Darcy

Now the final thing, I am 100% certain it's a treatment. Micro photography reveals it to ruin the surface with a coating of crap. If you remove it you see the smiths' original work. If you remove it the flat earth guys of today will reject it. "Needs gold rust!" which in my opinion is just some mix by Mitsutaka to put on old things. So, if you do remove it then you piss off the old Japanese scholars and maybe devalue your piece but it's a vote for the truth. I want to take some of this stuff and send it in for assay to see what it is. I don't think there is any gold in gold rust. If there isn't, then it means that there is no reaction with the surface and it's just crap laid on top. I need a university metallury department to figure this out. I just know from my own experience that there ain't no such thing as AuO2 and if there's gold rust someone better describe the molecule.

This is the thing with experts. I assume he has more info than me. If he throws off "this was a fad in his time" then I'd suppose as a serious guy he's not just throwing it out there. This may have been common knowledge at his time. The ultimate though is that we know from science Gold does not Rust. So whatever is on these, this is a treatment. Natsuo use it cleverly in my menuki to enhance the color shifting and the shadows. Anyone who can tell me it is gold rust has to write down the atomic formula. Because we know gold does not rust. So then I am setting up two parallel scenarios: 1. Gold rusts. 2. So all gold should rust. 3. The older it is the more rusty it gets But we don't see it in the lab or anywhere else where Tut's mask did not rust. Old roman coins did not rust. Gold sculptures don't rust. Now this is the responsibility of those making the claim " gold rust " they are trying to introduce a new compound into the world. Then, the rest of the world, on a science basis, should say: 1. identifiy the compound that is gold rust 2. give us a reaction that produces gold rust 3. show us cases at room temperature where this reaction is valid This is supposed to be a room temperature reaction that just happens. But none of the three critical things have explanations behind them. We call this "rubbish" in science if you have to handwave over them. Whatever has been done is a reddish compound rubbed on the gold. When it is rubbed on it obscures the details. After cleaning the details are revealed undamaged. This is a surface treatement to tint existing stuff from what I see here. I am not relying on Mosle as fact. I have had this problem from day one that the only people in the world who believe that gold rusts are nihonto kodogu collectors. So this is acutally the group with the extraorindary claim that gold rusts. The proof needs to come from them. What I see is this: 1. Kodogu styles and koshirae styles changed trough the years 2. People wanted to bring their old stuff up to date (since suriage basicaly). 3. Likely menuki were wanted to come up to date. 4. So, apply a finish and you have up to date stuff. It's like painting a house, you keep the structure but you change the look for the latest trend. I don't see a reason to disbelieve Mosle when he relays the fact that this gold look was a fad at Mitsutaka's time and he is relaying that Yujo's stuff never looked like that when it was preserved. My own conclusion is just that this stuff was xxxxed with. Now we still do it. Guys are carving hi in antique swords because they like it. Changing polish because they like it. Nobody is going back to try to make it how it used to be so much. Firmly: I want the chemical formula for "Gold Rust." If someone wants to claim this exists, they need to say what it is. Determining what it is will tell us how it can come to be and this answers the question if it is a later period treatment to modernize old works, or if it is something legit and natural. I know how that's going to go. I've worked with gold. This is something that needs adjustment I think in the way people think about it.

Bill, that's my whole point. There is no such thing as gold rust. If there were, we have an ex science teacher waiting in the wings and I also did chem in university. We'd like to see the atomic formula for "gold rust". What we have though is a 100 year old testament from Mosle saying that Goto Mitsutaka was treating these things to make them look like this. This means he was modifying them to look in ways they should not. That's what we have today... "gold rust"... with no atomic formula. Gold does not react with anything. This property is why Gold has always been precious. Silver is not as precious as gold because Silver reacts with sulfur and oxygen naturally which are in the air. Copper reacts with oxygen. Iron reacts with oxygen. Anything that "rusts" is reacting mostly with oxygen. Gold reacts with neither. When they cracked open Tuts tomb, it looked like that. If Gold was just another metal that rusted out then it would be no different from copper in the grand scheme of things. So my point here is that nobody has ever explained "gold rust" scientifically and any scientist will tell you "gold rust" does not exist. Now in my digging I see Mosle remarking (and he was taught by some experts in this) that Mitsutaka did a trendy adjustment to old work to bring them up to date with the fad for red gold during his time. Mitsutaka is an important guy. He did a LOT of the attributions on older stuff which became Juyo now. So he touched all the old masters. This means he may have updated a lot of the old masters. In fact people may have been bringing him stuff saying make this up to date, and attribute it while you're at it. Now: ask yourself about other patinas. If you rub them off, do they stay off? No they come back. Because they react with what's in the air. What in the air is reacting with gold? There is nothing in our atmosphere that does this. All of these treatments rub off. look at my examples, even the heaviest is still showing signs of being rubbed off. It won't ever change. This is because it's not a natural thing. 'Gold rust' is an applied technique of Goto Mitsutaka to "modernize" old work. After this it is a technique in the toolbag if someone wants to create red tones out of yellow the way Natsuo worked with it. But Gold Rust doesn't exist. It's not a scientific thing. If someone took a sword and painted it blue because this was a trend eventually we would undo that and put things back to the way we hoped they were when made. We call that restoration. Changing the fundamental appearance of old Goto fittings to fit Mitsutaka's time was not restoring and was not repairing. It was "updating". When they do this with paintings, inevitably it needs to be repaired and brought back down to what it was when the man made the painting. Yojo's work, according to Mosle, does not have this red color. If Mitsutaka attributed it, maybe now it will have the red color because Mitsutaka painted it on. This is graffiti. So if we want to restore it, we first need to undo the "trend" crap that was done to it and return it to how Yujo made it. I am seeing evidence of this stuff for sure. And I think this "gold rust" is coming from a place of not knowing chemistry. And not getting the info that Mosle got. I am 100% open minded and I am very willing to believe in "gold rust". Just tap the chemcial formula in here: _______________________________ and me and Barry will get to work on it. Maybe Barry I can bring those red Muromachi dragons. If you still have access to some mad scientist stuff, let's break down what this stuff is. I am very, very curious. I have a good example and we could actually figure this out.

Aqua Regia would dissolve the gold (hence the name, Water of Kings, the only thing that gold will dissolve into). It would ruin any surfaces it comes into contact with. Pure gold is a deep yellow, we know it from good fittings and Asian culture sees it all the time. Western doesn't because going for cheap jewelry tricked America into thinking that 10kt (42%) and 14kt gold (58%) were "gold". European culture is more 18kt (75%), and Asian tends to frown on any gold that is not pure. Alloying gold, generally you will mix in silver and then copper, the two metals cancel each other out a bit in terms of color but it will make ever paler gold, until it starts looking brassy. If you overweight with silver the color looks greenish, and we call it "green gold" (yeah, saw that coming). Overweight with copper and you get "pink gold." If instead you alloy gold with nickel it rapidly loses all color and you get "white gold". White gold came about when platinum was discovered and became popular, so white gold became a poor man's platinum. Now we know nickel and skin is not a good combination o palladium can be used (which for a long time caused the value of the alloy to increase as palladium was mostly more expensive than gold). Platinum needs no alloying, but is sometimes 10% iridium or 5% ruthenium. Those two metals are very hard and so you get a 900 or 950 platinum for jewelry use. Digression on the way here. So if you take something that is a low karat gold like 14 karat and you attack the surface with a strong acid you can pull out the copper or the silver. Think of it kind of as a reverse plating. This makes the gold that's left over and whatever other alloying element if one of them was left, take over and the color deepens. But it is subject to wear, it's just atoms deep. You would heat the gold somewhat and go at it with nitric acid. This is all 20 year old knowledge from when I did this for fun and I am out of date. Ford will know this inside and out. But if you went up against a Yujo with aqua regia you would very likely harm the details as it's going to attack everything. Gold, silver and copper. Last note is that gold was what you could find and refine and you'd never get pure pure gold like we have today.

