Darcy

What's the mei? I can't make out the last character. Rai Kuni-x. Anyway look at the width of the nakago at its widest and compare to the blade. If it's significantly wider that explains the texture change in the steel and you have something that may be older and significant. If it's the same width then younger. Unless it's been run around through all the channels and then sold here you should run it around through all the channels. This is the problem in that some people won't disclose this then when you bring it through the channels again everyone groans.

99% positive that is this. http://www.mori-shusui-museum.jp/_img/test-01.jpg

It's still under construction. The collection is 800 or so swords. 90 of them are Juyo Token, 17 are Tokubetsu Juyo and there are some Juyo Bunkazai. So it will be more than worthwhile for any visitor. Here's your kantei blade: Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?

This one I have to poke at because this is the western "ladder theory" fallacy. A mint condition Tokubetsu Hozon katana by Naotane is going to run you 5 million yen and it's going to be hard to get through Juyo. A Kotetsu Juyo Token is going to run 20-60 million yen and not be Tokubetsu Juyo. Kiyomaro is another one. The price is set first and foremost on the blade and who made it, attribution is the key. The secondary factor is the papers because it clarifies the level of the blade relative to its peers. So there is no "Juyo Token territory." I remember in the past I sold a blade that I myself papered to Hozon and Tokubetsu Hozon, and it had great koshirae with no papers as I never sent it in. That blade I wanted $42,000 because of what it is and who it was attributed to. The buyer was OK with that but he asked their friends and they came out with that "it's Juyo Token price." It was *cheap* for what it was, which was a mint condition blade by a top level smith and a really great koshirae. But in the US particularly people get wound up in the paper being the primary function on the price and not the other way around. So his friends gave him hell and they stuck knives in my back over this thing being so expensive and into Juyo territory. I cut the price a bit and he submitted the blade 2 months later and got Juyo (which is exactly what I told him would happen), and now he has a mint condition Kamakura blade with Juyo papers and great koshirae and he's paid $39k. Well now it's looking really really cheap. So he goes and sells it and gets $55k. If you understand what the thing is the papers are just guidance to support the bottom line. There is no top line. The top line is based on what the thing is. It is not uncommon at all to have Hozon and TH blades and items in Japan going all the way into the $100k range. It depends on what the thing is, who made it, the condition, rarity and so on. And some of those things may be incompatible with Juyo, and sometimes it is obvious that they indicate the blade is going to be Juyo. Like in this case. This year I sold three blades that passed Tokubetsu Juyo for their owners and I told them each time it was going to pass. The prices that they paid I am sure their friends said that it was really high "for Juyo" but what they were paying for was a top example of the smith, the bottom line underscored by Juyo but if they knew what they were doing they knew they had one submission Tokuju blades. All of them got selected for display in the Sword Museum after. So, discard this concept of "Juyo price". The cheapest Juyo are not even the ones people should want to pursue because those are the ones that fell over the line backwards and have the most of the price built in from the papers. I had to pay $72k for my Kanemitsu with no papers at all on it so considerable risk on the attribution. Once it passed Hozon it did not immediately become $15,000 of value because it's Hozon and $30k really expensive as a Hozon. It went up in value because the risk went down about who it could be attributed to and it got a good name. When it passed Juyo again the price goes up because the risk goes down more for most buyers. But any dummy with a bit of experience could pick the blade up without any knowledge and say, "Oh, this is a Kanemitsu that's going to pass Juyo" and that's what the price is based on. Before papering people should have known that and obviously did because someone bid me right to $72k and I'd have gone higher. I think it will pass Tokuju but I haven't tried it. Not on my site for sale and I don't care about the paper unless I have to sell it and stop some guy's friends from crapping on a mint condition flawless Kanemitsu as being too expensive because it's "only Juyo." Ladder theory has to die because it's all wrong, and it points people to bargains at the bottom rungs and says stuff at the top rungs are expensive. The opposite is true. The one that was $72k before it ever hit Hozon is not going to inflate "just because" it got Juyo. It's $72k with no papers to brag about. But if you can find a mid 70s crapper that passed Juyo then but won't pass now, you can sell it to someone who will fall in love with the papers and think he is buying a bargain because it's Juyo. SWORD COMES FIRST Papers are support level, not top line. No two Juyo years are the same. So they support different values at the bottom line. Getting to the blade in question and the "stiff" price. Kanemoto is popular because of the great reputation for cutting and this means a lot more over here than for people who see only hamon and nothing else. This one has decent mounts, a bit suriage unfortunately, but still good length. I'd agree that the price is "stiff" but he's pricing it not for us, he's pricing it for Japanese collectors who will pay the premium on Kanemoto. There is a premium on him, on Muramasa, on Nosada, on Yosozaemon, in particular in the late Muromachi. It's priced like that because someone is going to pay it. Which brings me to the last point that there is no blue book and people will pay what they think it's worth, so there is a difference of opinion in what one guy prefers. Some guys want the scratch n dent special. If this Kanemoto was perfect it would be a lot higher. I would personally wait for a perfect one but I would not have a problem with the higher price. The typical buyer says I don't want this one because it's not perfect, then the perfect one comes by at twice the price and they say wow that's too expensive I just saw one at half the price. I'll wait for a cheaper one. There are a lot of traps to fall into when trying to make some kind of theory of price that will let you say if any particular piece is too expensive or too cheap. There is a blade available online which is twice the price of my most expensive piece. To some it will be far too expensive, but to others that one will be cheap. I can tell you only this, that vendor owns it, knows it is something special, and he knows someone will agree with him and pay his price. The other 99.9999999999% of humanity will be welcome to have their own opinion but would not be buyers at 10% of the price let alone 80% or 50% or wherever they argue it should be at. His pricing is a conversation between him and the buyer. He will have a buyer for it I'm sure. So it ends up being like people who want to argue that super bowl tickets are too expensive and overpriced but they sell out every year. Someone wants them and pays for them. If it's truly overpriced then you have to die before it sells. But then you never get the answer.

