Darcy

This blade is shortened and unsigned, but shows the characteristic nie-laden hamon and jihada of Norishige. The chikei, kinsuji, and yubashiri activities [of the hamon and ji] are woven together, which is so typical of this smith. In this the hand of the smith [Norishige] is clear, so I agree with this attribution. Written by Tanzan Hendô in January of the year of the monkey of this era (2016) + kaô ... Tokubetsu Hozon and also papers from Honami Chikayoshi in Meiji 26 attributing to Norishige and saying it has a value of 300 gold coins. ... Comments... with one photo it's not very fair to do to anyone, I was curious how many people could put it straight to Norishige with one photo, which was something I needed to answer for myself, and a lot of people did. So thank you for offering answers. I just want to re-emphasize that it is a completely unfair test and so not getting it nailed is 100% forgiveable, just that Norishige blades offer an opportunity unlike others to be revealed rather instantly in my opinion and I wanted to put that theory to the test. Why I asked that you indulge me with this as I wanted to know how realistic that theory was. With one photo there are too many ways to go for imagining the rest of it, as can be seen the condition was extrapolated in some cases and without a full background of photos let some come to the conclusion that it had to be quite new. It's fair enough because you're looking at 5% of the sword with your imagination filling in the rest. ... The area in question is absolutely large patterned Matsukawa hada though the entire blade is not formed of matsukawa hada, and the Hamon blending together with the activities in the ji is one of the major features of Norishige. Smiths like Nobukuni would make fine pattern kitae like Sadamune or Yamashiro blades (in general), Hasebe would feature hitatsura (in general) and choji. Norishige Matsukawa hada is a moving target, the earliest works show it in tighter patterns without the glowing yubashiri following in parallel with chikei. Later works show some scattered yubashiri in the ji which trace out the matsukawa hada. A few I have seen including a recent Tokuju and a Juyo I sold before are quite complete as is this one. Example of a different blade that is about 50% in joining up the yubashiri outlining matsukawa hada, but not completely joined up: Chikei are formed when ji nie merge so you get a snakelike curl of material that looks black. It looks black because it's hard and reflects light away without scattering. Yubashiri are nie and nioi in a cloud without a clearly defined border. Yubashiri that have a clearly defined border become elements of hitatsura. In this type of sword, Norishige is making extensive use of yubashiri in the ji. Sometimes they are incomplete like with the tanto Brian linked and when they cross into the Hamon it becomes difficult to say whether they are Hamon elements or ji elements. This is referred to in the sayagaki where Tanobe sensei says the various hataraki are intertwined, naming yubashiri (ji), chikei (ji) and kinsuji (hamon) explicitly. Preservation is very hard to judge off of one photo so wasn't fair, there are some rough patches not in this photo so it's just impossible to judge that by extrapolating... but anyway a blade looking in good condition shouldn't rule out older periods. If you have to look at this, the shinto and shinshinto archetypes don't have this much activity in the jihada and tend to have tight nioiguchi, even when copying older smiths, unless it's an exceptional case like Osaka Shinto, which is also something that would give itself up in one photo anyway. The blade being covered in nie from ha to shinogi should be a dead giveaway to Soshu or Yamashiro. Kenji Mishina told me while looking at blades at the sword museum that you can distinguish Soshu from Shinto copies by the fact that the Soshu blade will have nie all the way to the ha and the Shinto smiths were not really capable of this. He said this in context to me telling him about the "Soshu Daisho" I bought at Christies and has been discussed here, where the katana was a Shinto blade that had the mei removed and an attribution to Masamune added. The blade is beautiful with a lot of activity even in the jihada but there is that empty space between the yakiba and the ha that gives it away. Naoe Shizu is in the ballpark but Naoe Shizu are rarely vibrant enough to compare to Shizu let alone Norishige and won't have this degree of hataraki in the ji. This is part of the reason that they get attributed to Naoe Shizu because if they were better with more activity then with everything else there is a strong argument to classify as Shizu. The copy of Norishige linked above my Masatsugu shows a good effort at getting the yubashiri going in the ji and Hankei makes a lot of very good attempts. Without seeing the whole blade it could be hard to distinguish from Norishige or a "really good copy" of Norishige. There was no way for you to tell the blade is O-suriage and so get firmly away from the Shinto and Shinshinto copies. But if Hankei made a really standout Norishige copy that kind of thing tends to be Tokubetsu Juyo, really good copies of Norishige are few and far between so it's probably better to say Norishige. I have to adjust exposure better on this sugata photo, in the middle of changing laptops and I'm all confused at the moment with photos.