OK. Bear with me. I am going to try to stab something in the heart and I am not sufficiently leveled up. I have dagger with 1d4 damage and maybe 1.5 attacks per round. I know I am out of my normal area of expertise but this is something that keeps coming up. Gold does not patinate. This is why King Tut's beautiful gold mask survives until now. This is why gold artifacts that we uncover all the time are still gold. You can do two things: make it dirty, or you can make it rough. Gold like swords, when you polish it you increase the reflectivity until it approaches a mirror. The more you do this the more of the color is lost if a light is shining into it and into your eyes and you see more of the environment coming in. Make it enough of a mirror and it will be. But at the right angles the color will be deep. Somewhere something else is not going to be putting its image through the mirror. Normally the metal is absorbing wavelengths in the blue and and some green and reflecting red. This mix of color, of green and red is interpreted as our eyes as yellow. From a human standpoint we can see 3 colors: red, blue and green. We know because we cut up human eyes and we can see the receptors. We use this every day, you sit in front of your computer and you look at these nice white pixels in the backgound. I took pictures of six pixels with a super high powered lens and this is what you're looking at: That's white. Six pixels in fact on an all white screen. Each one of those circuits is 0.005cm wide. Pixels are made up of three sub pixels. One for each real color. From far enough back the light mixes and you just get the same receptor tickled by al three tiny circuits and your brain goes "ah this is white." So what you see when you see gold is basically a metal with a blue absorption and red and green reflection. When we surpress the color blue your eye reacts having two out of three receptors tickled and the brain goes "Oh, I call that yellow when we see this configuration of receptors being tickled." So, yellow isn't what I call "real" any more than white is "real" once we break it down, white's an illusion in the brain when you tickle all three color sensors just right. Yellow is an illusion, a mix of green and blue in our receptors. This may be a digression though. OK, now .... one of the reasons we like gold is that it reacts with almost nothing. Patina is a chemical reaction of sorts. Iron forms oxides which make a patina. Silver forms sulfites and oxides and makes its black patina. Japanese experimented with chemicals and combinations of alloys to get different colors, hence we get shakudo and shibuichi as the reactions produce nice colors for art that are reasonably stable. Gold just don't react on its own. If you want to make gold "red" what you need to do is to turn the green off. There isn't any real way to make gold stop reflecting green. So you basically have to treat it with something, because it won't react on its own. You have to somehow paint it. The fact that it never changes otherwise is why we love gold everything. It's permanent. Unless it's been doped with a lot of other elements. ... What I got with kodogu always was that people had referenced this gold patina, this showing up on nice old pieces and confirming their age because ... patina! But, you don't just leave a chunk of 22kt gold out there and expect it to turn red the way silver will turn black. This is why gold has been so precious forever. It's unalterable except with very powerful chemicals which will dissolve it. You can dunk it in sulfuric acid and it will be happy. Dump in nitric, it will be happy, dump in 50/50 and you will finally dissolve it. Back to us, we get this impression again about gold patinating to get this red color which never made sense to me. I found this in Mosle's speech to the Japan society: So here he has Mitsutaka the 13th head dummying up some first generation Yujo menuki to have a "current, hip" look. This current hip look is an artificial treatment added on later, during this time, where there was a fad for red looking gold. We are undergoing our own fad right now as men are getting pink gold watches and there are pink gold phones and computers. This kind of red or pink gold is made in the case of real gold by adding in excess amounts of copper. Pickling away silver in a gold alloy may make the rest be deeper and if you have copper in there you can get a red-gold result. But high carat gold like Yujo probably used doesn't have enough silver to pickle it away. I don't think that is the right tack. And also if he did this it wouldn't wear so easily I think as what would be left are copper and gold and somewhat wear resistant. Better than gold anyway. So I think this is some kind of application. Or fire scaling to bring the copper up and oxidize it. So whatever Mitsutaka has come up with is some kind of treatment, or maybe a binder and he's basically painted this stuff in place. What I am driving at here is a few things: 1. this red gold is not gold patinating on its own, forget that, if the gold was good quality it should be the same now as it was 500 years ago if it didn't get dirty, unlike iron which will rust and patinate if cared for 2. this "red gold" look is not even traditional going back past the 13th or so Goto generation, and Mosle has caught him adding it to older Goto elements. This means that the fad to get this done gave Mitsutaka extra work on existing antique items to add this treatment. 3. it rubs off quite easily revealing the base metal. The only thing that this is "correct" for is a trend around the time of Goto Mitsutaka for making this kind of reddish look to the gold. The trend does not last but since he apparently treated older Goto works it's mistaken for some kind of natural part of the aging process. Now, there is naturally going to be some gunk and scratches and some of this does add to the antique look. In furniture making (I have some experience in goldsmithing and furniture making but I am not at the depth of experience as a couple on this forum, obviously Ford in goldsmithing) but if you do some antiquing of furniture to make it look older you're rubbing stain into the crevices amongst other things. The idea probably that the surface takes more wear so you're trying to create some contrast. And we see that in these examples. Not that they were made to look older but that whatever this red application was that they put on didn't adhere well and the highest areas tended to come off with some wear. I have some good photos recently of good Goto work and I listed it oldest to newest. The oldest is 4th to 6th generation Goto from Momoyama and these are quite evidently red now. This is the kind of thing that Mitsutaka was treating during the trend period according to Mosle who picked it up from other Japanese experts of the day. So these are from around 1570 or so. After this is Goto Teijo as it should look. There is some color variation because of flash and environment and different times these things were taken, some in studio, some with me using a handheld camera and a flash. I had to shift this one to try to bring it back into synch with the others. The third are the Goto Teijo that went onto my Yoshimitsu and they had some purple staining along the bellies. Not sure if that was intentional or them coming into contact with something that left a residue. But this is not gold patinating. Gold needs to react with something to make a patina. Iron reacts with oxygen, silver reacts with sulfer and oxygen. Gold reacts with dick all. The two Teijo are around 1650. These that come after have no papers and they are on a koshirae so I had to cut the same out and I did a dirty job. The work looks nice and I think they would either go something like "Goto" or "Waki Goto" or "Kyo Kinko" if submitted. Carving looks OK but the metal is quite silvery where it's been brightened by rubbing and you can see that it has the red coat of whatever in the deeper areas. First I'm going to display them a bit smaller to make the colors a bit more clear. Top is quite red, bottom feels a bit pink because the bright rubbed areas contrast with the reddish-yellow treatment underneath. Click and get the super high res. You can actually enjoy the carving quite well. Still amazing what these guys were capable of doing. Even in the Momoyama Goto piece you can see the same pattern where the treatment was exposed to hands it easily rubbed off making all the high spots reflective and yellow. Now, these things are no longer constantly being rubbed by hands. In which case if they were tsuba they would just repatinate. As any other metal would. But these will stay here forever because this is not some kind of gold rust. This is because they are an applied treatment I believe, strongly, from the middle Edo as has been pointed out by Mosle. If it's not right for the era it's probably something that should be removed. Last thing to do is to compare the fineness of carving between the Momoyama Goto and the Teijo work. Since the details are basically painted over in the Momoyama piece it can't be shown in its true glory. In the end this is what I think it is. My last point to prove that is that it's really globbed into the crevices. All areas that can't be reached by fingers should be evenly patinated if this was the case. Because a patina would grow from the surface and out and once the surface is covered it should stop because access to the magic air chemical which reacts with gold would be cut off. It's thicker in the crevices because that's where the brush will tend to gloop it in. Now the final nail is that Natsuo treated my Natsuo menuki a bit the same way, but his goal was to create some depth it seems between the undersides of the waves and the shiny foamy breakers. Similar to the way the paintings were done. Dark seas with white breakers. He's goto trained and it's the same color and just runs in the areas that he wants. What I wanted to reject always was that Gold was somehow aging and patinating into this red surface and it's just not the case for gold. The color will only changed based on the finish, whether it gets scratched up or not. But gold doesn't rot. Now, I may have just gone and _ _ _ 's this whole thing up, insert initials that you think appropriate. This is not so much proof as what I know from my past in casting gold and fabricating things in gold, silver platinum and palladium. I can hand fab and I was 3d printing back when we called it rapid prototyping. Whenever we were asked what rapid prototyping was, we explained imagine you had a printer, except that it worked in three dimensions. And then the marketing people I guess ran with 3d printer. Anyway.... I'm willing to be corrected based on science and proof that gold reacts to make a film which is easily rubbed off by fingers. Some gold alloys will patinate of course and you can make fire scale on gold by heating it if there is enough copper. This is another possibility for this treatment. Interested in hearing other opinions on what you think it is. If I'm right though it means that this is crap that was done to older Goto work 10+ generations after it was made and it's something that should be rectified when found. Also any opinions on who made the final Shishi in this set is appreciated as there are probably hallmarks you guys recognize that I don't. No papers and I probably won't be sending them in for papers. They are on the koshirae for my Hasebe tanto and any ideas given will help me advise whomever ends up with it. I would be safer and say Kyo Kinko myself but I think they are a bit more intricately carved for a pretender. I just don't know, the head and tail look right, the body seems a bit different. Lots of details in there though so I just think it's not crap. The material might not be high carat gold though. Same redding treament, maybe makes it from the same era as Mitsutaka whomever made it. It was "in trend". Also be warned the high res is big: 4,400 x 6,400 pixels. High res: http://nihonto.ca/menuki-treatment-l.jpg

