eternal_newbie

And honestly, this remains true even through entry-level Juyo pieces (2.5 million yen+). A sword which has no tradeoffs and is just excellent all around will be high-level Juyo (6 million yen+) and entering "contender for Tokubetsu Juyo" territory.

Nice work, always good to see different ways of considering rankings other than the usual Fujishiro/Taikan/Hawley trinity. Reminded me of this article, which attempts to do something similar but also for schools rather than just individual smiths: https://web.archive.org/web/20210123052432/https://blog.yuhindo.com/pass-factor/

Congratulations and celebrations! A truly remarkable achievement and — having seen some of his work — a well deserved one.

On a slight tangent, I'm not sure I'd respect the opinion of AI on what constitutes art...

Something to keep in mind here is that this smith is so often faked that he has his own rule of thumb among the collecting community, to wit: "For every ten Kotetsus you see on the market, eleven will be fakes." The people who reflexively reply that what you have is very likely fake aren't being elitist or downers; they're simply repeating a reliable piece of common wisdom in the field.

One other thing to add along these lines - this isn't the first time this blade has been listed at Aoi in recent history, so at least one other person wasn't happy with what they got. Your mileage, obviously, may vary.

Indeed, sometimes it's the mounts themselves that are what the collector was interested in, and they selected a junk blade to hold it all together rather than shell out for a custom tsunagi.

I remember reading about a dealer/collector who once picked up an obvious gimei Kiyomaro for a very reasonable price - only to have it paper to Shizu Kaneuji after having the mei removed, and eventually reach Juyo.

Yep, I believe the practice they ended was being able to apply for Juyo token with just Hozon papers. Now, to qualify for Juyo the submission must have TH papers issued at least x months ago.

Kanemitsu and Shizu in particular are cases where it's more or less understood by everyone that there's no way a single smith, or even a couple of generations, could have made enough swords for that many of them to survive to become Juyo in our time. It's just that there isn't enough evidence and historical documentation for the shinsa panels to distinguish between the named smith and their immediate successors/contemporaries, and therefore "Kanemitsu" or "Shizu" remains the best guess, given the information we have available.

There is also at least one Ko-Hoki blade with an ichimai boshi (https://onihonto.com/archived-nihonto-ca-yuhindo-com-ko-hoki/) as well as one Senjuin blade which has it (https://www.facebook.com/groups/destinationjapan/posts/4513864922166244/) which suggests that Gō could have either inherited the technique through his Yamato heritage (he is theorized by some to be the student or son of Senjuin Yoshihiro) or, like Norishige and Masamune, was inspired by a Ko-Hoki masterpiece that he encountered.

I agree - the blade is what it is, and no amount of papers, sayagaki or dealer verbiage will change that. But a significant portion of the market out there does care, and until that changes, stuff like this will have an effect on which blades get submitted and which blades get bought.

A few other things to consider: Without any prominent experts on the Juyo panel, a modern Juyo certification may be seen as less prestigious than e.g. a Tanobe-sensei sayagaki Reduced number of swords passing does not necessarily mean that standards have gotten higher; in fact I have spoken with more than one person who feels that the last couple of sessions' worth of Juyo blades have been a decidedly mixed bag, with some swords among them that, and I quote, "should not even have gotten TH, let alone Juyo." I personally do not share that opinion but admittedly I do not collect at as high a level as they do, and thus my standards are probably lower Reading some of the recent Juyo and TokuJu setsumei, one can definitely sense a shift in certain long-held assumptions/assertions. For example, the decision to finally certify a Chogi tanto with a date 10 years older than the previous oldest acknowledged work, and noting in the setsumei for a TJ Shizu blade that the blade is attributed to the Shizu group, of which Kaneuji was the foremost, whereas previously an attribution of Shizu meant Kaneuji himself, with a slight plus or minus of confidence From my understanding there has definitely been an attempt to broaden the gap between Hozon and Tokubetsu Hozon of late. The number of older blades being approved, and the tightening guidelines for qualifying for TH, may also be related to the fact that we are now approaching a period in which works by some of the early gendai smiths are posthumous candidates for TH, and someday even Juyo The increasing availability of documentation on a given blade's history — the Wayback Machine, forum and Reddit threads, as well as the tireless work of big data gatherers and analysts — now means that it's easier than ever to determine whether a blade a) has been submitted multiple times for Juyo, b) has been passed around from seller to seller, and/or c) does not quite measure up to other Juyo specimens from that school or maker, meaning blades that are good enough to be considered Juyo candidates but not good enough to actually pass Juyo are now likely to be submitted less often (as an aside: I wonder what the record is for "number of Juyo attempts by a single blade")

Very interesting. Something to keep a lookout for in the future.

It may be so. The second character can be pronounced "en", "noki" or "hisashi": https://jitenon.com/kanji/簷 and does indeed refer to eaves. As part of a signature, those first three characters could perhaps also be read as "Inokishi"? However, a cursory search for "一簷子" online seems to mostly come up with Chinese-language results, which does lend credence to the Gunboards theory that it's some sort of classical aphorism/poem.