Darcy

Thanks Pete, I will amend my list (now fixed). Masamune: this naginata naoshi I remember from about 12 years ago, it sold for around $600,000. There is only one. The setsumei on the back was a bit uncertain on the attribution but said it was top Soshu work. Color me a bit surprised but there you have it. The alternate would be Shizu for this style I think. Norishige has six Juyo naginata naoshi. The Akihiro I originally thought was the Jubi one, but didn't remember it passing Juyo in the last session (it will pass for sure, I don't think it was submitted yet). I think instead it is one of the early Juyo, it's dated "Oan san" (Akihiro has a habit of not using the month or day in his dating sometimes). The blade looks healthy and is something that would qualify. Pretty sure this is the Masamune as there is only one: I think this is the Akihiro:

The 2016 Tokubetsu Juyo shinsa is over and the results have been published to the NBTHK website. http://www.touken.or.jp/pdf/2016-04-27.pdf I did a quick transliteration of what is there. I missed one item of kodogu but the rest should be ok. http://nihonto.ca/tokuju-2016.html At least five blades owned by foreigners (non-Japanese) passed. This is just what I have picked up from my own clients and from the gossip circle. So that already is pretty good. Three on the list were items I sold to my clients as Tokuju candidates so I am pleased with the result and will pat myself on the back a bit.

Too early to submit.

When I die this will be it. Still evolving but it'll all be there.

I think if you look up Kanesada in Nagayama he illustrates what it looks like... I vaguely recall. More like a bean in the hamon.

Good discussion. I think the Showa wakizashi was probably intended as a small katana rather than a long wakizashi. Just guessing. At this point it's clarified as Osafune Kiyomitsu rather than Kaga. Osafune Kiyomitsu is between a school attribution and an individual attribution, isolating it to work of the line. So it's saying that the most reasonable conclusion is that one of the Kiyomitsu smiths made this but there is no significant work shown that would allow someone to say more than this (similar to the Umetada assessment in one of the other threads). For study, probably you will find more in studying Kiyomitsu than in a Showa work unless the Showa work was fine work by one of the top smiths of the period and in which case it would be also highly collectible. O-suriage mumei Muromachi works are not considered in the same category as older works where mumei is almost a standard situation. In the case of consideration for top level papers, Muromachi mumei works will not be accepted higher than Tokubetsu Hozon (or is it now Hozon? Someone will clarify). In looking at Juyo to Tokubetsu Juyo, an unsigned but otherwise mint condition blade may have better chances to pass Tokubetsu Juyo than a signed but less healthy blade for works older than Muromachi. But the price relationship does not necessarily follow the papers as there may be a relative abundance of healthy Tokuju blades compared to signed ones. Anyway this is not so relevant to the case in point. I'm just mainly wanting to make a distinction there there is not so much a clear dividing line gendai / shinshinto / shinto / koto when considering works like this, but it is more like gendai / shinshinto / shinto / momoyama / muromachi / nanbokucho-kamakura / heian Each one of these groupings will have different levels of condition that are considered poor, adequate, or exceptional. An exceptional condition Shinshinto blade is maybe on its first polish, flawless, showing ububa and no alterations of any sort and a beautifully finished nakago with nothing impaired. An exceptional condition Heian blade is just going to be ubu and signed and you have a unicorn right there. Adequate condition in regards to mumei is at the line between the Kamakura-Nanbokucho group and Muromachi. This blade being suriage and in the Muromachi group means it is below adequate condition. As such then as a buying target it is purely based on bang for the buck in what you can see and where you are in the scope of beginner to advanced student and the acceptance that reselling in this condition is difficult as you have bought from the bottommost part of the category (ideally then you saved a bunch of money in recognition of the condition). Anywhere above Muromachi you need to accept that mumei and/or suriage are major detractors from value. Below they are standard and the signature being there is a big bonus. Ultimately if your goal is to keep your spending down and get a blade that will let you learn what a sword is, and what koto Bizen looks like and to start internalizing it, it's OK. If it is the best sword you can comfortably get with the budget you've set, this is OK too, as long as again you're not worried about getting rid of it. But it's not the kind of thing to go horizontally and extend into a collection because you will end up with a large quantity of problems rather than a small quantity of excellence. Also some people who start with swords at the top level but are not serious about them end up ruining the blade. If you are unsure of your level of commitment to caring for such a thing, a blade like this can be advisably better to start with. But if you're committed usually the best thing you can do for yourself is to buy the best and most complete package that you can, and this will retain desirability down the line more than a problematic piece. This is the reason why you don't want to go wide and long horizontally with similar types of pieces. The same expenditure will get you a better experience as a collector to get a better blade, no matter what level you're collecting at. Illustrating the point: 200 rust buckets out of polish could cost you $20,000. You would be better off spending the $20k in a good sword that is in polish by a talented smith from any period. This is the exaggerated description of wide and horizontal vs. narrow and vertical. Every collection though falls into the same parameters, even if you say bought 200 Juyo blades by middling schools that barely passed Juyo you would have an expense say of around 9 million dollars. If you were to approach collecting with a budget of 9 million dollars you could get some of the true masterpieces of all time by the top smiths. And somewhere in the region of 15 of the best swords in existence. An ideal collection is going to find some kind of balance between quantity and quality. As soon as you start going too far horizontal, trimming the fat and edging the quality up will make your collection better for study, more interesting for others to experience, and better for retaining value.