It has Meiji period Honami papers (rules out gendai without getting into it).

Single photo kantei, can't see the whole sword. Completely unfair. Who made this? (High res = http://nihonto.ca/052.jpg)

Kanbun 7, Yamano Nagahisa (1667). Authenticated one via my site: http://nihonto.ca/hizen-tadayoshi/page-l.jpg He was 66 or 67 when he made mine and that is Kanbun 3 (1663). He died in 1667 according to Markus. The rest left as an exercise to the reader.

A penny is not a good idea because it's been stamped. You can take gold which is soft enough to bite into with your teeth, and then hit it enough with a hammer, it will become hard enough that you can put an edge on it and cut someone with it. Not a great weapon, but you could still make a knife from it. Stamping a penny hardens it considerably. If you want to use said penny put a blowtorch on it and heat it until it glows and let it cool off on its own. It will be a lot softer afterwards. Better would be to head to an art supply store and buy some copper sheeting which will be very soft. But I think it's a bad idea anyway. All you need to do is to dislodge one piece of gunk of some sort and drag it down the blade to give yourself a nice gouge.

First, it's against WTO rules to levy a particular "tax" at the border vs. a particular country. It's not feasible to do so as a result, as much noise as is being made, there would be huge repercussions. So the political goal of punishing an ally and major trading partner (which makes no sense anyway) isn't achievable. So it is a tax on all imports or a tax on none. That is reason number one why this is dead in the water. Reason number two is that it would be extremely expensive to administer and especially if you were going to single out corporations it would make all kinds of loopholes and legal challenges. It would take years to set up and then it would be fought tooth and nail by corporate lobbyists and all government types would drag their feet and run out the clock. Depending on who you ask, they only have to run the clock out 30 days, 180 days, a year or two but four at tops. That is easy. Especially when it looks like some people may be headed to jail, Washington will be non-commital and see where the wind is blowing before setting any permanent sails. About VAT: Corporations are exempt from VAT type taxes, otherwise when you're buying and selling your parts and assembling products, if you keep paying tax each time someone touches and resells a combined widget the percentage of the value that is tax increases. Eventually the consumer pays an incredibly inflated rate that is almost all tax. This makes domestic industry not very competitive vs. imports and then you need to have huge duties, and the person who ends up suffering most is the low income consumer. So corps get VAT refunded and pay a net out of what they collect from consumers and what they have paid out on expenses. A VAT doesn't satisfy the political desire to punish Mexico though at all so that won't happen either. Basically there is a lot of simplistic thinking that a trade deal in which money flows more in one direction and goods in the other is somehow bad. It's like being angry that you can buy your groceries at 20% off. People could just volunteer up that extra 20% if they felt really bad about it but they don't do it. There is benefit that flows both ways here. A lot of people understand this and they will just let the anger dissipate and once this wave of populism is over, they will go back to free trade. The wall will end up in the same situation. Bureaucrats are really good at waiting.

I don't think it's an attempt to gimei Kiyomaro. It's not even close. And there were other Masayuki smiths, even one that signed Minamoto Masayuki.

I'd like to see that Enju tanto for sure. What's the date of the attribution and what level is the paper now?

It's a very fine blade and in good condition. I think the difference between this and Rai Kunimitsu is more in the Hamon than the boshi. 95% of the time the Rai Kunimitsu will have fine workings and activities all down the blade. A suguba one at first glance you may overlook it, but when you look at it closely you will see this: There are those that are more choji midare, but I am talking in this case about those that appear to be suguba. There will be fine nie sprinkled all the way to the ha, and ashi and yo. Sometimes they're not on the oshigata depending on who drew the oshigata... but when you compare to something that is forged finely like this Enju is and you look at the hamon, you see it coming up with tight nioiguchi and very little in the way of any small workings and activities. The difference is both in the steel itself and in the treatment by the smith. I think this Enju is an example of some things that I've mentioned before, where it is a really nice blade but just "not quite" Rai so gets put to the next closest thing one rung down. That said I think it is a really nice piece and if someone was saving money in this buying range, that is a nice set to have at that price point.