It's more that without the papers, the big name needs to be seen with skepticism. Someone who owns one such thing but refuses to paper it feeds the skepticism. One who owns it and tries to sell it for big dollars is pouring gasoline on the fire of skepticism. If they really believe they can get the paper and then they can get the price they want for it without a problem. That they instead pound away trying to sell with no support on a big name, it shows really that they don't truly believe it. I always tell them, get Hozon and come back to me with it. Nobody ever did. Tells me they all knew already it was junk. In this world if something stinks, it's up to the owner to resolve the stink. If he can resolve it the stink goes away and it can go to the market and do well. If he doesn't want to resolve the stink, he can get only a small price from the next guy who now inherits the stink and the chore of resolving it. This is why the guys with huge names and no papers and these guys who have experience, have no good reason to sell it like that. There's only one, that it's no good. Buy these things for sure, but get a guarantee from the owner that you get it returned if it fails papers. Then you also get to find out how honest he is. Guys selling fakes for profits will generally find a way to get out of their promise to take yours back.

You guys made some awesome stuff.

Also whenever an organization tells you your thing is way wrong, remember that Juyo Enju blade I posted where the owner was told his mei was bad by the hedge experts he trusted so he sawed it off. Then it ends up in the Juyo with the mei unattached from the blade. Then it goes Tokuju with the mei as gakumei. THE BLIND LEAD THE BLIND All that it takes is that you buy into their profound sense of the depth of their own expertise and let that make some decisions for you. You bear the consequences not them. So here's a guy who does a suriage to cut a mei off, finds out it actually is fine, and that he cut up a sword that still passes Tokuju in spite of him cutting it up. Remember that when the NTHK tells you blah blah blah. Remember that when the NBTHK rejects a blade. Or when you look at a really old paper that doesn't seem to make sense. Never abandon that you know a little something but it all has to weigh relatively. Just make sure to count them as opinions, informed opinions, and weigh them and keep collecting data as long as you suspect there may be something more to it. The negs, nod, and take it down as a vote against. The positive, nod and take as a vote for. I posted a legitimate Nosada to this board and 100% of people told me it was gimei and I thought about having the mei removed. I submitted and it went Tokubetsu Hozon and another member here now has it. But I came close to saying why bother, how could I be so wrong? But hey, I was right all along. All those opinions are useful but just keep remembering they are opinions as long as you have some kind of proper ground on which to rest your own argument. No time travel, definitely no zombies or raising the dead. No aliens. None of these can be used in your arguments. And if someone lays down a block, X can't be Y because Z, you have to admit it and find a path around that blocked channel. If not then you admit defeat and learn. But just remember because a bunch of guys say something doesn't make it true.

Good job all!