Because Darcy has not seen it - it does not exist? The burden is not on me to disprove that swordsmiths signed in gold mei. I have looked at 13,000 Juyo works. In none of them did the swordsmith sign in gold. The burden of proof is on the person who is making the extraordinary claim. It's always like this. If everyone thought the earth was flat, and you said it was round, it's not up to them to disprove you. Even if you're right. It's for you to prove your extraordinary claim. This is why I said above I would be happy to be shown a counterexample. In a world that we now know to be round, if someone wants to say it's flat, it's up to them to prove their claim if they want to be taken seriously. In the modern round world, one can go about showing the flat earth guys the proofs that the earth is round: but it's also fair to suspect that they have already encountered evidence for the world being round in their life, and have rejected it. Thus, trying to provide them with a sound logical argument that the world is round and disprove their claims of it being flat is about as productive as trying to hold water in a sieve. If they cannot understand the facts and logic that shows that the world is round, repeating it to them doesn't win them over. You're lacking a mutual language to have a logical argument. So it becomes pointless. It falls back then to the simplest case that the person making the extraordinary claim is the one who bears the burden of evidence. If they use pseudoscience, conjecture, appeals to emotion and other fallacies to make their point and they believe all of this is logical argument, then again you will have a failure to ever communicate to them that they are wrong. You can however though say they never did produce hard evidence for the validity of their theory and until they do that it's fine to dismiss. If you want to claim that Tadayoshi and Sukehiro are the same person, you need to provide evidence. Real evidence, not one of your strange flowcharts that make sense to you. Facts, and evidence, not conjecture and handwaving. If you want to claim that the Umetada school signed swords with gold mei then you need to show some works that are universally accepted as having been made like that. You can do that at any time. If you're right then they are out there and you can find them and can substantiate your point. Until then it's fair to believe that no, they didn't sign swords like this. This is a reasonable point of view. If you want to claim that you can make a perpetual motion machine, then you need to actually make it and other people need to be able to duplicate your approach. If your proof of perpetual motion machines is to link a Youtube video and say "look!" well, those are all funny things that people make with hidden motors and batteries and generate millions of hits which make them money. They are appealing to the uninformed and the stupid, or to those who will just giggle and enjoy the contraption they've made for the cleverness. But it's not a proof of anything. Your charts fall into this kind of example. They're basis for speculation but they're not evidence of anything other than that you may believe this. This directly addresses the kind of logic failure seen here: Because Darcy has not seen martians - martians do not exist? Putting my name into the statement is an appeal to emotion, trying to make it personal, that I am putting myself up as the arbiter of what is true and what is not. Secondly, take my name out, and you're asking us to believe that: 1. It's reasonable to believe Martians exist even though there is no evidence for them. -or- 2. That a lack of evidence of Martians existing implies that martians must exist. Rather, when we examine all the evidence and we see no evidence for Martians the RATIONAL conclusion is that Martians do not exist, failing the production of evidence to the contrary. If you want to make claims based on your "research", then you need to substantiate them. If you want to claim that this is a gold signature made by one of the Umetada smiths, then you need to find established, published evidence. You're not allowed to rely on appeals to emotion or to your own personal "research" which at best is highly questionable and at worst has received a lot of derision on this board. If you want to take it seriously, you need to produce real examples. You don't get to make these charts that look like Glenn Beck conspiracy theories and think that because it looks reasonable to you it's a proof. Any two Japanese characters written by two people share similarities, if they didn't, they would not be interchangeably legible. I think part of the problem that you're experiencing is that they all look the same to you, so you draw these strange conclusions from things you think you "see" that are not there. If you see a mekugiana in a certain place in one sword, and it's in the same place in another sword, you make an unsustainable leap of pure faith that therefore these are the same smith. Even if the books say that one is long dead by the time the other is a child. You don't let the facts get in the way of these imaginary connections that only you can see. You just plow ahead with more charts. The charts are not convincing in the least because they don't make any sense to anyone but you. In the case where nobody has seen anything, for instance we can say Rai Kuniyoshi, does he