Ray, that is an excellent observation and this was also what I heard in Japan. Koshirae: there is none. This year I tried to make koshirae for a large shinsakuto (oddly enough, a copy of Chogi again) and took a year to try to find fittings just large enough that they could be used (posted here a few times). So I found out that fuchi for big blades are really hard to find.

Going to be listing this soon. I thought it makes for a good idea of how brutal some of these Nanbokucho swords were in comparison to the period beforehand. This is attributed to Hasebe, and the comparison sword is a Juyo Token Rai Kunitoshi. It's wider at the yokote (3.2cm) than most swords are at the machi. Kissaki is just shy of 8cm. It looks like lunchtime.

This was at the Dai Token Ichi and is a very interesting set. The sword is an ubu tachi attributed to Rai Kuninaga and is 86cm. The koshirae is original to the blade and is Muromachi period. It certainly fits the description of a use item rather than a show item.

For the record, and no offense intended at Ford's analysis which is one set of opinions and valid as any others, the MFA example is the typical copy of Omori that is around in my limited opinion. There are 100 of these for every legit one. This includes the FK higher up and if you just google "Omori" you will find a half a dozen for sale by dealers, some with fake Omori Teruhide signatures and the dealers insisting they are Omori school. The main thing they have in common is that none of them have any reliable attributions from any reliable sources... but everyone selling them will certainly assure you of their opinion that it is "Omori School Work." I even saw NTHK papered Omori Teruhide that was not correct work and the mei didn't match any of the Omori Teruhide in any book with standout errors. Because something is papered doesn't mean it is legitimate, it means the guy making the papers thinks it's legitimate. Something I learned in gemstone collecting is that sapphire and ruby are the same mineral (corundum) with different impurities. Every impurity that tints a sapphire will generate different colors. When you get a red sapphire we call that ruby. If the red is not saturated enough it is a pink sapphire. A pink sapphire is marketable at a fraction of the cost of a ruby. So there is some grey line between pink sapphire and ruby. It's the same impurity that gives them their color (chromium). So that begs the question, where is the line between pink sapphire and red ruby? The answer is: if you are selling it, it's a ruby, if you're buying it it's a pink sapphire. With these Omori-like things with no signatures or bad Teruhide mei that are "surely Omori work" ... well there is a lot of stuff that looks like Kotetsu or looks like Shinkai or looks like Masamune and the same thing is almost always true. If you look at the Juyo examples you will see that whatever technique Teruhide came up with, it was faithfully handed down to the students. I posted a Hidetomo before and he's not even in the main line of succession and it is the same craftsmanship. Maybe maybe if maybe but students had to learn maybe unsigned maybe if but low quality maybe works are maybe unsigned because maybe students in the workshop or less well known students maybe if but made these things and that's why they are Omori-like but not in the same style as the great work. If you want to spend your money on that kind of thing, excellent and everyone is welcome to a theory on unpapered mumei work of any sort. Sword, kodogu, art. That thing you found in the pawn shop might be a van Gogh because it kind of reminds you of what a van Gogh is supposed to look like too or maybe it was by one of the students of his students. Or maybe it was just someone who saw the original and was influenced by it or it had marketing appeal and they made something similar without knowing how to do it step by step from first principles. Occam's razor I think points to the last way but... everything is just an opinion when it comes to mumei so choose your poison. With Omori, again in my opinion, until you put a really legitimate copy in your hands there is always going to be some confusion. Once you have a legitimate copy in your hands then the doubt vanishes and the rest of the stuff in the grey zone fades away into black. This is not a lot different from the opinions on Masamune, where the doubts were raised in the late 1800s and then exaggerated in the newspapers to make a big scandalous paper selling noise out of it, and that caused a lot of reaction by experts in later decades saying anyone who was confused needed to handle the real deal to resolve the confusion. There is no confusion about Masamune if you handle the real deal. Not "this is certainly made by a top Soshu smith but we will accept the old Honami designation (for now)" type of description on the back of the Juyo, the description that is not read by westerners nor translated by dealers wishing to sell a Masamune and therein letting you do your own homework... which is not usually done because people do not want to disclose their big score for fear and greed in that someone is going to cut in front of them and take it. But the real legitimate work is breathtaking and you understand that if there really no Masamune then there is nobody in the literature to whom you can attribute this work. So it becomes work of someone so high level that he's above everyone ever documented YET somehow escaped documentation himself... and then this guy Masamune who fits the bill is just some invention of Hideyoshi's era? That's two stretches that are hard to believe, whereas if you accept both it is a much more simple explanation. Back to Omori the pedestrian stuff being handwaved away to a falling off of skill or inability of students or whatever I think is handwaving. I think that this is technique and Teruhide had some eureka moment in coming up with something that he turned into waves. We don't see a bunch of half-assed Tomei millet that is blurry and poorly formed. He invented something and it worked and he started using it. Just my opinion about this stuff. Even if one were to buy into the theory that the second and third rate waves work is really Omori, it remains second and third rate stuff that they didn't want to sign and it should not be conflated with the best work. The things I found in common with the Omori-wannabes is that these adjectives seem to be dominant: flat, smooth, small, melted-looking, regular. The Omori stuff looks chaotic, sculpted, cut, deep, irregular and features a mix of surfaces. Again, just my opinion and no offense intended against others who hold conflicting opinions. Also please someone sell me this koshirae.