I am overall I guess hearing that there may be something traded off between a Yamato blade and a Yamashiro blade, in that the Yamato blade somehow is going to be more of a cutter than the Yamashiro. I am hearing that the fancy features of Yamashiro and Soshu are bonus bells and whistles that are applying in a realm outside the need to function as a weapon. I'm not sure if that's the intent but that's what I am hearing. I disagree with the thought because I believe that form follows function. I think if you gave the Yamato smiths the same customer base as the Kyoto and Kamakura smiths then their blades would evolve along similar lines. I don't think they are as functional then at the end of the day as these other blades, these Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu blades are chosen to be elevated not because of some rude bias against Yamato and Mino, but because in general they are better swords. They are better swords because more time and more work and more technique went into making them, and probably as equally, more failures went into the scrap bin instead of being handed out to a lower ranked customer. I don't look at anything on a sword as being extraneous except in the Shinto blades when they start getting into Mt. Fuji and priest hamon and the flowers floating in the stream hamon. None of that does anything much for the sword. So the word "extraneous" that keeps coming in, I don't see it. Yamanaka saying that swordsmiths were not attempting to make art is in agreement with what I'm saying here. That is form follows function, and so whatever you see there that is there during a period where these blades were going to war, it's there for a reason. If you look at an F22 raptor everything you see there has a reason. It looks like red hot flaming death because form follows function. They wouldn't do things that ruined performance in order to make it look cool. And what is there looks cool because it enhances performance. A "functional" blade the way I think of it is minimal effort to get the maxium effect. In this they are simply dropping out features and qualities that incrementally raise the performance in order to make the blade more economically viable for the customer base. The blade does not perform as well, in this theory. Like if you took a Corvette and customized the hell out of it you could give a Bugatti a run for its money around a track. Probably won't beat it but the performance per dollar spent will be higher. But when money is no object then you measure performance by the top line. If the Shogunate or the circle around the Emperor thought Yamato weapons to be superior they would have adopted them and that style into their midst. But when the call came to bring smiths to Gotoba, there were no Yamato smiths brought. All Bizen and Yamashiro (and Bitchu, should really hold them out seperate). When the call came to set up smithing in Soshu, the call went out to Bizen and Yamashiro again. I don't like to second guess the Emperor in the year 1200 about who the best swordsmiths are in his land that I do not know or understand very well. And partway through the next century when the same sources are used to set up in Kamakura, I don't argue with the Shogun's ability to evaluate the state of the art. Presumably both want the best technologies and learning for their projects. Those were cost-is-no-object projects so they went to where they could find the cost is no object manufacturers who sit on the top of the mountain of quality. I don't think the mentality exists to say give me a pretty sword, a non-functional ornament that does not cut as well as the country blades or the monk's blades. And this is important against what was quoted above: "What I am really trying to say is please do not treat swords as pretty pieces of steel. They are supposed to also be fully functional weapons." Every feature in there that happens to make it beautiful is actually something the smith is developing to make it a higher performance tool meant to help you survive a battle and to kill human beings. I think this is the reminder. Not that pretty swords are to be shifted to the side and warriors swords don't look like that. This is what falls in place then when assessing swords at the top levels. The best swords are still supposed to pass with all of the conflicting things grabbing and pulling the judgments in whatever directions. At the end of the day if your sword doesn't have much to say for itself it's not going to pass. Form is supposed to follow function, that is everything that you see on the blade is an expression of some feature supposed to improve the performance. So you should be able to go backwards and examine the features and from there backtrack to make some judgment about the performance. Swords clumsily made, cheaply made, with major problems and lack of balance in features are not thought to be good. It happens to be that these are not the same words we would use to describe Bizen, Yamashiro, and Soshu works in general (esp. those of the Kamakura period). We can't generalize Shinto, Yamato, Mino, Shinshinto in the same way. And Gendaito not at all. So I think it's really boiling down to is where Yamato fits into this thing. The words bias were at the beginning I think and the impression I'm getting now is that pretty features are not supposed to mean anything, and they surely do. Because control of the material and control of the hammer and control of the forge are going to result in beauty. I had a Ferrari and it had a cheap radio in it. It had nothing much of an interior. People who expect luxury expected wrong. What it was good at was going fast, around corners and in a straight line. The engine sung from about 12 inches behind your ears. Nothing in this machine was thrown on as some blah blah that had no purpose in it going fast unless the law mandated it or customers would not drive it without that. The machine was very pure and the shape was very pure and the accidents of this design generated something that was uniquely beautiful. We can't dismiss beautiful cars as being those that can't go fast because every car that goes fast is oozing with some sort of beauty. As their form evolves to something that can go fast, that shape, the design, the technical approaches for this machine to solve the problems it needs to solve, they fill the machine with a sense of purpose. A layman can't touch a part and say well what's this do to make it go fast but some engineer has put his time in to making it just like that in order to improve the situation from the previous iteration. So I think all of those swords converge on certain ideals. And in this they all share that same beauty that comes from perfect execution of plans to make a great weapon. In appreciating the beauty we are appreciating the skill and craftsmanship of the maker. As soon as that guy starts drawing chrysthanthemum into his hamon he is saying it's not a real weapon anymore. He's turned it into a joke. He's got the form ahead of the function and he's trying to make it beautiful in this way and that way and it can't be done if his intention is to stay true to what the thing is supposed to be. I don't see anything wrong with what they're (NBTHK) doing in the end (with assessing Tokuju), how they're trying to sort out the best swords and if the bias is on Soshu, Yamashiro and Bizen it means that this is because these are the best swords (as a group, or that the best swords out of their group tend to be better than the best swords out of other groups). The others are getting included when they have their own genius work that deserves to be there (ranks with the best in the first three), but some of that other stuff does not go head to head with the older great work and so is getting in on a quota system (and in this we see Tatara Nagayuki accepted while a Soshu Yukimitsu may fail, and head to head I will take the Yukimitsu any day as the superior sword). With exceptions for guys like Kiyomaro maybe. When those quota blades go through it makes you sick usually if you held a masterpiece from the koto period that is 2 times the blade that quota piece was. Now, if things do slide for anyone's standards (I ignore the NTHK almost entirely), then that organization has a problem. I don't see it with the NBTHK (yet?) I thought when I started collecting swords that all this "koto is best" crap I was reading in books was just crap. I bought a Shinto sword and it was really great. Didn't ses how it could be otherwise. Second blade, Izumi no Kami Kanesada. Copy of Rai. Didn't understand that it was a copy of Rai but I saw it was very different. Next I bought a Juyo Shizu and a Juyo Gojo and I said wait a second, it's all true. All of it. I had enough to see that the Shinto blade I had was a toy compared to these other things. Gave that one back to the vendor and explored koto. Now I am told I am a koto snob (fair accusation, I am). But there are Shinto pieces and younger that are wonderful. But these really come from a different civilization. I think the NBTHK is on the right track, as much as they can be with a group of people who will never agree in full and evolve over time. EDIT: just to clarify the generalizations (writing these things late at night when I can't sleep)... when I talk about the superiority of Yamashiro, Bizen, Soshu vs. everything else, it's as a whole or on an average. There are blades of all sorts from all schools or also don't fit into the Gokaden that are pieces of master craftsmanship that hit the top levels. I'd need a venn diagram to properly express myself. I'm trying to avoid saying that all elements of A are better than all elements of B and sometimes the language I use makes me sound like I'm saying that.

You guys make me weep with joy for your anti-uchiko stance. There is hope!!!

Nice koshirae too. Without the rough hada it would be something to submit to Juyo with some confidence. As is 3rd gen always costs a lot. So if you're happy sounds like you did pretty well then.

Maybe a bit too curved, a bit too tapering, a bit too small a kissaki to feel confident in it going to Kanemitsu. But it's hard to argue with someone who saw the blade in polish and not blurry and wrote a sayagaki. It looks like a promising blade and should be sent to someone who knows what they're doing to have a close look. No two are ever identical but you can compare to mine for what I'm talking about. http://nihonto.ca/kanemitsu/