exist? Well, nobody has seen any, but the old books say he did exist. So, basically any opinion is fine to take because we have no true evidence one way or another. We cannot disprove his existence. We also can't prove it. If you want to say he certainly did exist, then it's fair for someone to say no, you can't know that for sure without evidence of a signed sword. Similarly you can say well you can't know for sure he didn't exist, because you can point to the old books as citations and make a reasonable statement that these people didn't usually pull things out of thin air. Whatever conclusion you want to make is then based on faith and what type of source you make. The NBTHK handles this by straddling the issue, saying that old books say Kuniyoshi existed and is the founder of Rai, but we don't see his works now, so Kuniyuki is the de facto founder. If someone finds evidence one day of a signed Kuniyoshi and it is universally accepted then the books can be rewritten and Kuniyuki becomes the nidai. These are cases though where we have no strong evidence one way or another. It's not the case of looking through 13,000 examples of the top works, and also failing to find any evidence anywhere to support the point that smiths signed swords in gold mei. Making up a reason why it could have happened is not facts or research, it's speculation. But believe me, if you can find an expert citation from someone who saw evidence of this, or an actual example, I will certainly change my mind to it being a process done in rare moments for some known or unknown reason. But not because you made it up or are speculating. Because you're not a reliable expert by any means. If you discovered the sword yourself and other people accepted it, that would be fair for me too. But I don't think you have. Now, in the case of the NTHK, it's very simple, you can write to Bowen or whomever and show them this paper and ask them if they believe this mei was made by the maker of the sword and filled with gold. If they say yes, then here is one example that will have some support by experts. That is called gaining traction. If the NBTHK will also say the same then it starts moving toward acclaim. But this is not the interpretation I get from the papers. I'm open to being wrong. You just need to show me. Not with magic handwaving, conjecture, and poorly reasoned arguments. It's for you to substantiate the claim if you're going to make the claim. Until then, the reasonable response is, "No." Graphologists would label the sword Myoshin/Shigeyoshi by the niji-mei. Speculation again with no basis.I think that you have trouble identifying differences in signing styles and because of that you can't differentiate easily and think automatically everyone else sees like you. A color blind person who cannot tell the difference between red and green can shout at the top of their lungs that the two colors are identical. He can say everyone will surely agree with him because they are exactly the same. Only in his perception is that true though, someone with better eyes will see the differences. Every time you post your stuff, I surely don't see what you see nor do the more educated people of this board seem to see it. They don't even want to expend the energy engaging with you on it. At some point it's just wasted energy. Like trying to argue with the guy who says the earth is flat and rejects all evidence to the contrary but cannot at the same time prove his point with evidence. To expend energy (like I am now) is a lot of waste. Simply UMETADA will suffice. The client requested it as such. This is called conjecture. Conjecture and speculation are the things that hold your charts together. Similar to Glenn Beck's beautiful work. What you need is evidence and proof, and that stops it from being conjecture and speculation, but your posts never have any of this. You present it all as statements of fact. Because you believe it doesn't mean it's fact. The confusing part is that either you're a really well intentioned but poorly studied guy who is putting a lot of effort into a misguided approach to study, or else you're a very hard working troll. It's hard to understand how else these things can be generated. Most of the board believes you're a troll but I don't necessarily believe that. Maybe I'm the fool then, I don't know. Go see "Atakigiri" in the Fukuoka Museum. You may just have to get out and see more blades. Expand your knowledge. How many good blades have you studied? And in person? I think you're entitled to say that if you have studied them. There are not a lot of Norishige katana. The NBTHK has made 50 of them Juyo. 97 total works of Norishige Juyo. I am aware of five below Juyo and probably there's some more waiting to be found and by no means can anyone firmly conclude past what is documented what is out there. But I owned a reasonable percentage of Norishige blades (for one person). Around seven percent of them have been mine. I feel capable then from intimate study to make some reasonable statements about Norishige. I don't say conclusions or state facts but I can make some reasonable observations based on first hand study. If someone wants to say Norishige is no good then I'd say you need to go out and see more blades like you did, but I don't see any reason to believe that you're in the same boat. Benson's personal experience with great blades is far greater than