Just to be clear, the one you're comparing it to from my site is the Shodai Tadayoshi, not Sandai.

A+ content. Makes reading the board a pleasure.

That one is amazing.

I completed about three weeks of 10 hour days begging and pleading with everyone (even NMB) for good related dragon stuff. Going to post it as it arrives. This is a tsuba attributed to Goto Mitsutaka (Goto Enjo). Made probably around 1750 then, he is the guy who increasingly made tsuba in the Goto family and did most of the major attributions which are now used by the NBTHK in sorting out the earlier generations. Not for sale as it's going into a project. I am not a big iron guy as is probably known (but I will post something a bit later). This kind of thing is right up my alley though. EDIT: Trying to fix the high res link, can't see the junk at the end of the text in the editor.. http://nihonto.ca/goto-mitsutaka-l.jpg

This is a bridge that every collector must cross sooner or later, when he realizes that the source of papers is an opinion. I mean really internalizes that. And also if he learned enough he can weight his own opinion vs. that. What you have is some kind of statistical function of who the most likely culprit was according to someone's best experience and opinion and you need to be ok with that in your gut. Sometimes there is a reaction of "what do you mean, so-and-so didn't make this???" and it's just that it's impossible to verify to the point of certainty. This is why there is never any substitute for continued study and getting out to see the best works. Ideally your own opinions and ideas will undergo a constant evolution. In the other argument as to the source of a mumei Kiyomaro, I think having a couple of opposing points of view is really good because it helps people understand that there is no way of knowing for sure on these things. You have opinions and arguments and then rationale. What one person thinks is reasonable another won't buy into. Time and experience will change the basis you use for determining what is reasonable and what isn't. If nothing ever changes for someone it means they're not learning much, because their experience in the world is never coming into conflict with ideas they held as a newborn baby collector. Having opinions and being wrong or having them adjusted by what you see and learn is one of the most important parts of advancing in this field.