About cutting, I think it's an interesting subject. I think that (this is based on almost nothing) cutting ability is generally lost over time due to polish. Cutting is, I think: 1. edge fineness 2. curvature 3. niku (key) 4. technique 5. momentum 6. material Obviously 4 and 5 are in the hands of the tester. This much should be obvious, give me a six-gun and a target at 20 meters and I will proceed to miss six times having never shot one or knowing what the hell I'm doing. Same goes for swords. Anyone who's tried their hand at kendo (for fun) against someone trained knows how hopelessly outmatched they are. So, good testers will get good results. Great testers will get great results. Consider if you were testing bats for home-run-ability. Obviously then Hank Aaron is going to get more home runs than Ichiro. Is it the bat or the batter? If we record all their results and assign it all to the bat maybe we're going to get some poorly reported results. But obviously the right bat is going to perform better than the wrong bat. Also, matching bat to batter is going to be important too. There is no universal bat that gives universal results. Rather: what we have is a system which is entangled the bat-batter system. This combination we can judge and assigning everything to one or the other is not really possible. So there is an inherent problem in judging the cutting ability of a blade. We have the same problem in computer sciences, where people like to judge the speed of a language, or the speed of a CPU and really you cannot judge either. What you have is a system of four dimensions: programmer-language-compiler-chip ... if you optimize the compiler enough for one language in comparison with another then the "language" can be said to run faster than another. But it's not true, it's just that you devoted a lot more time to making a better compiler. Similarly Motorola and Intel used to argue about who made the faster chip. Sun Microsystems used an architecture called SPARC that allowed development of compilers to be that much simpler than the complex sets of the others. Though the chips would run "slower" by measurable parameters program speed was often faster if you controlled the programmer's output as a constant. This was because compilers had an easier job generating efficient code. If you hand-tuned at the low level for the special features of the other chips you could get performance gains. What it points out in the end was that you always needed to judge the overall system. When Apple came out with a new programming language "Swift" and claimed it faster than "Objective-C" their old language, if you understood that this was one parameter of a system and it can't be judged on its own, you could come to the conclusion that it was BS. They set up and cherrypicked one particular program to get one particular result and used it to make a broad claim that doesn't have a lot to do with reality. We can think of this kind of system with an analogy that is maybe easier to understand, which is, one car being faster than another. Well, straight line or on a track? 0-60 or a quarter mile? Who is driving? I guarantee you can put me in an F1 car and a real F1 driver in a Mustang is going to beat me around the track. Which "car" is faster then? In a straight line a top fuel dragster will destroy everything but the problem is that if you run the engine for more than 5-6 seconds it will blow up. So it depends again on distance. I can outrun on my feet a top fuel dragster maybe if you make the distance 20 miles. Sword cutting ability does not stand on its own any more than any of these other single parameters of a system stand on their own. Here's another parameter in sword cutting: what cut are you going to make. I can hypothesize that the type of sword meant to cut bone is going to probably take on a different ideal shape than one that is to cut flesh. To understand this try to cut through a block of cheese with a standard chef's knife. That knife is sharp as hell but it gets hung up in the cheese. A wire does a better job though it doesn't have much of an edge. It just doesn't get hung up. Take a piece of paper now and try to cut it with the wire and it's not going to cut at all. Try to cut a tomato and you'll make a mess. The chef's knife in this case performs splendidly. So, if we change the material we change the ideal form of the tool meant to cut it. So now we have a system of sword-man-material and the sword is just one parameter then of a three dimensioned system. There is no real way of assigning cutting ability to the sword as a result of this. There is just an ideal sword that solves the function if you assign the other two variables. Think back to the baseball player, take a pitcher throwing a 98 mph fastball, take Barry Bonds on steroids at his strongest, and the type of bat that will solve the function for highest probability of a home run is going to be different from Ichiro against a knuckleballer. There is no universal bat that solves for all players and all pitches; there is no universal sword that solves for all cutters and all materials. So inside the system, each parameter has sub-parameters. We assigned two of the five above to the cutter. Three of them belong to the sword. Edge fineness is partially a function of the sword and the smith's choices for his steel and hardening, and the rest is the responsibility of the polisher. Bad polisher = bad edge = less cutting ability. Given the assumption that an atom-width infinite-strength wire will probably cut anything very easily, we'd assume and expect that the finest edge will produce the best cut. I think that's OK. So, give a polisher mashed potato and ask him to produce an atom-width edge and he can't do it. Give him diamond and he can. The harder then the better probably for what the polisher can produce and then it's controlled by his skill. Now, we have the conundrum in that the harder the more likely to chip. Bizen swords maybe have less edge hardness with the intention of making them more reliable. The other guy's super hard super sharp sword does not help him so much after it breaks in half. So, what cuts better, the sword that broke in half with the perfect edge, or the Bizen sword that didn't break but maybe didn't take such a fine edge? So what is cutting ability when measured in the lab vs. the battlefield? Cutting ability doesn't mean so much if it doesn't add to your ability to win a battle. So robustness comes into the question as another parameter in a function that is a superset of cutting ability, and that function is maybe survivability, and then when you multiply by cost you get another higher level function which is utility. A blade with a mediocre edge but doesn't break and costs next to nothing has a high degree of utility. But this starts to digress too much. This starts to point at the fact that cutting ability is not everything. US military learned this in Vietnam where the first M-16s or maybe the predecessor performed great in the lab but in the field, mud and lack of 100% care caused performance to fall to next to nothing. Your average AK-47 can rust out and you can kick it until the parts start to move and then you can probably fire the thing. And its cheap. Simple and cheap. Measuring for accuracy and penetration power and all this jazz in the lab doesn't mean anything in the field if the weapon stops functioning due to the environment. Cutting still is an important parameter of the utility and survivability functions. The two parameters left are curvature which I will deal with now. By the Edo period swords are not being used in the same way as when they were made in the koto, so they are cut down. The smith is not responsible for the shape that they took if given to an Edo period cutting master. The shape would be rather random: determined by who cut it and to what length for whom. It's not an ideal shape for the techniques of the time and for cutting a stack of dead bodies by a guy on foot. It's randomized and so results will be somewhat randomized. Keep this in mind now, that koto blades cut down will have a random component added to their "cutting ability". The other deal is niku. Take a boat now that's meant to travel through water. The shape of the underside is meant to cut the water in the most efficient way possible and this is going to take different forms based on the ideal velocity of the boat, the size of it, and what kind of weather it's intending to deal with. What you want for a waterjet hydrofoil is different from a sail boat is different from a jet boat is different from a jetski is different from a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. But those shapes are all programmed for an ideal. One would think that the koto makers putting emphasis on utility and cutting ability will create a niku that is designed to part flesh and not get hung up in it based on the length of the sword which is a big determinant on its velocity which determines its momentum which is also affected by the man swinging it, and