mine and I would expect someone like him to make a reliable first hand statement like this. I would bow down to his experience and knowledge. Similarly someone who has only seen Norishige in books, I would hope would take something I have to say about Norishige as having some utility and insight that they may never have had. But, I don't see that you're in that position unless you want to tell us how you got there. I know myself it's hard and expensive. DARCY...You do love "quotes" and semantics and I agree that you do have a vast knowledge (compliment<<). What you call "quotes" is called addressing the point directly if you're arguing with someone. It's useful to make a point by point disassembly of the magical handwaving that holds together these speculative arguments. Quoting something else in support of your argument is substantiating your point. Refusing to do either is appealing to various forms of fallacies. If you want to say I'm relying on semantic arguments for instance, you can substantiate that accusation. But without substance it's just noise in a "fight." BUT please talk about the blade in question as you've talked a lot about what 'I have actually said' (flattering) and totally ignored identifying the blade in this blog. This illustrates a failure to recognize what kind of discussion we're having here. I don't even have an opinion on who made the blade. I'm trying to explain why the NTHK's approach in this case was reasonable. I'm trying to explain why your approach is unreasonable. In order to show why your approach is unreasonable I need to address your points. Since I am not making any claims myself about who made it, I have nothing to directly comment on this blade about. Consider if you said that you found a painting and it's by van Gogh. I say it's not by van Gogh. You get upset because you want me to argue about who made it and venture an opinion. However, I am not saying I know who made it. I am arguing that your statement that it was made by van Gogh is based on conjecture and limited knowledge. I'm not even arguing the absolute truth. If one were to accept that an Umetada smith made this, then if everyone on the NMB picked one smith of this school and then made a handwaving argument about why that smith made it, one of the members would be correct. He would be correct for the wrong reasons: if it must be an Umetada smith, you run out of options, and if you cover all the options, then someone will be right. But his reasoning is the problem. Your reasoning is the problem. IF this is an Umetada smith then you certainly have a chance to be correct in your conclusion. But that can still make your argument a failure. Back to the painting, If someone else says this is certainly an 18th century painting and no more can be said about it, and you want to attack that person for not being specific enough, I will also tell you that this is not an argument based on a well founded approach. If you further claim that if an expert will not go further than a period statement based on pure knowledge, that he should GUESS and sign his name to it, and you think that is a valid approach, I will also argue that this is not the correct approach either. In none of this am I required to have an opinion about who made the painting. My opinion can just be that the answer is not easily known and if you're going to wave magic wands while your approach is in your own words authorizing "leaps of faith", that you have already invalidated your own methods by including that phrase in the arsenal of tools to be used in assessing who made a work. Leaps of faith are OK for sitting around having a beer with your friends. Experts will indeed make them. But when serious time comes and they need to create a document and sign their names to it, then they don't use leaps of faith. Criticizing them for not leaping to a conclusion isn't founded on anything scientific. Boeing engineers don't go and make a plane and put it in the sky based on a leap of faith. They don't take stuff from suppliers, with the suppliers signing off on the parts as working to spec based on leaps of faith all around. Now you will buy a ticket to fly on that airplane based on a leap of faith. But your leap of faith is also based on known published safety incidents which are very, very small, so it is not requiring a lot of faith. Go fly on a 1960s spec Tupalev in Idunnowhereistan and now you have to take a real leap of faith. Leaps of faith like that are not currency in the real world though, because they're not reliable. Experts trying to give you something you can rely on will stop at the first statement that they cannot firmly back up. Or should anyway. To fail to do so is to lose out on reliability. Failure to understand that this is important (reliability) is a failure to understand why we want papers at all. If you think that your methods are excellent and beyond reproach, that your leaps of faith are justified and accurate, and your opinion is higher than the NTHK in these matters, then it's a reasonable conclusion that you can start issuing papers online from pictures. How well you do in the marketplace will indicate how strongly people agree with you. It's fine to challenge the findings of a paper. You can come to your own conclusion. But to be blinded to how they got to where they got and why, that's not reasonable, that's showing a lack of study and experience.