Arnold explained it well about the Nidai Kanemoto / Shodai Magaroku. The rule of thumb on the Kanemoto generations is that: 1. Shodai will show no sanbonsugi. 2. Nidai will show the concept. 3. Sandai distills the concept and it dominates the sword. 4. Later generations turn to an extreme uniformity with sharp peaks. From a glance at the hamon it looks like sandai work to me. I didn't check the signature out. I think you are fine to restore this one and keep it, it's a nice example of Kanemoto. I don't find sanbonsugji "boring", there are some strange opinions that come out of non-Japanese circles, which is that "suguba" is boring too. Suguba is like a tuxedo or a glass of champagne. Yes, the big fat dude stuffing his face with a big mac and 1 liter of coke wearing his NFL jersey finds those things to be "boring" so I think it's important to keep that in mind when the instinct goes to criticize these things. Sanbonsugi is one of the nice things in the sword world as it is a distinct development of the Mino tradition and so clearly shows a particular school and time period off as an example in a collection. One of the nicest muromachi swords I ever had was a sanbonsugi work by Nosada, also very rare in his work. I agree with the opinion that the paper is very likely to just confirm it as legitimate Kanemoto work. If you are lucky they will put a generation in or else put (Magaroku) in parens if you're really really lucky. It is the kind of thing that serves a point for sayagaki when this happens. This can be because judges may disagree or at the lower level of papering they are OK confirming it as a work that fits into the Kanemoto school but they feel more on edge about assigning it to a generation and if they cannot slam dunk it then they won't throw the shot up. Sukesada is another example where the vast majority just come back as confirming it as legitimate work and legit signature and no mention of which Sukesada made it (it could be any). This doesn't mean the paper or the process is bad, it's a balance of risks things. The signature is determined to be correct and the right time period and the work correct and the right time period but the smith left nothing behind on the work to betray his hand. In rare cases then they will add (Hikobeinojo) or (Yosozaemonnojo). We see this with Ichimonji as well and sometimes with Muramasa, though the signature differences in Muramasa usually make it easier to slam dunk it so they will do it. An individual judge is more free to put his reputation and opinion on the line if he so feels it so you can get a sayagaki to distinguish which.

The history of fakery is that 90% of the convincing is in the target's mind, and based on their greed. The evidence of fakes that it didn't take a lot of convincing, otherwise it's hard to explain all the bad fakes. And there is a case where Kano Natsuo was posted to this board as a "modern made" menuki that unfortunately was not for sale so it couldn't be used to mount a poster's low cost katana. Nobody picked up on it then, or since. So it's listed on this board as modern work. I've handed a Shintogo Kunimitsu tachi to a collector, the blade being Tokuju and signed, and he had no idea it was particularly special. He shrugged and handed it back to me, "nice blade." Yes nice, like a million dollars nice. Almost all faking is about the label that's on it and then taking advantage of someone's ignorance. There is never any shortage of ignorance, this is why you don't take an excellent thing and destroy it to make a fake. An inferior "unconvincing" from the NMB armchair standpoint with 100% hindsight is actually perfectly acceptable, so says the gimei blades that still turn up today, that still get posted to this board, that are still obviously unacceptable, but people keep buying them. And they will never ever stop, because basically people are almost always too afraid to disclose their "score" to someone in advance to get them to vet it, in case they get it swept out from under them, and people want to believe they can buy gold coins but pay a silver price. Even if it's from a dealer. So too good to be true is actually perceived as their good luck.