There is a reason that sellers in Japan will use ebay to sell a big name thing with ridiculous papers and it's not because ebay is a great place to sell good swords. People need to use some common sense. If you want one ounce gold coins, and you want to pay 10% of the market price for a gold coin, and continue to hunt, eventually you will find someone who will sell you a gold coin for 10% of the market price. And when you show it to an expert you will find out that it's gold plated copper and you paid 100x the real value. There have been great finds on ebay and some members here found important and rare things there. But it has never been a Japan based seller, it's been what you would expect if you have been around a while. Guys digging and flipping things without doing study, rusty mumei blades, mislabeled auctions that never get eyeballs on them, people who just want out of a blade and put up something papered for a low entry price and let it coast, and so on. This is how you ebay.

One protip I learned from Cary Condell: The smart thing that he was doing, and I don't know who came up with it, was to wrap the blade in saran wrap. Just one layer carefully cut. It stops any movement of the blade in the shirasaya from causing damage to the polish, and is extra insurance against touchy touchy the shiny thing type reactions from anyone doing an inspection. Will block any liquid damage as well. Blades going up in planes are subject to some temperature changes and that can cause them to unseat in the shirasaya. So this is good for that.

Note...typos. On the iPad and fly in a few hours and can't fix them all.... ... I don't see high end as $10k ... and top end is not $50k. There are guys who only collect Tokuju and are always in a $100k plus mode. There are guys who only collect ubu koto blades. In Japan some are pursuing jubi and jubun and if you want to sell to them they want your blade to sit well with these or kokuho. Even some people when I was selling the mitsutada were saying well I want one that is signed and flamboyant -- if this existed it would need to be in a new level above kokuho. Part of the problem is that collectors live on islands and on these islands is a echo chamber where they get their thoughts reflected back to them like 10k is a high end sword. I have had in my hands a Masamune worth $800k now in the Mori museum, a Hisakuni worth $1M, three others worth well more than $1M. Some others that may be priceless. This is the pinnacle of collecting. High end is below that but not at 10 percent of that. When you get into swords where the sword is less than the value of the restoration and papers etc you are in the low end of the market and that by definition includes $10k swords. Low end of the market is not "what is expensive to me" but is the bottom part of the overall economy. So the top two tiers, the guys regularly buying six figure blades and those handful of gods getting the best and the true Meito need to fit in. There are more islands out past the horizon. I have said before that in these fields the safe places are with elite things as rare and special never go out of style and in the bottom as there is no downside and always will there be guys who's love reaches deep and their pockets are shallow. Danger is when people think they are guys rare high grade items at 10k and they are firmly in the commodity band with untold amounts of supply out there. Supply being poured into the market as fast as possible by certain agents will destroy the value of what you have. Especially when people focus on value (bang for the buck) instead of focusing on how important or unique something is (collectibility). Value focus is what gets you burned because the firehose does not stop and every day there are 10 more for your "but it was a good deal" purchase to compete with in the market. Your good deal melts away. Those that set criteria and stick to them like say ubu koto elevate themselves out of the spray of the firehose. Better to raise your criteria out of the commercial grade band or not care or stay at the very bottom. The problem as mentioned is perception. A blade gets posted here and people who do not truly know jump up and say it's a sure Juyo when it has no chance and is deep in the commodity range but the perception is that it is rare treasure... that is where the damage is done. So when confused look to the old ways I think. If I were to partition the market it would be: - blades not worth a polish at all - junk - blades worth polish but will not gain in value by the price of the polish - blades worth less than all of the other expenses combined Those three are low end. Then the mid grade market is set by the price of mid grade smiths. High end market you I want have access to famous smiths work of high quality. Top end market contains the best works of the top smiths. Assigning prices is hard in our world where currencies rise and fall 20 percent in a year. But if you look at the work as described and then check the prices. You will see the work defines the markets rather than the dollars define the markets. Guys in the real high end market do not get a low end blade any more often than a guy who wears a Patek will be buying Timex. The prices then track supply and deman of the tastes of these people. This community saw the end of a one time event which was the repatriation of a massive haul of war loot that was not priced with full knowledge of what it was. The community is still suffering adjustments from this. Then it had the return of those same blades that went out got restored and papered and returned and sold on the back of the papers. There is still not adequate understanding of attribution coming first in valuing things and why. So people labour under the equivalence of papers being equivalent value. Those that know better don't offer up education... just me here banging the drum. But what they did for decades both ways over the Pacific Ocean was arbitrage. What defeats arbitrage is universal acceptance of ideals which comes from education and exposure. Prices have been adjusting on people as they have found out that no, that chi-jo Saku wakizashi they were told to spend $5k on as a starter is not worth that because the world is drowning in them. That same problem plays itself out over and over again. The safe areas are at the extremes. Rare and special or common and cheap, when you have common and expensive now you are going to end up on the wrong side of the pricing adjustments. With rare you can buy so high that you go above anyone else who would ever buy and it's another problem. But a $20 tsuba will not ever hurt you. The trick is to try to balance it all. That in itself is an art. But education is the key that unlocks it all.