The ken handle is called a "Vajra" (maybe only by itself, as a tsuka, maybe sankozuka) ... the identical horimono (to Jacques' post) is found on one of his own blades that is Juyo. This style though is not common at all in Myoju's horimono. He did a lot of free standing dragons and then traditional horimono like you would see on works of Rai Kunitoshi. There are no horimono set in panels among any of the Juyo work, though there is one Juyo Bunkazai. Set inside panels in relief is much more frequently found in Echizen (Yasutsugu, Kotetsu) smiths. But Myoju did at least one and I can't find the other Juyo Bunkazai to check others. Not much to go on in the Juyo stuff. I think if the NTHK felt it was Myoju they would have said Myoju.

It's important to treat it at least at face value to some degree because it is uninformed at the very best, and at the worst it is deliberately misleading noise being injected into the messageboard. We know the quality of what is being presented, but someone new coming in won't know the difference. Answering the points is important because these posts will exist long past our deaths. As has happened already to some members who posted here, they are gone but their thoughts live on. On kinzogan: I've never seen anyone try to consider kinzogan mei as an authentic signature of a smith, and without being able to examine the chisel strokes and the depth of the strokes it's not possible to authenticate. If you took a Kanemitsu and filled the signature with gold it would obliterate half the information needed to determine who made it. Swordsmiths didn't sign in kinzogan (willing to see a counterexample), no Umetada smiths signed blades in two characters (willing to see a counter example).