his strength and skill. Once you cut that blade down and polish it for 300 years the relationship of the niku to the length is completely different from how the swordsmith set it up originally. This also randomizes the performance vs. his intention. Therefore to take a work of "Mihara Masaie" and then do a test cut with it and then assign "Mihara Masaie" a cutting ability based on the results, with all of the variables above, is probably utter hogwash. You would need to get a mint condition blade or at the very least a suriage one with healthy niku. Once the niku is gone, you end up with something like the chef's knife cutting the block of cheese or at least taking a step towards that. So what we have in the Edo period ends up having way too many random parameters to properly assign to koto blades of a sufficient age by this analysis. Now, let's look at Sai-jo O-wazamono as wikipedia has it now: Osafune Hidemitsu (長船秀光) Mihara Masaie (三原正家) Osafune Motoshige (長船元重) Nagasone Okisato (長曾弥興里 Kotetsu) Nagasone Okimasa (長曾弥興正) Seikan Kanemoto (清関兼元) Magoroku Kanemoto (孫六兼元?) = Kanemoto II Izumi no Kami Kanesada (j和泉守兼定?) = Kanesada II or "Nosada" Sendai Kunikane I (初代仙台国包?) Sukehiro I = Soboro Sukehiro (ソボロ助広?) Tadayoshi I (初代忠吉?) Tadayoshi III = Mutsu no Kami Tadayoshi (陸奥守忠吉?) .... So this list is has 6 Shinto smiths, 3 late Muromachi smiths, and then 3 Koto smiths (of middle skill). What this tells me is that it was probably fairly easy to access healthy blades for 9 of them (Shinto and Muromachi) that had the original lengths set and original niku set by the smiths. The further back you go the less you see high rankings. That has a couple of things affecting it probably, the first being that nobody is going to go test cut the family's treasure Masamune. That is going to affect a lot of blades. The worse condition the blade is, the more likely you're going to allow it to be test cut -or- maybe it's just a mumei koto that you don't know who made it and then you'll test cut with it being ignorant to its value. That, and the older a blade is the more likely it is to be in a poor state of health... and the healthier it is the more valuable and so the less likely to be used for test cutting. This makes the major smiths of the koto period, especially high ranking known "valuable" smiths of the time, to be very unlikely to be used for test cutting. So what we probably see are the results for their worst examples in terms of original length and original niku. That means they are competing with a great handicap against blades made in the Shinto period for Edo period typical use with original niku and length, straight from the smith. My opinion is that any reasonably healthy blade in the hands of a specialist cutter is going to perform very well provided it has the correct shape for his technique. And in addition then that the koto grades are under-reported in a direct inverse correspondence with the reverence given to the maker. I don't think any maker could get praise if they just made a beautiful blade that was completely non-functional. So my belief is that when koto were gendaito they were probably put to the test too, and that form follows function. In the case of "money is no object" you got results like Awataguchi and the circle around Masamune and the best Ichimonji products and the best Osafune products (along the main line). If you wanted cheap but durable then you'd end up with something like Kozori, close enough for the man on a budget. The only way we can really judge how those blades performed is to take a 3D laser scan of some of the ubu kokuho in mint condition as a starting point, though we don't know the techniques they used today, we could still get a smith to make one and then robot mill it to micrometer tolerance. From there just give it to the guy with the most skill available and hope for the best. I think the results would be good but it is very difficult and expensive to do this kind of test. And still won't be so accurate because we'll never truly know how they used those blades at that time. Now all that said there is only one Juyo Token blade with a four body cutting test and that is a Tegai blade. Tegai as a school is not (I think) falling into any of these ratings, though Shizu Kaneuji was re-tested at some point (according to Markus' book) and took a Sai-jo O-wazamono ranking (though he is not in the list in Wikipedia). The fact that his ranking could change again points to the sample being used, and great age being a huge variable in performance since it means the niku is messed with as well as the length. That leads to random results as I propose above and we see it in that a smith like Kaneuji would be elevated. He being a Tegai smith at his source then, this reputation agrees with the four body cutting test blade (in mostly-suguba by the way). This blade is 74cm which is something to take note as well. The three-body test blades are dominated by Shinto smiths which is to be expected (36 of the 37). Easier to test without crapping your pants about breaking it, they are replaceable at the time of testing. Healthier, they were shinsakuto or gendaito at the time. Unaltered lengths, so programmed by the smith to be ideal cutting implements and not messed up by anyone down the line. So we probably have some selection bias which skews the results is the first of the conclusions. That leads to the second conclusion which is that koto blades in their time most likely cut just as well as shinto blades did in their time, and it's not possible to say anything very conclusive about one school vs. another on cutting ability. The data is just not reliable. The reports that we have, I would call "floors". They represent the minimum possible ability vs. the Shinto ideal brand-spanking-new sword. If a maker of a blade that was 400 years old at the time of the testing was able to out-perform any modern blades, this would be a surprise. We can point at the Yamato Tegai blade with the 4 body test or various koto smiths like Motoshige or Aoe Tsugunao with ultimate or high rankings and say, those are degraded rankings... the implication then is scary. Like if you took out a 400 year old car "as-is", with equal drivers on a reasonable circuit to control for the other parameters and it beat a modern car of any sort, that would be frightening for what it said about the knowledge and technology of the bygone era. So, if I am right, cutting ability in terms of the swords parameters are length, curvature, niku and edge quality. 3.5 of the 4 controlled by the smith at the time it's made. Where does the beauty come in? Beauty is symmetry, uniformity and mix of hard and soft steels. A beautiful blade is going to be form following function to achieve a blade with a very hard edge but being durable otherwise. Screwing up the symmetry is going to blow your cutting ability. Screwing up the uniformity will introduce weakness that will lead to bending or breaking. Screwing up the mix of hard and soft steels will lead to a more brittle or more bendy blade. Some of those affect cutting since they directly work on edge hardness. All of them work toward utility because we all know that it is easier to make a hard blade that takes a razor sharp edge if you don't have to care about it breaking. Finding that ideal point in the curve of maximum hardness plus maximum durability is (now, I am guessing) going to overlap with a blade being very beautiful. That is the maximum survivable blade (survivable for the owner that is). It is not necessarily the highest utility blade because it doesn't factor in the expense of making it. If you can't afford the sword it's useless to you right? And we discussed earlier the impossibility of arming a lot of guys, especially without a lot of skill, with ultimate weapons. Economics is the last function that increases the utility. If you can reduce the cost of the blade by 90% while reducing the survivability (which I think is parallel to beauty) by only 20%, then you have a big increase of utility. That's the cost/benefit maximum that maybe you see with Yamato and then even more with Mino and Sue Bizen. A blade that is 50% as good but costs 1% as much is way, way more bang for the buck. It's less bang overall, but just more bang for the buck. So, the intention comes back, about who the customer is and what problem are you trying to solve by making this sword. The fact that mid to late Muromachi blades almost never go higher than Juyo Token reflects that they are high utility (they rate well for cutting ability, and they sure did pass the AK-47 tests in the field) but as blades just don't hit the peaks of the old blades. But that was the whole idea at the time. The ideal was just to find the cheapest blade that fit the minimum performance requirements. I think Yamato is affected by that somewhat and cost is no object is Yamashiro and Soshu. Bizen covered all the bases... Bizen being made where the great resources were but no built-in market, they (guessing again) seem to have marketed to everyone.