Probably OK. The NBTHK is not always confident in the generations and over time the scholarship on Yoshimichi (as a school) has shifted around a bit. So you need to be prepared for it to come back, if it's legit, as just copying the mei onto the papers without any resolution of ambiguity. Whomever submits it then, if it comes back without saying anything about generation then probably you may want to try a sayagaki. They do not seem to want to really nail the generation down though and will either say shodai or else later generation if the Juyo are any indication and this is more prevalent in recent history than in older Juyo, wherein if the blade was really good it just went to the shodai. None of the Juyo have kiku mon though. Odd side note. Though many are not by the shodai.

Arnold, I may have misunderstood your point so I'll address point by point: > Isn't the conflation of hamon and better older materials some sort of contradiction? No I don't see that. If you think so, then explain your logic? If you don't think so why is it a question? Better older materials generated better hamon, both artistically and from a material point of view. We can understand as well that old swords were subject to the kind of testing that new swords were not. If Osafune could not make a good sword they would be gone but they lasted 300 years. Kotetsu though all he had to do was send his swords out to his buddy to make one cut through a couple of dead bodies and he became famous through the centuries. A Bizen sword had to see war for a century to be retired most likely. Kotetsu, one cut. Finished. Put it in gold. Famous. Osafune made more beautiful work than Kotetsu and more functional work than Kotetsu. So, I am failing to see the contradiction between good hamon and good older materials. > Where is it demonstrated that older material inputs were better? The whole is the sum of its parts plus magic. If koto blades are better than shinto blades (and there is exhaustive history and opinion that indicates this) then part of this is the material they are using as well as the technique. That the schools moved around as I mentioned above seems to indicate a need to change location for exhausting raw materials as Bizen did not relocate to the source of customers like with Kyoto (Yamashiro) and Soshu (Kamakura) and Yamato (temple) smiths. If we knew what they were using we could put it to the test, but all we can do is infer from all of the above plus the work of Yasutsugu where we see a "modern" hamon put on older work. By comparing what he did on the retempers and on his own, we chiefly see the difference in the steel as given to the koto masters and as given to him, plus their forging. Sadamune, Masamune, Awataguchi Yoshimitsu, all of these and more were retempered by Yasutsugu and the remarks are that they rank better than his own but inferior to the originals. That makes sense if a sword went through a fire because that is going to chemically change the sword. You refer to Yamanaka below and Yamanaka makes the point that the reason that Yasutsugu could put a first class hamon on a Yoshimitsu is because Yoshimitsu's steel is better than his. And that steel is a combination of source material and technique. Yasutsugu being able to put a first class hamon on Yoshimitsu shows he has the capability, the technique to do first class hamon. It would seem that what he can do with his hands and his brain is all fully capable. He could clone the sugatas perfectly. But the magic of the hamon only appeared on the old steel and not on his. Though he had the hamon skill, though he could replicate the shapes, and one can then assume he was good with the hammer, the missing component is some secret in the material itself. All books refer to regional differences in steel as well, and only in the 2000s do we believe that anything different is completely equivalent. Everyone gets a trophy. Prior to this for 35,000 years we believed that if two things were different there was probably one