Next up, My Perpetual Motion Machine and Why It Works

When you're done here, do Momoyama and newer.

As to how the habaki can get on and can't get off, you guys answered the question already. New nakago is thicker than the old one. So the habaki won't go up it. Solution: put the habaki above the weld, weld away. Habaki now cannot go very far north or south and is permanently stuck in there.

I usually start by thinking I'm going to write three lines. Late at night in the dark, time sense falls apart and next thing I know... Long Post Time.

I'm not a polisher so I can't say where I'd expect one of these to turn up the activity or not. Ted recently polished one and can comment.

Also look at the rest of the pictures of the sword (on my site), you will see at most angles and lighting conditions you can't see any of this at all in the jihada. Move back and forth from your light source and you will find that there is a good distance involved that will make it pop up more. I think it is basically weaker than people may otherwise use in order to properly see utsuri, otherwise the intensity of the light is too overwhelming and you won't see it. It's kind of ghostly but on some swords it will pop pretty strongly (rarely).

Oh for _____' sake everything deleted again after a quiote is used. Please, please look into this bug. I'm not rewriting all that again. Grr. The last statement is that this blade is not signed. It has an attribution mei added by a later unknown expert. If you can't tell who that expert is then the judgment carries no weight. Confirming that judgment, if anything, is a bit more stressful than judging a mumei. Because you're agreeing with a guy who never bothered to sign his name. So you need to be sure about what you're saying. School work is a safe call vs. making it a specific smith. But it's less safe than saying it's just a tradition. The committee wants to make a call that all its members can support, as specific as possible before the judges start dropping out. That's all. They made the right call here if they think it is anything. And it's easier to upgrade later and be more specific with more information. You don't make a leap of faith to Rai Kunitoshi and then downgrade it later to enju school. It is appropriate if you suspect it is Rai Kunitoshi but not sure, to say Enju school and make sure you are safe. In later years your suspicion can be studied and then upgraded if it holds water and you have a happy owner. Once you say Rai Kunitoshi because you did a leap of faith, now you're hung on it and people will use your leap of faith as evidence that their Enju is also Rai Kunitoshi. Now the whole thing implodes quite quickly as it's not a functional system to use faith in making attributions.

God damn this quote bug. Eating half my posts. The rest of my post was: Nobody wants papers that are leaps of faith. Nobody. And nobody should be advocating for papers that are leaps of faith. That defeats the point of papers if the judges can just throw crap down that they're not accountable for with a logical path that gets there. No faith should be involved in a judgment. The safeness of the call is based on what the observable facts are about the blade. You keep coming to some kind of oddball point that if you remove observable evidence that a judge should still be able to come to the "correct" conclusion, and no, it doesn't work like that. Every fact you erase is going to make it less likely to get there. And there is no correct answer. The best Shizu you can answer Masamune and it's a good answer. You get there by logic and knowledge and observing all the right things. And you have to understand historically that there is overlap, some Masamune became Shizu and vice versa over the years. Where the exact line is is not clear. These two smiths work in styles that are closer to each other than anyone else so we don't know exactly where one begins and one ends. We can just look at these on the far left and say those are definitely Masamune, and on the far right these are definitely Shizu. And if the quality is not as good as the best Masamune but the style is right, then that is probably Shizu based on the assumption that Masamune was a better smith. But all of this can be logicked out.