I wish I could tie those thoughts up into a bit better package but it's going to take a few more years of observations and thinking.

If you oil the blade as Bill suggests, then put saran wrap on it, there's going to be no issues with anything. When the wrap comes off the oil will be compressed in some places differently so you will see a rainbow effect from light diffraction, but you just wipe and the oil is gone. It's a really good method for shipping. I have received such things as Tokubetsu Juyo swords and had them vibrate in the shirasaya and cause some burnishing because of that. Saran wrap would have saved a thousand dollar shiage required to fix these things.

For Paul, yes there is a Tokuju volume 23 out. For Arnold, it's complex and I'm still thinking about the issue and have been studying it for 5-6 years. So this is not exactly a succinct response but more of a ramble of what I am thinking about. The numbers can't be interpreted flat out as A is better than B. Things that have to be considered are: Bizen scope is 600 years. Yamashiro scope is 400 years. Soshu scope (for all intents and purposes) is about 150 years. Mino scope is 300 years. Yamato scope is about 350 years (we believe it to be longer but this is generally what we see) Because Bizen lasts so long, they get the benefit of longevity producing a large number of grandmaster smiths. That causes them to occupy a lot of volume in the counts. Yamashiro's customers were in Kyoto and high ranking people. Compared to Mino who were making blades for the average warrior in large armies in the Muromachi, there is going to be a quality difference just based on the customer. There is only one true Mino Tokuju work (by Nosada) because we should really consider Shizu to be a Soshu smith in his post-Masamune capacity. This really puts Mino in dead last. But all Muromachi branches of traditions are affected by the same wave: mass production being promoted vs. quality. Bizen is also boosted because the Gokaden is an artificial construct. At the very least Bitchu should stand alone and that would deflate the numbers in a large way. 9% of the Tokuju came from Bitchu province. That is more than Yamato and Mino and Shinto and Shinshinto but it's only considered a subset of Bizen (without a really strong reason other than that they shared a border). So it's just a label and taking it away from Bizen evens things out more. Time of production is a big factor, old blades are rare and not well preserved so if you do have one then it will have a great chance of being considered a very important blade. It's just more historically significant to have a 1000 year old mint condition blade than it is to have a 100 year old one. The 100 year old thing is commonplace and the 1000 year old one might not exist. Bizen and Yamashiro both benefit from the fact that they happened to exist in that 1000 - 1200 AD period. The others basically did not... for whatever reasons Yamato either we lost its pieces or we can't properly classify them (there are exceptions) going back that far. So they just lack the age factor that otherwise benefits them in being considered a top blade. I don't think these are biases, these are objective details. Yamashiro for the first 300 years is just a story of excellence. Sanjo, Gojo, Ayanokoji, Awataguchi and Rai. There would be more Tokuju if there were more survivors from these schools. You can add more survivors to Mino and Yamato and it won't necessarily make a difference because on a blade by blade basis the chances of a masterpiece are going to be higher in Yamashiro. This doesn't say that masterpieces don't exist in the others but I think it's mostly a factor of who the customer is and what was the ability to pay? Giving a monk who is defending your temple the equivalent of a Ferrari is not a good economic decision, nor is giving a Ferrari to a guy with very little training fighting the volume based wars of the Muromachi period. You want to give them something reasonable and functional and you stop there. Higher ranking guys get higher ranking weapons. If your customer base is basically the closed economy of a temple it's different vs. serving an open market of nobles or the warrior circle around the shogun. The fact that there are extreme masterpieces in Yamato indicates that the top dogs in the temples did get their Ferrari. Just the average case is not. (We also see this in the tank battles between the Soviet Union and Germany... Germany tried to build the master tanks and these took a lot of resources and were tremendously armed and armored... tank for tank nothing could match them in the war. Soviets designed a pretty good tank with some advanced features like sloped armor but not usually well made, American advisors complained that the welds were crap and the build quality was low, but the Soviets just ignored them because the crews were getting a few hours of training, then sent to the front to get blown up after a couple more hours... your weld quality did not matter so much as your ability to put enough tanks in the field and win even if just by seeing the enemy run out of ammo. Stalin is quoted as saying "quantity has a quality all of its own"... and ultimately though the Germans destroyed 4 tanks for every 1 of their own the Soviets ended the war having produced something like 8 tanks for every 1 German so Stalin was right... that same economic decision that you don't arm your footsoldiers with the best quality weapon I think played out with the production of the Mino and Yamato smiths). Soshu smiths and Yamashiro smiths during the heydey of these traditions did not serve the average guy but they served elites, so the blades follow the pattern of who the intended customer was. Bizen is interesting because they marketed to everyone. And we see that in the output, there are schools within Bizen that won't ever see top ranked status. They weren't likely intended to be serving top ranked clients in these cases. Ford has all the capability if they want to make and compete with Ferrari but they concentrate on the mass market because the huge volume that's there is where the money is. When they dabble in the high end it's usually to create a marketing image for the rest of the brand. I look at the Mino smiths, many (most) of whom got there by way of Yamato and have Yamato roots, and this is what I see. Just a difference in the market. Elite markets made for elite swords. That's the end of what I see in the numbers when Soshu, Yamashiro, and Bizen take bigger chunks of the top ranked pie. Their output fit their markets and its especially true for Yamashiro and Soshu as we would expect since they were serving local power centers who had the money and desire to buy only the best. So I don't see it as someone now deciding they like Yamashiro so really promoting it at the expense of the others. I see it just as output matching markets. What the blade really needs to pass Tokuju is: 1. great condition 2. historical importance 3. outstanding work Historical importance means that the smith needs to be significant and the blade needs to be significant within his body of work. So Joe Average, his masterpiece won't cut it because he's not significant. On the other hand a real major smith, any particular work can actually be hurt by the reputation of the smith. If you have a Masamune, you need to have an *outstanding* Masamune to pass Tokuju because it has to compete with the other Masamune blades, as well as all blades in general. For the most part just being a Masamune and getting that attribution means it has to reflect the best of the Soshu tradition. There is no crap Masamune. It can't get that attribution if it's crap. It has to be head and shoulders over everything. In this sense a Juyo Masamune is most often going to be superior to a Tokubetsu Juyo Chogi for instance if you look at the quality and consider that the health is the same. Yet the Juyo Masamune just may not pass because other Masamune are more significant somehow and outcompete it. A famous blade, owned by a famous man, if you have one with no history then you have to compete against that. So the arch-smiths, one can't automatically think that they're going to go Tokuju or have better chances than a lower ranked smith. But if you go too low on the smith ranking then the smith isn't significant and it won't pass. And in this "passing" needs to be read as meaning "being considered a top ranked blade." It needs to compete in two dimensions, horizontally vs. other smiths and vertically vs. the smith in question. To do otherwise would cause Tokuju to be too overly represented by a small set of smiths. Tokuju has to function as a library of sorts. This is why I think Shinto blades continue to get included though pound for pound they are out muscled by the koto masterworks. They need to be represented. Some of course are really fantastic swords and deserve to be there. But, should one necessarily care more about a Tatara Nagayuki in comparison with a Soshu Sadamune? The Sadamune may fail Tokuju and the Tatara Nagayuki may pass. I can tell you what the prices will be in the market and the Sadamune will surely cost more than the Nagayuki because the market has decided that one is far more significant. This is a different type of judgment. Nagayuki has a reputation significant enough to pass so all you need to do in that case is locate one of his best works and you're in. The worst of Sadamune will be better than the best of most other smiths, otherwise it would never get attributed to Sadamune in the first place. So in this sense we need to temper what being a top blade means, and realize that reputation is a double edged sword. To break down the swords completely qualitatively and objectively may be difficult because there is a matter of artistic merit and that is taste, and when taste is handed down it is culture. What we have to go on is going back to who the customers were. Yamashiro moulded itself to the needs of the aristocrats. It represents aristocratic taste. Soshu moulded itself to the needs of the warrior elites. It represents elite warrior taste. Mino moulded itself to the needs of fielding a huge number of people on the battlefield. So did Sue Bizen and to some extent Sue Soshu. So, we get just about what we would expect. The Yugos of the sword world belong in this spot though there are outstanding works still. Yamato moulded itself to the needs of the warrior monks and the economic decisions of arming them, with some works that seem intended for elites in the ranks and probably the leaders of the elites mixed in. So what we see in the output seems to follow that expectation quite well. At the end of the day any given work just needs to stand on its own merit though. It's not possible to get to this level (in theory) without having that merit (I confess I don't always agree with the judgments and I'll admit that this only means I don't understand what they were trying to do, though I tend to believe a favor is granted here and there). So there is still room for an individual to come to their own conclusion. The matter of taste (to close up) is subjective. One can align oneself with what the elite monks thought was a superior work and feel completely fine about it. Or the Kyoto nobility... or the Kamakura generals. Mino will always have the bang for the buck. This isn't to denigrate Mino because there are obviously awesome works (Sue-Bizen being equivalent, same thing that most production is for dirty use and then mixed in there are masterpiece items for the elites of the time). Kanesada, Kanemoto, Yosozaemon Sukesada, etc. all stand out as being special. They are just surrounded though by the need to produce work at low cost. Stuff that didn't have to be used to kill demons or cut rocks. One can respect that too, minimum cost and minimum materials to solve the problem is the goal of every engineer and so the end of the Muromachi is where you get engineering magnificence. Engineers will say that anyone can build a bridge that won't fall down. The trick is to make a bridge that just barely stands up. From that sense if you were given all possible resources and time and assistance to make a masterpiece you should be able to. Give a guy a day and his own hands, basic materials and tools, and tell him to produce something utilitarian that will kill someone just fine and maybe it is a harder nut to crack? Something to think about.

One other thing you can do for each other, which Ted does and I do, and I learned from Condell, is to wrap the blade in saran wrap when you send it. Go on the mune side, wrap it around, and then carefully use scissors to trim it. Then slide into the shirasaya carefully and then bind the tsuka in place with more wrap. Just one layer and not thick at any point. This does two things: 1. Anyone inspecting it can't get fingerprints on it 2. Stops the blade from vibrating in sympathy with a truck engine, wheels on a dirt road, various carts or whatever else it may be on shaking and then scratching or buffing from rubbing against the shirasaya. 3. If the blade is inspected and not properly replaced into the shirasaya then you won't have damage from the bigger problem of sliding in and out of the shirasaya when it goes back into the box. The goal is to always be ahead of the curve so nobody wants to open your box. Then you want to have some failsafes in place in case they do go into the box. A note on the inside explaining what the contents are, rare and delicate and please be careful, goes a long way too. If you're shipping and you care about what you're shipping, this method is very beneficial. It takes more work, but it's better than insurance paying off for a new shiage.

9307.00.00 is swords, bayonets, cutlasses, and is a great code to use if you want customs to destroy your item where weapons are prohibited. 9706.00.00 is what you want to use, which is antiques greater than 100 years old. If you don't use this code, then you basically force a broker to stop the package so someone can read the description and assign a code to it. When the assign the code you may get something like 9307 (do not ever use 9307!!!!) and then you're boned. You will have to pay duty as well as tax or have it destroyed or confiscated and get yourself a real pain in the ass of having to prove what it is. Customs have powers that are second only to god. If they decide it is a 9307 then it is and it's up to you to prove differently. The main differences are: 1. one is a weapon period, the other is an antique 2. one is dutiable, the other is duty free If you have a Showa era antique you can still use the collectors items of historical/ethnographic interest (and other types fall in here). You can even try that on a sword made by a licensed Japanese swordsmith from Japan since they are licensed by the government for the reason of perpetuating a historical artform. A Japanese-like sword made in China, Taiwan, USA, etc. cannot be classified as one of these. Basically the WWII sword is a collector's item of historical interest and the modern made but licensed sword is an item of ethnographic interest (i.e. culturally significant). 9705.00.00 should be duty free but I never tried it myself so your mileage may vary and it may be a country to country thing. It is duty free for Australia: https://ftaportal.dfat.gov.au/code/97050000/tariff?option=jpn-import&search=9705.00.00 If I haven't made myself clear NEVER USE 9307.00.00 !!!!!!!! I made a huge post on this before. Do your homework before sending something and overdocument it. Make sure the vendor knows to put these codes on it. If you are sloppy then when customs does your tidying for you, you get to listen to them tell you how it is. Then everything is on your head to fix it. The reason being that so many people are trying to burn their own countries out of tax revenue and sneak stuff in or out that countries have found there to be a need to issue draconian powers to their customs officials. It's been like this for like a thousand years.

