eternal_newbie

Just commenting on the veracity of ChatGPT and the like. I suspect the sword isn't as old as the AI thinks, but to be sure we'd need to have a shot of the exposed tang and maybe the entire naked blade in profile.

The secret here is that ChatGPT is optimized to give you the answer you're most likely to approve of (and thus keep using it). And that usually means telling you your sword is a national treasure, your idea is revolutionary, your book draft will usher in a new era of literature... Sure, most swords were fungible works hastily slapped into whatever parts were on hand... but not yours, good sir, not yours at all!

Update: Yamanaka Newsletters Volume 5 Issue #3 available: Yamanaka V5 NL03

Chogi is very much sought-after in the nihonto world; a blade's attribution changing from Hasebe Kunishige, Shizu or Kencho to Chogi can more than double its asking price.

It's also interesting to compare the age and demographics of nihonto enthusiasts at Japanese events to the ones in the West. Much younger, much more evenly distributed gender-wise (with many, if not most, tilted in favour of girls and women).

Fantastic book; excellent photography, excerpts from various other important and hard-to-find Japanese references, and perhaps most importantly, plenty of Honma-sensei's own personal commentary and opinions. You can download an English index for the book here: https://www.militaria.co.za/nmb/files/file/204-sôshû-den-meisaku-shu-english-index/

Very nice piece, I used to have a papered set of F/K (now moved on to a new owner) in the same theme and materials. Bats in Japanese culture are symbols of happiness, luck, and prosperity. In Japanese, bat is 蝙蝠 (kōmori) and the second character 蝠 can also be pronounced ‘fu’ or ‘fuku’ which means happiness. It is the same character found in the name of the lucky god Fukurokuju (福禄寿). https://curiousordinary.substack.com/p/bats-in-Japanese-folklore

And unfortunately, most people who do use AI tools for translation online either don't know how, or can't be bothered, to do so – they just want to get their little paragraph or description English-readable and move on with their lives.

Yup! Nie means "to boil" (because nie particles look like the small bubbles in a boiling body of water), and the AI sees this and interprets all the following characters in a context related to boiling water, steam etc.

Welcome to the board. Your wakizashi is signed Kanesumi 兼住 There were many smiths who signed with these characters in Mino province (present-day Gifu prefecture), from the Koto period all the way up to the 1970s. Based on the structure of the hamon, I would guess it is one of the smiths from the later half of that range.

Those are the vendors who are running their listings through Google Translate or a similar AI product. The AI doesn't have the context necessary to know which pronunciation (and thus romanization) of the kanji is the correct one for a given smith's name. Kaneuji 包氏 is another one – often gets romanized by AI translators as Kanemitsu/Kaneshige or "Bao family" or even "Mr. Tsutsumi".

Yes, Aoi's system has a standard 1000JPY minimum increment for all bids. If you up your bid, but the current bidder is still higher than you, it will record your maximum bid in there, and then set their bid to be 1000JPY higher than this. The increasing bid increment in auction houses is to keep the pace of bidding going faster and faster; this isn't an issue for online auctions because the system is able to handle multiple tiny bid increases within a single second and not skip a beat, unlike a human auctioneer who can only call out so many bids in a given timeframe. According to some of my friends in e-commerce, keeping a small increment apparently encourages bidders who are on the fence to jump in, on the off-chance that they might just happen to snap up the item with a tiny increment outbidding the current maximum. And once they do this, they get invested in the outcome and are more likely to raise their bid.

Hmm... I wonder how kosher those bids are. Wouldn't be surprised to see it show up again for sale, perhaps at a more reasonable price. Yes, it's ubu, zaimei, early Osafune... but 71M yen is well into Tokubetsu Juyo or Masamune territory.

Many of the swords people describe as "a good starter blade" or "an interesting study piece" are mediocre, in poor health and polish, and generally don't really offer anything to be learned from by examining them other than the experience of holding a Japanese sword. This, on the other hand, is the kind of blade I would have loved to start with; a maker of high skill and renown (considered the intermediate quality step between Tametsugu and Norishige, and with many blades that have earned Juyo), in good polish and health, and with plenty of activities in the hamon and ji. A blade like this will continue to reveal its secrets as you get better at viewing it and understanding what you're looking at, and in turn will continue to entice you to develop your skill and broaden your knowledge. Good luck with your sale!

I mentioned it in another thread but, if you really must upload your full-resolution high-quality blade photography (and by all means do so, we love some good eye candy on this board ) the best way to do this is by using an external hosting service (Google Drive, Dropbox, Photobucket, Zonerama etc.) and linking to it from your thread. This lets people access the full-quality files at their leisure, without taxing the NMB's resources unduly.

Upload space is limited and so uploaded photographs are downsampled automatically. If you have an image hosting account (e.g. Photobucket, Google Drive) people often provide a link to where the high resolution photos are stored so folks who want a closer look can get to them.

Here is a thread where the topic of modifying a koshirae to fit a different blade was discussed; in particular, I posted a picture in there of a saya rasp tool used to adjust the inside of the saya to fit the new blade:

備州長船 [ ][ ] - Bishu Osafune XX 祐國 Sukekuni perhaps? But as @Scogg has said, it's not a genuine sword so the signature is meaningless (purely there to mislead potential buyers).

Unfortunately Google "search" nowadays is somewhat more reliant on AI hallucinations than data analysis/indexation; please adjust your expectations and research methodology accordingly.

Looking forward to it - Shitahara work in katana, wakizashi and tanto is usually quite distinctive so it will be interesting to see what it looks like in a jumonji yari.

You're in good company; it is indeed the general consensus among connoisseurs and scholars that Sadamune is superior in jigane and sugata, while Masamune reigns in hamon, hataraki and application of nie in general. In fact, Sadamune is often described as having "the finest jigane in all of Japanese swordsmithing", outshining even Rai and Awataguchi.

There's chikei, and then there's chikei... And then there's Masamune chikei.

I really appreciate seeing people's own personal thoughts on exhibits and high-level blades like this. While I don't necessarily rely on them for my own personal evaluation of swords, it's always refreshing to see what kind of different personalities and preferences exist elsewhere in the nihonto world.

Congratulations on your sword going Tokubetsu Juyo! The English list of exhibits can be found here, and the English translation of the captions for the exhibits can be found here.

Assuming your polisher is a reputable and reliable sort, this is absolutely the case. They will likely also stress that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe polish (unless it's something very light like a shiage retouch) because even the healthiest looking blade could have a flaw revealed when some metal is removed.