If they're sure, they will do so. That they didn't means they were not sure. I'm failing to understand the disconnect here. School attributions happen all the time. Ichimonji, Enju, Shimada, Awataguchi, Gojo, Goto, and so on. If I took a Masamune, broke it in half, and filed off the hamon, would they still attribute it to Masamune? If I took a Goto Sojo menuki and smashed them with a hammer and submitted them, would they still attribute to Sojo? If you remove the identifying features of a blade and then submit it, then of course you are less likely to receive the answer that you're anticipating. There is no way to know if any answer is correct, it's just an opinion and a judgment. In their opinion, considering the blade as a whole, they felt Umetada school was reasonable and they thought the kinzogan was done in good faith. So they papered it as such. If they thought Myoju then they'd have said so. Lacking features to call it as Myoju and with work that could be any Umetada smith of sufficient skill for the rest of it, in their opinion, they agreed with what was on the nakago. It is really a simple and straight forward process to understand what they did. It wouldn't ever be gimei because it was a mumei tanto to which an attribution was attached. Kinzoganmei is done like that purposefully to show that it is not an attempt to fake a signature. That's why the gold is there. Gold I believe is an indication of the seriousness of the appraisal since you wouldn't be doing that in the back yard for the hell of it. That shows a complete lack of understanding as to what they're doing. They're looking at the condition and structure and deciding if that is consistent with the time period. This is not random and pulled out of thin air. If that is consistent then they're looking at the style of manufacture, and that includes the horimono and deciding if this also is consistent with the school. If there is no objective reason to disagree with the judgment, and there is enough information to agree with it, they will confirm it. Because it seems like black magic to you doesn't mean it is. You can go into the doctor's office and get an MRI, because you don't understand the physics or the equations behind it, doesn't mean that there is no scientific process there that leads up to a useful result. You can certainly question the validity of the paper, but you need to have a reasonable argument. The fact that they failed to put it to an individual smith is not a reasonable argument. In fact it's a completely unreasonable argument, one that experts like Kanzan specifically wrote about, that at times they had a necessity to put things to a school and he felt it was a shame that collectors were not prepared to accept such judgments. And that to go further than a school in some cases was to make a judgment call based on very small bits of information that may not be consistent with the judgment being accurate. What you're asking for is exactly what Kanzan was lamenting.

Dark part above the hamon is called the antei. It's hard to know if you're seeing utsuri as it's extremely hard to photograph utsuri. What you've done there is about as good as you can get unless you know very much what you're doing and even then it's hard. What you're describing, how it is seen only at a certain angle then vanishes is the correct experience. You can see complex utsuri with multiple layers here (Fukuoka Ichimonji). The dark part immediately above the hamon is the antei. High res: http://nihonto.ca/fukuoka-ichimonji/sh/121.jpg http://nihonto.ca/fukuoka-ichimonji/sh/150.jpg http://nihonto.ca/fukuoka-ichimonji/sh/151.jpg

This is sudareba. I don't see it in yours. But not all of them show sudareba. It's maybe 50%.

Compare: http://nihonto.ca/shigekuni

When this was founded I was told by one of the founders that they had no intention of doing shinsa. That it was about the current state of preservation of the arts and for and about craftsmen and their craft and preserving it, rather than about antiques. If the mission has changed, I'm not aware of it. It's not competitive with the NBTHK, it's complimentary and I think was seen by the primary players as a way of assuming control over the issues that concern them.

It's the secret signature that Soboro Sukehiro made for Sukesada.

How can you be surprised? They didn't see anything more to go on than to confirm a school attribution. So that's what they did. It is a safe call. Sometimes you need a time machine to get more detail.

