eternal_newbie

Mentioned here, along with links to an English writeup of the exhibits, if you didn't manage to find it yet: Aside from the Awataguchi blades, of personal interest to me is the Yukimitsu which is the only signed work of his that is also done in hitatsura and is thus a valuable data point for Soshu. That single blade allows the NBTHK to issue non-den attributions to Yukimitsu for works that match that hitatsura style, since there's a shoshin zaimei example as a reference.

Sounds like the best course of action is to make sure you can afford the tariff bill before ordering from overseas, then cross your fingers and hope you get lucky.

You are almost certainly correct - the general rule of thumb for Komonjo blades is, if they aren't papered, assume they won't paper, at least in their current state.

Nice find. High-resolution images of treasure swords are always worth a look!

Someone who's played baseball would probably try to hit it with the monouchi, like you would to get a good homer. But yeah - this is pretty much exactly what scratches from cutting look like. If it was a blade deemed important enough to test pre-war, it would likely have been given a light polish to remove the scuffing, if not the nicks - this is what leads me to believe it was done during the war, or after it. EDIT: one other possibility is that if the blade really is late Edo period, it could have been involved in a fight during the Bakumatsu era.

Before the war it would probably have been a family blade so this likely happened during the war - or after it (unfortunately not all owners of cool-looking antiquities can be trusted to not take a swing at a pool noodle, cardboard box or water jug). I've also seen anecdotes of treasure blades that were being used to trim weeds or chop unruly branches before someone knowledgeable managed to rescue them.

Very interesting, thank you for the insight!

There are also some schools where a specific type of shinae - shinae-ware, or small crack-like openings in the horizontal grain - are expected and not considered a flaw at all. In particular, the Hosho school's masame-hada has a tendency to produce these and it's even considered a kantei point for that school.

Generally shinae themselves aren't considered a structural integrity problem and are unlikely to develop into a bigger problem on their own - but they do indicate that the blade was abused or faced some serious stress in battle, and thus are a warning sign that internal structural weaknesses may have developed as a result. Think of it as seeing a giant dent in a car's side door; the dent itself likely has no bearing on the roadworthiness of the vehicle, but having received a perpendicular hit like that, you'd want to check that the suspension's not shot.

For a new blade, generally if it's not small enough to be ground out, the smith wouldn't sign the blade and forward it for polishing (especially given that they're only allowed to produce a limited number of blades each month). For older blades being touched up, it depends on how deep the flaw goes - usually the integrity of the blade is prioritized above a flawless topology, especially if you don't know exactly how much surface metal would need to be ground down to erase the flaw(s).

The answer is that nobody knows for sure, and there will be a great many lawsuits, class actions and appeals before any of this is even close to being sorted out. Until then, it will depend entirely on whomever is transporting and selling the goods you're interested in and how they choose to respond, and some element of luck regarding which customs agent ends up processing your package.

Beautiful.

As I have the site on my daily rotation, I've noticed it seems to be intermittent; sometimes it's completely offline, sometimes it works but no pictures load, and sometimes - as you said - the main page loads up but none of the swords will load. @Ed you may want to check with your hosting provider to see what's going on there if you're not already aware of this.

Let's hope Hoshi suffers a happier fate!

More important than the mei, is the blade. With a name as big as this, it's likely to be labeled gimei if the blade doesn't match the work he's known for, even if the signature is a perfect match. Your translation, at least, is accurate - the mei reads "Minamoto Kiyomaro" (源清麿). https://nihontoclub.com/smiths/KIY132

"An auspicious day in xx" is sometimes also translated as "a lucky day in xx" or "a good day in xx" - that should give a better idea of what the inscription is trying to get across

There's a small icon near the top that will let you change colour schemes; I do think this could be more obvious/intuitive, and it doesn't change that some of the fonts are a little wispy at high resolutions (i.e. on a monitor instead of a phone).

Almost looks like two different tsuba designs sandwiched together, one half being the namban we can see and the other side being a solid design in some other metal/alloy (maybe even solid gold). Also, it's probably just the photography but some of the stuff inside the namban looks like moss instead of dust/corrosion...

Honestly, given how niche the field is and how all of these resources are maintained by private individuals, a little redundancy is a good thing. I have an extensive library of references, both English and Japanese, and I still felt the loss when Nihonto Club went members-only just because of the convenience of the search function (I've been approved for an account there, thankfully).

Sounds great, you've clearly put a lot of thought into this I'll add only this; if you're not swimming in money it may be worthwhile to add a Donate or Tip Jar link somewhere so heavy users can contribute to hosting costs. Most won't, but some will, especially if they see value in it. (at least until you get paid subscriptions working, if you ever plan to do that)

One question, if I may - do you have any plans for keeping the list of swords up to date? e.g. are you going to update it whenever Jussi releases a new version of his dataset, or will members be able to request/make changes to add new swords or update the info for existing ones?

No small amount of effort has been put into researching how the Koto smiths achieved the uruoi (潤い) wet jihada look, and for good reason - it's long been seen as a hallmark of grandmaster artisans.

Aye - and the cost of living's not getting any better. Looking for gendai/shinsakuto blades with NBSK certification may help somewhat, I believe they also have several less-renowned smiths under their umbrella alongside the bigger names. You could try looking up some of the NBSK competition results and see which names earned some of the bronze/silver prizes or were newly accepted.

Moriyama-san's guess that the blade is illegally made (i.e. not by a registered smith, or an "under-the-table" blade to get around the monthly restriction on the number of blades a smith can produce) or imported would probably explain this; use a somewhat unknown/average smith's name who works in roughly the same style the blade is done in - that way, nobody's too motivated to check the mei for accuracy or that the work matches the smith's oeuvre. A gimei Ono Yoshimitsu would be far more likely to attract suspicion than a gimei Nobuhide.

Fantastic work, I've already signed up and can't wait to see how it develops.