thing better and another inferior and maybe with some overlap. There are also the anecdotes of smiths trying to find any old iron, nails, what have you, to use in their modern works to try to give it some flavor that is missing. The smiths themselves are expressing that the material is lacking something basic at its core when they do this kind of thing. And they try to toss in some random elements to achieve something different from generic. > If we admit to Albert Yamanaka's claim that no smith "made or forged swords with the intention of turning out a great work of 'art' " (Nihonto News-Letter, Vol. II, No. 4 (April, 1969), p.31, wasn't the goal to make better functioning swords within the contexts of their times? Maybe it would have been better to write these out as statements rather than as all questions. I'd repeat my point made above that the koto works are the great works by far and these by far are concentrated with Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu. Form follows function and it's believed that a beautiful sword is an indicator of a well made sword, and a well made sword begins with the best materials. (silk purse / sow's ear). Yasutsugu again if he could make a Yoshimitsu or Sadamune perfectly he would but he couldn't. Gassan Sadayoshi if he could make a Norishige he would but he couldn't. They could copy the shape, the one thing they could do by eye and by pure skill. This indicates they had the skill. They just did not know the secret formula. If you tried to make cookies your whole life having tasted chocolate chip cookies but did not know what chocolate was or where it came from but some magic was in there making it taste good you'd never get it right either. > Finally I suspect that technological change, local access as well as cheaper imports of inputs as time went on, all played a role in cost reduction, a universal reason to change one's ways. I agree, I did say I felt economics explained a lot of sword changes and needs over time. Once you lost a need to really fight you lost the need to make the best sword. You needed to sell it though so you needed it to look like the best sword. Maybe a cutting test to ensure the marketing is done. A car that looks fast and a car that is truly fast are two different things. I don't honesty believe Kotetsu's swords cut all that better than anyone else's. From study it seems that his swords have the most cutting tests on them. What that does is distribute far and wide the story of their cutting ability. Shinkai seems to have done it once so nobody would be talking about all of his cutting tests. Kotetsu I think was just a smart guy and marketed himself very well. The marketing was so good that it entered into myth and legend today. Koto swords that cut well didn't need cutting tests. The fact that the school continued to exist over a long time is what proves they cut well. And didn't break. Because if they did not have the secret, they would vanish. Who came before Kotetsu and who came after Kotetsu? It is very murky. The magic cutting arrived out of nowhere and returned to nowhere after he died. And the best explanation for that to me is snake oil. The best explanation for 300-500 years of unbroken production is that you are making a truly legendary product.

Fatal flaw is just a sword guy thing. If a Rai Kunitoshi has a hagire and you owned it would you just scrap it? Nope. Most people wouldn't. That it cannot be used for cutting anymore due to the hagire is no big deal in a world where nobody would use it for cutting anyway if it didn't have a hagire. Fatal flaw is a relative thing as well, no-boshi is a condition that can get a Heian blade through Juyo but not a Shinto sword through any paper. So how fatal is this fatal flaw really? It's important that we don't run with this phrase "fatal flaw". Fatal in terms of utility as a sword so don't trust your life to the hagire Rai Kunitoshi during the zombie apocalypse, this is what you will have the gendai Nagamitsu for anyway.

