which was a copy craft, not art. I get the impression that that distinction was not so important in Japan.

This series is mostly a summarization of Tale of the Heike - it's a bit disappointing, as they clearly didn't do large amounts of research beyond that. Their overview of the Tale is pretty good, although occasionally has minor issues, but I highly recommend to anyone who is interested to read the actual original. It's an amazing piece of literature, maintained and grown for centuries as an oral tradition, rather than written, and to my mind much better than some of the comparable Chinese classics like the Tale of the Three Kingdoms. The Royall Tyler translation, as with so much of his work, is very well done!

I think there's a good chance that the surface texture of the steel was largely deliberate, and not caused by corrosion

There's some story there - it's curious that the axes of the lattice are not consistent across the piece. I can't think of why a craftsman would have done that even if, say the piece was started, work stopped, and then resumed later. Puzzled!

One thing that we sometimes forget is that iron, copper and other metals were much more uncommon a few hundred years ago than now. Take the example from Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (late 10th/early 11th century) where cupboards with hinged doors were much more "high class" than cupboards with sliding doors... because hinges required both metal craftsmanship and metal. That becomes relevant when we think of koshirae from the Muromachi/Early Edo or before. I suspect that if they were of ordinary craftsmanship, and had gone our of style, they were often recycled. Hence the relative lack of older koshirae.

Or alternatively, if you have a really nice set of tsuba and other metalwork for the koshirae, and you don't mind the cost, I would simply ship the koshirae parts to Japan, and get craftspeople there to make the saya and tsuka and fit and assemble the entire package. Trying to do it piecemeal is a recipe for frustration...

I would be put off by that polish, which is a crude treatment of a magnificent hamon. The blade deserves much better.