Yasukuni shrine blades and all the others mentioned were inferior to Kiyomaro then and are inferior to them now. Also inferior to the best modern smiths. And valued less I think, always. It's not automatic that because something gets older it gets valued higher. Consider now if you went and had Gassan Sadatoshi make you a custom blade. That blade has value even though it's "not valued as highly as Shizu." Would you go and cut up a Gassan Sadatoshi in order to make a fake koto Gassan blade or a fake koto Soshu blade? No you wouldn't. You would never cut up the grand master of the day unless you had a very bad economic plan. So the point is one of how reasonable is this. If you had a run of the mill journeyman work then this is the one you would cut up to use as your fraud point. You're starting from the wrong point of view if you think Kiyomaro was not held in high regard. He was. He had a waiting list and his swords were not cheap. He killed himself with outstanding orders, maybe 100 blades. Consider what it will cost you to buy 100 shinsakuto from even a journeyman smith now. This is the inescapable problem with this thought that Kiyomaro is a target to destroy a blade to make a fake. Even if he was "relatively inexpensive" compared to a Shizu, there are even cheaper blades that were made during this time that would be perfectly fine to pass off as a Shizu not to mention any number of older ones. No matter how low you want to lay him, there are zero cost options. It's much more reasonable to assume someone "upgraded" a piece that had an issue rather than to assume they destroyed a perfectly fine blade by one of the top, if not the top makers of his period. And I have first hand evidence of unsigned Kiyondo. Why is it more reasonable to you that someone would select a perfect 100% excellent example to destroy instead of nice work that had a tragic issue? Generally what they have done in history is found ways to scavenge value out of otherwise dead pieces. There is a Juyo Awataguchi Hisakuni wakizashi. One could argue this same path that a wealthy merchant had it and wanted it cut down so he could wear it. On the other hand maybe it broke and they saved what they could. There is so much evidence of them saving what they could out of valuable items. Nobody made this tanto below because they just wanted a tanto and took a nice blade to destroy to make it. The blade broke, and they salvaged it. I'd need to see a reasonable argument about why a perfectly intact blade is more reasonable to suspect than a blade that had an issue that was being salvaged. Markus relates this: Kiyondo said later that he had to forge 30 blades just to pay off Kiyomaro’s debts which were 300 ryō in the form of advance payments for ordered swords. So we have Kiyondo making 30 blades to cover a 300 gold coin debt. 10 Ryo per sword for Kiyondo, who is not Kiyomaro by any stretch, is not a cheap junker that nobody is going to care about. This is the point in the end, there is value there. You wouldn't cut down a Gassan Sadakatsu after WWII, and you wouldn't cut down a Gassan Sadatoshi now, and I have trouble believing you'd cut down a mint condition Kiyomaro for the purpose of making a fake. If it was cut down for use, and then afterwards dummied up, this is a different question than purposefully making a fake from an intact blade. There is no good fraud argument for destroying valuable things to make fakes. All through sword history it's either unsigned stuff that is upgraded by adding a signature which does not destroy the blade at all, or it's an inferior work that will only pass because someone doesn't know what they're looking at. The whole point is to deceive someone who doesn't know what they're looking at. Nobody took a Rembrandt and sliced it up to pass it off as a part of a Da Vinci painting even when Rembrandt was making them. It's always inferior stuff. Kiyomaro was never inferior. It's never going to be more reasonable to destroy something good when something not good will do the trick just as well, unless there is great ignorance involved (i.e. if the blade was shortened for a legit reason first, then dummied up after). The weight of historical evidence is always toward salvage. There is an exception in making fake Masamune in that there is a reason to give those as gifts. If someone had put a kinzogan mei to Masamune into this one or it had a Masamune attribution there would be a little bit more reason to believe it may have been original.