A couple other thoughts this morning... steel colour can be deceptive because polishers can adjust it. But back to material the thing that is always in the back of my mind is the similar problem of understanding features of true Damascus steel. This like with the koto blades was made for a while, peaked and then vanished. Nobody really understands why. Features like Jacob's Ladder are seen in the patterns in the best works... I am no expert but I did photograph a great blade once (below). Scientific American did an article on this and in the authors opinion Swordmakers in the Islamic world were using Indian wootz steel. The source he thinks had traces of vanadium in it which were responsible for these effects. When the source dried out so did the blades vanish. This is why I say above that maybe the more pure the less interesting. High res is here: http://nihonto.ca/shamshir-l.jpg

Of course if you want to test all the steels you need to cut up some Masamune, Awataguchi etc. I'm not sure anyone has done that yet. No problem to cut up some Muromachi beaters. I don't think it's possible to know for sure what the smiths used because of the case where they seem to have used it all up. This is similar to Paraiba Tourmaline gems whic were found only in Brazil in the 1980s and and when they were mined out it was over. They cost a fortune now to buy a legit one. There are Paraiba-like colours out there but none are the same as the archetypes. And Kashimir sapphires ... the type of blue was only found here and mined out I think in the late 1800s. My feeling is that the magic is spread over the steel and the technique both. Yasutsugu had to pull his hair out over it.

I think it's easy to misunderstand Yamanaka. He is saying that form follows function. The older smiths wanted to create a great sword and the side effect of that was magnificent art. In the Shinto period they made swords that were putting style first. And in Shinshinto trying to clone old work. These are generalizations. Yamanaka is not saying the old smiths did not create great art. The Pantheon is a masterpiece first and foremost because it stands. Secondly because it is beautiful. Shinto smiths just had access to the same generic steel as everyone else which is the root of the problem. I believe that Soshu smiths had some regional source of materials that failed before the technique ever did. Shintogo through to Sadamune the steel is similar to Awataguchi. Hiromitsu on down the steel is one grade lower. I don't think they would have forgotten how to do it in 5 years time. But if they were working with small local resources and proceeded to exhaust them starting with the best grades first it completely makes sense that the results would start falling off in quality. That could be the right wood or the right ore or a combination of both... and when the materials changed the techniques may have drifted to try to compensate. Over 50 year periods then you have a slow decline. Lose the major customers and it increases the rate of decline. Bizen was the only major tradition who was located on top of the resources instead of on top of a client base. It would seem then that they had major resources. Even so the drift say of the Ichimonji school from town to town can be explained by exhausting the best local materials and moving to a new source. Fukuoka did not give way to Yoshioka because yoshioka was better... but yoshioka maybe had untapped resources. And so on to katayama and iwato. As the resources dry up the school moves or disperses. In the case of Yamato smiths when the clients dry up... there was the migration to Mino. Yamashiro smiths branched off I think probably because the local client base was static and usually dominated by one school in the market. These are just my thoughts and not backed up by anything I've read except for the Shinto steel problems. Basically when the Edo period starts the majority of manufacturing is where the customers are and country wide trade networks turn steel into a commodity that you buy. It's cheaper to buy tgean to make. But then everyone has the same stuff to work with. 25 years ago you could buy a computer with a MIPS R6000 chip, a Motorola 68040, a SPARC, a DEC Alpha, IBM PowerPC and Intel x86. All of that is for the most part gone and whatever you buy in the marketplace unless it is very specialized is going to be x86 (intel and its clones). So the differentiation in laptops at the core comes down to branding and marketing. We have ARM still for low power devices but it is otherwise a CPU monoculture. I think economic reasons always explain Nihonto quirks best. I think they end up on a steel monoculture and maybe the more pure it gets the less interesting it will be.