You can pump hawley numbers into Nihontoclub. Search: http://nihontoclub.com/view/smiths Or link: http://nihontoclub.com/smiths/MAS590

Is it papered?

They have been doing Tokuju since 1972 and there are less than 1,000 swords accepted in total. There are around 100 tosogu accepted. If it were a "cakewalk" and they were "cranking them through" then these would not be the numbers now would they? Tokubetsu Juyo represents the best sword out of every 13 Juyo roughly. An item that did not pass Juyo on the first try is never going to pass Tokubetsu Juyo. Every single sword submitted to this shinsa has been vetted by friends and dealers who have experience with Tokuju swords and know what the requirements are. Many have been passed through Tanobe sensei for sayagaki and have gotten his opinion on whether the blade is worthwhile to try to submit. Nobody is trying this unless they feel there is more than a break even chance to get one through. Yet the vast majority fail. Very minor things can derail a sword from passing. Things that are not on the papers factor in. 25% of the blades that did pass Tokuju are known to have been in daimyo collections. This is vs. 5% of Juyo. The other 75% will be at a level sufficient to believe that they probably were in daimyo collections too. Major dealers will submit good candidates that they sat on for two years to have a chance to submit and have no success. I saw one such sword, almost two years ago, a fantastic Nanbokucho masterpiece in 100% health though suriage by a Sai-jo saku smith. This I was shown for kantei and nailed it and I asked to buy it. The dealer said "no papers" but that I had the right smith. He put it through lower papers and confirmed it as the guy we thought it was. He wouldn't sell it. It went to Juyo and passed on first submission easily. I asked if I could buy it now, he just smiled and shook his head. This is because he is thinking it will sail through Tokuju. Me too. Now, here are the results and it's not there. So now probably it will be available for sale as he won't want to wait another two years. This guy knows what he is doing and I mostly do as well. We're both surprised but that's how it is. In 15+ years of fooling around with swords this is the first time I've ever heard anyone suggest that Tokubetsu Juyo is easy. This is not a conclusion supported by any evidence, either in the items that passed as shown or in the count of items that have passed historically. This is not the largest session and this is not the smallest session. The NBTHK passes them it seems to reflect the total count of Juyo to continue to make Tokubetsu Juyo the "best of the best" category. I know firsthand some amazing and important items that should have passed I felt but didn't. So does everyone else because nobody is submitting stuff they think doesn't stand a reasonable chance of passing. After they fail everyone always wants to know why they failed like there is something wrong with the blade, and the answer is usually "look at the stuff that passed" though there are always some head scratchers.

PS. now that's a research chart.

Here's the primer on Tokubetsu Juyo. First, it's supposed to be the model of the "best of the best". Quoting Tanobe sensei "it's the upper half of Juyo Bijutsuhin." The smith's reputation, the health of the blade, especially in areas we may overlook (boshi and niku) is extremely important. Period is also very important as you can see in this issue 92% were koto. 8% were shinto. 0% were shinshinto. Naginata are often as well made as swords so pass but they are rare to find in older periods. Yari are not usually as well made so they don't tend to pass so well. Only one ever went. For a long time these were also considered disposable so a good record of old yari and naginata is hard to come by. Tanto, many master smiths of the Kamakura period worked in tanto primarily so we see a lot of tanto. Wakizashi are generally a Shinto thing. They do pass for smiths like Sukehiro, Kotetsu, etc. who may have taken a special order from a rich merchant and so made lights out work. Before the Shinto period a ko-wakizashi in Soshu style is the kind of thing that is completely fine to pass. But a tachi shortened into a wakizashi is a really big modification so removes something that's very important in passing Tokuju: sugata. Everything is a balance of the merits and ideally everything is perfect or as close as possible, then there is a competitive aspect where you need to beat out others in order to get in. There is some balance of Yamato to Yamashiro to Bizen etc. and there is some balance of Koto to Shinto. Some facts: 1. Katana (mumei suriage tachi and zaimei katana) are 40% of what pass 2. tachi are 30% 3. tanto are 11% 4. wakizashi are 7% (and these are mostly nanbokucho type things) After this are koshirae and tsuba with everything else really being small and exceptional. Looking at the data another way: 1. Kamakura are 48% 2. Nanbokucho are 23% 3. Edo are 10% 4. Heian are 6% 5. Momoyama are 7% 6. Muromachi are 4% Edo is bumped up by the fact that tosogu are mostly Edo. Everything else is split... Kofun stuff passes but is so rare to find so it's small. Meiji can pass if it is extreme. So your ideal item to submit is a signed Kamakura tachi by a well known smith. In general they are looking for true archetypes of some sort and Edo wakizashi is not something very high on the list. I try to learn from this and model what I do based on what they're putting emphasis on. It's not about a nice blade, it's about the most important out of the important blades. My Yukimitsu passed this year as it is a dead ringer for Shintogo work and is very healthy with excellent niku and great activity and jihada. It also tells a story which shows that Yukimitsu learned this style which is based on Awataguchi from Shintogo and this happens before the midareba Soshu revolution. Picking Juyo is hard but picking Tokuju is harder. It needs to really abandon the "nice sword" thoughts that pervade people's imaginations about why something is a candidate. It can be nice as you want but it's not what they're looking for. Important is important, so the best smiths will dominate Juyo. When you get to Tokuju levels the best of the best dominate the rest. What follows below is a tradition chart of Juyo vs. Tokuju works. Koto Bizen dominates both, being almost 30% of Juyo but it's 41% of Tokuju. So the best of the best tends to be Bizen. This is also though based on frequency: there are a lot of Bizen masterpieces to pick from. Soshu is 10% of Juyo but is 15% of Tokuju. So while Bizen has a 33% boost going into Tokuju, Soshu has a 50% boost. This implies that Soshu is quite rare but punches very high at Tokuju. Yamashiro also boosts , 12% of Juyo up to 17% of Tokuju. What this tells people is that the three main areas of the peak importance are Bizen, Soshu and Yamashiro schools. Yamato on the other hand falls from 9% of Juyo to 5% of Tokuju. The work is not competitive when you raise to filter for the top works. Shinshinto falls from 2% of Juyo to 0.18% of Tokuju. A 10x drop. Shinto is 14% of Juyo but 8.7% of Tokuju. It tells you if you want to seek the best swords for collecting, you concentrate on Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu koto. If you keep the quality up you will increase your chances too that they will go higher in terms of papers. But this shouldn't be about papering, it's about what the top experts think are the most important things. It is kind of a money is no object thing to be talking about great Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu smiths but that is the thought, that if you are to pursue greatness, this is where it's concentrated, as together they represent 72% of all the Tokuju that pass. What you need to take home from this is that most Edo wakizashi don't really register in the top brackets as art items. Muromachi is also hard as is Shinto and Shinshinto. Exceptional pieces in all of these will also be exceptional pieces period. Of the Gokaden there is a clear heirarchy and that is Bizen, Soshu and Yamashiro at the top, Yamato and Mino and then Majiwarimono (hard to classify), and Shinto below. At the bottom, Shinshinto. In terms of how we view importance.

I am in on the ebook. Got me a tsuba to research.