Not a single one of those smiths was considered a target for destruction. Whether he is more valuable or not, there are other things you can destroy if you want to make a fake. Here's the thing: we see gimei and fakes all the time. It's clear that the skill level is not there when you compare against the target. Therefore, anyone who wants to commit fraud seems to have been able to do it during the Edo period and thereafter (and it is still going on that people believe they are legit) without destroying perfectly good items. Say you have a real 4th gen Tadahiro and you have some other suguba thing by a nobody. You will make more money by dummying up the suguba by making it mumei and putting a kinzogan Rai Kunitoshi in there, and selling the two as a legit 4th gen Tadayoshi and as a fraudulent Rai. You don't go in and destroy your valuable things to make fakes. If you wanted to make a fake Patek Philippe you wouldn't go and destroy a Rolex to do so. You would use a super cheap Chinese mechanism and sell the Rolex as it is. As a fraud strategy it is a bad idea to go around and destroy all of your legitimate valuable items to turn them into fakes of other things. Because you just don't need the legitimate valuable thing, an expert is going to sound it out regardless. Fakes make headway based on people not having the expertise to know the difference. This one as a fake Shizu did not last very long. And if it was a really good idea to do this then people would have rounded up all the Kiyomaro and done it to all of them and made them all into Shizu and Masamune. Every point of view is valid, so I can't say that you're wrong, you may be completely right and Tsuruta may be completely right. But I think the simplest explanation is that the person who dummied it up did not perceive that it was anything of particular value in whatever state it was before the dummying up. I can float another theory: if it was unusually big and if it had a hagire then whomever ended up with it may have had to deal with the fact it would need repair by suriage. Once made suriage it opens the question of what to do with it if it falls into the hands of a sword dealer. And that what to do could be make it into a Shizu where it will be more valuable than a suriage Kiyomaro. Ultimately we'll never know but I find it to be more believable when we don't have to have the person who did this perceive zero value in a perfectly intact and relatively brand new Kiyomaro. To me I have a lot of problems swallowing that belief when the evidence all seems contrary, that people did value them.

It's a good find but: 1. it's a Masayuki signature and there is indeed a difference 2. Nobuhide preserved the information, which shows that it was indeed considered a valuable thing and agrees with what I think rather than disagrees And even though it was one of his early period blades it was still considered important to retain the information. Just that whomever owned it wanted to use it and thought it was too long. Maybe this one is a Masayuki? Maybe that's an alternate explanation and whomever dummied it up wasn't aware that Masayuki became Kiyomaro. I would buy that ahead of someone killing a perfectly valid Kiyomaro.

He's not a student of Masamune. But he was not traditionally ranked higher than Go or Samonji.

"Too much sori after saiha." I have seen this talked about before in books and here and so on but nobody has offered the mechanism for how this happens I think. We can see in video that the martensite formation in the ha and pearlite in the rest of it causes the sword to curve. Martensite takes up a bit more volume. When you heat the blade though and turn it all back into uniform steel of some sort this volume change is negated. Carbon migrates out and you don't get martensite after you heat it up and let it cool down slowly. This should reverse the curvature induced by the first creation of the hamon. I don't think if you keep retempering the sword forever it's going to turn into a circle. I don't buy the forever bending blade because I don't see how the steel in the hamon can continue to grow in volume, which would be necessary to further curve the blade. What CAN cause the blade to curve more though is say if you took a blade that is old and polished and has something like a very narrow suguba hamon. As this blade polishes out it will start to stoop forward. Losing its curve. This is one of the reasons that is claimed for uchisori appearing in Kamakura tanto that were made straight after finishing. We are told they are made a little uchizori going in, because the creation of the hamon will push back and straighten the blade. So, this is just the blade reverting as the hamon is polished away, to the shape it had before tempering. So now you see this blade not with the original curvature it once had. If you replace this ito suguba with a chu-suguba then yes this blade will curve more than it was when you just saw it 10 minutes before the retempering. But if you put it in again and temper on a thinner suguba it shouldn't cause the blade to curve again, even more, it should straighten somewhat after the process. But if you keep doing this eventually you run the risk of the blade failing and a hagire developing. I just want someone to pose a mechanism where if you temper a sword 10 times it will keep bending and becoming more steep. So, I don't buy that a deep curve is a sign of saiha.