I don't think Sadakazu was in the habit of making fakes. He had the relationship with the imperial house and probably his business was most safe of all swordsmiths. And no reason to destabilize what he did have by selling fakes out the back door. Ed has a great Sadakazu utsushi of a real Norishige tanto. Sadakazu made no real attempt to copy the hada or the hamon but copied the sugata and horimono perfectly. The source Norishige came in from the dark about 2 years ago and passed Juyo. The sugata a bang on copy but he really respectfully took a pass on the intense activities of Norishige. This states that he did not feel he could make a sincere effort to copy those structures of Norishige that basically nobody could ever copy. So the existence of an utsushi like this and the reappearance of the target blade as a Juyo just two years ago I think pop the balloon that the Shinshinto smiths were copying koto masterworks so well that they would fool people. Probably the hardest smith to copy is Norishige as many tried and everyone failed. It's different from copying Rai, which has been done reasonably well through the ages. Yasutsugu from what I have been looking at time and again, he seems to have made copies of the koto works that he retempered before he retempered them. Looking at the various ones that are out there (there was a good opportunity about 3 years ago at the Dai Token Ichi as someone had the Shishi Sadamune meibutsu tanto out, and he had one of Yasutsugu's utsushi of this blade, side by side and for sale at the same time... the Shishi Sadamune is a retemper by Yasutsugu and there are five or six of Yasutsugu's copies of this blade that are now Juyo and one of them is Tokubetsu Juyo. The hamon varies on all of these blades and so I think it tells a story. That story would be Yasutsugu assigned the job of fixing this important old sword. So he first analyzes the construction and attempts to remake it from scratch. He puts a hamon on the blade, then sets it aside and starts again. He repeats this process trying to refine his work. He continues from first principles until he arrives at a conclusion that he feels is going to be appropriate for the final work. It's like one of the top diamond cutters being given a massive diamond. These guys will spend years analyzing the stone, looking at its internals, mapping it out and developing a plan for how to cut it. Then when the time comes, they pick up their tools and in one strike make the single cut that cannot be undone. That by the way is Asscher cleaving the Cullinan which would go on to form the main diamonds of the Crown Jewels of England. That is one shot, one try, have to do it right the first time. Yasutsugu would know he had one good chance to put a new hamon on this blade and would not want to do it without a real game plan set. That's what the many utsushi of the blade tell me as the story. The hamon that Yasutsugu was able to put on these old blades was generally better than the hamon he was able to put on his blades. This is an indication then that he did not have access to the material that the old Yamashiro and Soshu smiths had. And it also pops the bubble again on Shinto and Shinshinto smiths faking old works to the point of people not being able to tell so well. Because the main problem comes back to the lack of the correct raw materials to get the job done, and Yasutsugu's experience with retempering Yoshimitsu and Sadamune shows everyone the exact problem of trying to make a modern day fake. No doubt he tried with utmost sincerity to copy the Sadamune note for note before he retempered it. But the steel always failed him when it came to the hamon, but only compared to the old treasure. As standalone works they are Juyo and Tokubetsu Juyo and masterpieces. They just do not elevate to the level of the work he was trying to copy. If they could do it, if they could make those blades so well that they could fool people into thinking that they were Masamune and Go, and so on, then they would make these blades every day and sign their own names to them proudly. But they didn't, which means they couldn't. Honestly if you could paint every bit as good as Da Vinci, would you hold back on the works you made in your own name? Or would you go all out and challenge the great old master for supremacy and go down in history as one of the greatest artists in the history of the world? So... unless we see their name signed to a work that stands with the best of all time, they couldn't do it.

Send it for papers. Opinions and opinions are all opinions. Nice looking sugata.

The second example with the weird looking bohi is a sign that the kissaki was damaged and the whole thing "moved back" into an existing bohi. There is no alternative other than to end up with this kind of problem OR keep a broken tip or a big chip. The feature of the bohi starting further back from the kissaki then is supposed to be a Nanbokucho development meant to avoid this exact problem from happening. If both sides do not match up well and fail the eye test, you have to mirror it in photoshop to make sure there is no illusion going on, because the geometry may have changed more on one side than the other for various polishing reasons (skill or to recover from some kind of problem). And then the alternative is as you have stated, that the hi were just cut poorly. Poorly cut hi can be a sign of them coming after the manufacture of the blade. Covering up flaws I think is mostly a BS argument, it's come from fairly speculative places. If the shinogiji is badly flawed then cutting deeply into the core is not likely going to reveal beautiful steel but probably even more problems. I think it's more an owner from halfway through the life of the sword that had it lightened at the time of suriage as part of a one stop fixing-upping so he could use what for him was a useless but beautiful and too heavy old blade. Some of those were done poorly and later on fixed up again. Sometimes if obviously added after they were dummied up to made to look like original items. If dummied up well enough there's no way of knowing now. But I think that it is in the minority rather than majority of cases... either opinion one would take though is entirely speculative. I do know of one American collector that had the bohi recut because he didn't like the look. I was really surprised that anyone would do that. So, it does happen that they are mucked with but I think that the rationale of removing flaws is rare. We all know that even polish is a gamble because you don't know if what's underneath is going to be worse than what you're hoping to take off. If you fool around with horimono you could end up with a real disaster. Surely though some have done it for the reason stated (flaw removal). I just think it's an exaggerated reason that is repeated more often by people who read about it in a book than ever saw a real case where it happened.