BTW, sayagaki is very Japanesey... it's optional and a gift. But people generally give 30,000 yen. Fees on top are for someone to run it out and run it back and that can cost another 15 or 20,000 yen. Have to make two runs and that is about a day on trains. I was told by someone recently that he believed that sayagaki were just for western consumption and I don't think that is the case at all. Sayagaki predate western collectors even being on the scene. A lot of blades that have never left Japan have sayagaki on them already. The NBTHK judgment is a consensus and in that there are some variations of opinion. Some of that variation in opinion means that the final call is a negotiated settlement of sorts. When I sent a tanto to Tanobe sensei when he was still actively working for the NBTHK he told me that the blade was 50/50 Soshu Sadamune or Shodai Nobukuni. He pushed very hard for the gimei to be removed and he said he guaranteed it would pass Juyo but not sure as which smith. Now, he had his opinion and reading between the lines and how much he stressed to get it in indicated Soshu Sadamune. But he couldn't speak for the other judges and what would be agreed. Now he'll make a sayagaki which is his attribution in advance of the papers. If we want to think that his opinion is worth less than the other judges on the NBTHK panel you could say that the sayagaki is meaningless in light of the papers. I personally hold his opinion higher than the other judges so for me the sayagaki means a lot more than the papers. The NBTHK as time goes by and different factions push and pull it, over 60 years there have been trends and changes in attribution. People get upset sometimes when they see a lack of consistency but they forget that the NBTHK is not a machine, it's a set of people that come and go, learn and die and the composition changes. I had an Awataguchi Kuniyoshi with Juyo papers to Awataguchi. I asked Tanobe sensei (he had done a sayagaki to Kuniyoshi well before and "not for western consumption") that if we were to accept the NBTHK judgment as being Awataguchi, if it were not Kuniyoshi, who were the alternatives? I didn't think Yoshimitsu and I didn't think Norikuni and the blade had the hallmarks of Kuniyoshi's work. He thought so obviously. He laughed and he said in this case there is no alternative whatsoever, this is Kuniyoshi. I asked why did they do it like this then? He said, "They're just nervous." He's pointed at some other older judgments on swords he was analyzing, in one case the sword had a sayagaki to Soshu Yukimitsu by Kanzan. I know how Kanzan feels about Yukimitsu which is that he is a peer of Masamune and he probably believed some of his better work got taken from him. The same way I feel about Osafune Nagashige's blades becoming Kanemitsu and Chogi. So this old blade that had no papers, I looked at it and I saw no reason that this shouldn't be Masamune. I say this having owned 6 or 7 Yukimitsu now 2 of which were Tokuju. He asked me what i thought and I said I thought Masamune and I knew Kanzan liked to push for Yukimitsu so that made me feel even more that it was Masamune. He laughed and pointed at it and he said, "Safe." It is much easier to call something a Yukimitsu and in later years after decades of study elevate it to Masamune, and it is a lot harder to take a Masamune and after decades of study make it into a Yukimitsu. Especially if it comes to consensus being necessary you get a statement that people can feel safe about. It's not necessarily the opinion of the guy who knows the most on the panel. And that for me is really where sayagaki come in. It's a chance for the guy who knows the most to be able to speak his mind without being fettered. A blade coming out as "Ichimonji" you will get his opinion if it's Fukuoka or Yoshioka and that is good to know. His opinion is better than mine or most people's. If I feel it's Fukuoka and he does too then I'm happy to call it Fukuoka. Similarly if Honami Nisshu takes a blade attributed to Yamato Shizu and says this is Kaneuji then this is a great disambiguator. And the reverse applies, because they may write into the commentary this is work by the followers of Kaneuji. It's good to know what they think and I like to hear it straight from them without the filters. There is a blade out there with an Awataguchi attribution that Dr. Honma wrote up as Awataguchi Hisakuni on the sayagaki. Obviously someone thought that was too aggressive or he thought they were too tentative. The blade is very clearly end of Heian period Yamashiro Awataguchi. I can't sit here and tell you that I can separate Hisakuni easily from the other handful of the earliest smiths. But when he's saying Hisakuni he's also saying that this is the very best of the early Awataguchi smiths and it conforms to all that we know about Hisakuni and for this you can see it in that blade (it is Tokubetsu Juyo). On the one hand committee judgments are nice because they can fill in the blind spots or perform checks and balances, but in general what they are doing is going to be making judgments more conservative. More conservative does not necessarily mean more correct. It means less likely to be wrong. If we wanted to be really conservative we could just write papers and say (pre-1400 Yamashiro tradition). Every step of making an attribution goes one step further out on the limb. And the problem, if you are the best judge it is quite comfortable on the end of the limb because of what you know and the others who don't know as much as you do will be clinging to the trunk saying you're crazy out there. In the end both serve their purposes, committee judgment and single expert judgment and it is nice to be able to have both. The idea that you take home at the end of the day is informed by these other opinions and always you have to bear in mind that they are advice, based on what these guys have learned and applied, about what this thing is. You ultimately decide how much authority is carried by their opinions and if there are any grounds to challenge them.