Late to the thread. Some clarifications: 1. The Yasutsugu utsushi is one of several he made of Sadamune in general. The target of this utsushi is the meibutsu Shishi Sadamune. The Yasutsugu in question is Tokuju but there are 5 others that he copied of this exact same blade that are Juyo. There were surely other copies made. So he seems to have applied himself strenuously to the task of replicating this sword. This one apparently has been singled out as the best of all the efforts. The Meibutsu Shishi Sadamune is Juyo Token in spite of being saiha. It's possible that Yasutsugu made all of the copies before attempting to work on the hamon of the Sadamune. The copies show some variety in approaches to the hamon like they are models, and he would probably look at them afterward and decide which one was the one to go with. One of them is an "after the fact" inspirational work that derives from the Shishi Sadamune. The one that went Tokuju does not have the hamon that he settled on when he made the hamon for the Shishi Sadamune. There are fine nie from the yakiba to the ha that are not present on Yasutsugu's work in general. 2. Hada patterns won't change but the steel composition in them will. Chikei are formed from ji nie merging and these are martensitic steel formations following higher carbon steel layers. Every time you heat and quench you will have a different variation in the appearance of ji nie and chikei though the steel itself will have the same pattern. If you took a Norishige and say had me retemper it by watching youtube videos on how it's done I am quite sure I would not see the same chikei (if any) or any of the other vibrant hada effects seen in his work. The jihada instead would become grey and lifeless but still have the same basic forging pattern. If you give it to Yasutsugu though with experience and who seems to on really serious work plan it out with various models and test the results, then it may get a lot closer to how it was in the beginning. Swordsmith skill is needed to get anything at all, but what he is doing is reverse engineering a result. If he does what he normally does with his talent on the steel of a Sadamune, a Yoshimitsu, or whatever, his results tends to be better than how it looks on his own swords because he's using a much higher quality base product as his starting point. But without knowing the exact method of the smith who came before him, the best he can do is try to guess and estimate and maybe make fully finished sword models to explore theories on what to do before he makes a try on the famous burned blade. I like Yasutsugu a lot. I think his work shows Sai-jo skill. Fujishiro holds him down one notch from top level and Yamanaka swipes him at some point too. He though was working for customers who were highly dictating what the results should be. And they may not always agree with the aesthetic that someone coming 400 years later would have liked to see. But he is very clearly the early Edo swordsmith who has not one but two powerful sponsors that he needs to please and he can't even live in one place anymore. That they both wanted him and engaged in this tug of war over his work indicates that he was highly respected at this time. And I think he just had to make stuff to spec more often than make stuff to please himself, the things that Kunihiro and Tadayoshi could do after exploring all kinds of different approaches. The guy was constantly being told to copy this and copy that, retemper this and retemper that, make this for the Shogun, make this for the daimyo. I just don't think he had the freedom due to the people who were asking him to do these things, that other smiths had.

Richard is a highly talented photographer who also does amazing pro style photographs of kodogu that would be suitable for publishing in any Japanese publication. This is as you guess a result of much experimentation. A decade and plus work goes into being able to take a photo like that unless someone is going to take you by the hand and walk you through everything that is important. And nobody did that for Rich. The big trick is that you need to care about it enough to devote the time and the brain power to trying to get it perfect. It's the most ridiculously awful photography subject I've encountered in my entire life, trying to get a sword to photograph well.

Start 15 years ago and keep practicing. It's what Rich did. And me.

Some corrections... 1. Tsuruta has a theory. 2. Hirai Chiba and the NBTHK have an attribution. Shizu has been held in high regard but not as the highest of the Juttetsu. That is Go Yoshihiro, ever since "Nippon San Saku" which came about in the Momoyama times. After this it's Samonji and then Shizu. So, don't run too far with the ball trying to back up Tsuruta's theory. If indeed this is a Kiyomaro then it's possible that it's an unsigned one to begin with. I have seen an unsigned Kiyondo from way, way, way back, my first visit to the San Fran show. Condell had it and it was a beautiful sword. Kiyondo is of course Kiyomaro's student. Kiyomaro left behind a lot of unfilled orders that Kiyondo is supposed to have taken care of. And Kiyomaro had a love/hate relationship with his craft. It is not beyond question that this was a mumei Shinshinto katana that looked a lot like Soshu den to someone who then converted it into a koto blade. It sounds less promising to a buyer, but I think it is a lot more simple than someone taking a signed Kiyomaro and wiping the signature off. Kiyomaro had a lot of popularity. There were like 100 unfulfilled orders? (someone correct me if it's wrong) when he killed himself. People knew who he was and highly respected his work and were waiting a long, long time. How long are you going to wait if you're number 100 on the list? Fujishiro is writing his book in the early 1900s and he has him down as Sai-jo saku which shows what the thinking was then and after. So, if you're in the habit of making fakes are you going to take a great perfect signed masterpiece by a famous smith of the day and hack it up to pass it off as a fake? You don't have to do that. There are plenty of other blades you can use to pass it off as a fake. You're better off taking a worthless blade and passing it off as a fake than taking a blade that has value by a known famous smith and killing it. This though leaves a possible buyer of this blade with the "eww" feeling because it was mumei Shinshinto. So it's not a really good theory to use for marketing the blade. Any theory is fine, including the theory that it's not Kiyomaro. It's not possible to know now. I think though if it is Kiyomaro it's one that he never signed for whatever reason. Went out the back door of the shop, lasted past his death unsigned, whatever. And from there it got disconnected from its history so that all the faker had to do was clip the end of the nakago and refile it, drill a hole, and quick as you may like you have something that looks like koto Soshu den of some sort. Keep in mind the length is 76cm so this blade did not lose its mei by suriage. 76cm is about the right length for a Kiyomaro on average. Someone just clipped the bare minimum from the end of the nakago, filed it to remove whatever filemarks were there and then aged the nakago. I think it's just a lot easier to think of that than someone destroying a signed Kiyomaro to do this because it allows them to be ignorant to what it is that they are messing with.

Richard and I started developing nihonto photography together .... 15 years ago? Given that nobody was telling us anything. We exchanged ideas and kept poking away. Richard went and learned great ways of doing kodogu and I kept on with swords. There is no way you can just get a brain dump from either of us to give you this kind of result. Even if we told you everything you would have to practice it for years. When a blade comes out looking natural and beautiful as he shot it, you guys react and can see it's beautiful. What I see is every major trap that was set by this blade that he did not fall into. This is a very hard blade to shoot. To come out like this is highly admirable. Not a lot of people are doing things as we do. What we do is honest and hard. I have been training Ted for half a decade as well. A lot just use a scanner and you see a flat deadish looking thing that has been enhanced severely with photoshop because the scanner does not see what the eye sees so they have to make some illusions. This kind of photography is an artform. It is constantly improving as both technical skills and artistic merit increase and experiments are done. It is excellent work. I can highly recommend having Richard shoot your swords. and it's nice to have for your wall or for one day when you sell it to be able to use an image like this so someone else can see what you have. Vs. the nightmare shots you will take with your point and shoot. If you really want to shoot like this set aside 15 years, a lot of blood, swear and tears and be prepared to learn from your mistakes. Easier to just send to Richard and ask him to shoot your blade. There are only 3 people in North America who can do this correctly now, I think. Me and Ted and Richard. Everything else is a grade less at best. Some of these people grabbed spilled knowledge I threw out there when I thought it was all about people helping people. Without that they'd not have been able to leverage out of the bottom rungs. Richard's work was peer work and his insights helped me a lot and I hope mine helped him too. He is an expert and especially in tosogo.

It's an excessively difficult subject and you pulled it off with perfect results. Just my opinion for what it's worth.

The really important thing is that you know what you got. And what the options are from here. As long as you understood that you made an informed buy. And that is almost everything about everything.

This is a wonderful example of crowd sourcing to get something good made, that we will all need and Markus will be helped too. Good job everyone.

Also I matched against all the Juyo and I did not see this kao. Goto Ichijo changed his name two times. There is Goto Mitsuyo. Ichijo. And then Hakuo (almost all tsuba). I don't see this kao anywhere. I am though eating chips with one hand in bed with the computer waiting to fall asleep. But find that kao where it is acceptable and that will back or break your opinion.