Darcy

I found that tsuba about 15 years ago in Montreal. It belonged to the same set as the Katsuhira tsuba that became famous in Ford's Utsushi video.

First step would be to post your images rotated 180 degrees. It's like trying to recognize a face upside down. Koshirae is a non-factor in aging a blade since they were frequently changed. Shape is a factor but not the only factor. Rust and patina is a factor but you need to determine if it's suriage or if it is original. Need to look alone the mune and see if there is any narrowing above the nakago to see if there's a large effect of polish over time. The quality of the work and style of forging and hamon also factor into knowing the period of the blade. Sugata is just the biggest and easiest guideline but there is a large grey area of an average type of shape that can slide into many different periods so it isn't everything. Hard to say for sure how old your piece is without a closer look. It is kind of guesswork as it's laid out here. The nakago could be suriage in this case. It's not a really standard shape that rings a bell for me.

All I can say is.... "wow." Be really careful of self-promoting "sensei" ... always gather multiple opinions, always act conservatively. That this was cut off in the modern period is a travesty. I would have never suspected it for a moment. There is a lot to learn in here about hubris, and acting rashly on too much faith on one opinion. If it passed Tokuju like this it would have passed Tokuju before he damaged the blade. So here we have a very high level piece and neither the owner or whom he turned to for advice could understand it at all but they had no problem plowing forward with a destructive mission. Cutting off the end of the nakago is a horrific way to do it, but in hindsight it saved the mei for the future ... instead of the normal way of pounding it out which would have destroyed it forever. The casualness is really amazing to me.

That is excellent advice.

Well I made this. A little bit late.

We're often left wondering why some blades go suriage, sometimes it's "to fix a chip that won't polish out" or to fix a hagire or because the blade just broke. Sometimes the reasons are harder to understand. It was done on a Niji Kunitoshi I had (multiple times suriage) as late as WWII in order to fit well into gunto mounts. I stumbled onto this Enju Kunimura a month ago and just recently discovered that it is also Tokuju. This is a really rare example because somehow the cut off end of the nakago holding the signature was kept. How long, I don't know, but it is the only Juyo sword I know of that passed as two pieces. That was in session 22. By the time it hit Tokuju in session 18 the mei has migrated into the nakago as gakumei. I am not sure I agree with the decision to do that. There are some other that acquired kinzogan mei between Juyo and Tokuju as well. But anyway it's an interesting thing to look at so I'm posting it to share.

I think Markus put the followup in the right spot because of the context here. This thread can be separated into two though. Problem is that the Admin started the sidetrack and it's a major concern because people are in the dark. So here we are.

OK, so apparently what has happened is: 1. some time ago the NBTHK warned to be on the lookout for fake papers 2. recent notice is about Torokusho 3. this got posted to facebook and distorted to be a notice about the Hozon papers again 4. a certain someone with a vested interest in a certain group decided this was an opportunity to take potshots 5. drama ensues (as usual when the certain someone gets involved)

There is a warning going out that some people have been faking Hozon / Tokubetsu Hozon papers. Apparently it's about Torokusho and it's been misreported. Anyway, gossipish.

If he put this for 7 days then this auction will I think end with no bidders. It's not enough time horizon to catch the notice of someone who may want it and be able to pay for it (this kind of person is usually too busy to hit all the websites every day). Dealers that might have bought it quietly won't want to touch it because it will have radioactive eye dirt all over it now. It's not the normal blade for his clients or what they're used to. So though it's cheap they generally will find it to be expensive. I'd have brought it to Kurokawa san or Kawashima san or Myoga san and asked them to privately find a buyer if I were a Japanese owner of this sword and I think it would last no more than a month doing it like that. I am watching out of interest to see if someone is bold enough to make a move on it and if they do I will toast them. ' If you sell something at Christie's or Bonham's they are taking 35% of the sale. 25% from the buyer and 10% from the seller. For most people who are already bottom feeding this is a thought they can't bear accepting unless the entry price is already objectively extremely cheap. But anywhere near market value and the perception is that this is money the buyer is giving up and it has dried up a lot of the interest which used to be stronger in these auctions. Those however are auctions that can reach outside of sword circles and a Kiyomaro is close to something that would be bought outside of sword circles, but I don't think so... without very fancy mounts. I did suggest to Christie's that they try a Hong Kong auction of higher end sword stuff and got back some possible interest but no followup since then.

edit: now that the shock has worn off, toning this down a bit. It's weird.

Also one of the reasons for his auctions is that the auctions have no return policy. If you are selling something like this you don't want it to go overseas and then come back because the guy got a panic attack and returned it. You want no backsies. So he uses the auction to enforce no backsies. If you step in to buy this you know you're doing it without any return policy and if I were the seller deciding it to go I wouldn't want someone getting buyer's remorse after going through all the shades of excitement for nailing something in the treasure hunt. It's probably the primary reason to auction it.

Honestly 27M yen is pretty cheap for a Kiyomaro. I'll say "signed Kiyomaro" because some people are under the mistaken impression that signatures don't affect the value of a Muromachi and younger blade. It is typical though that people would want to cheap out and try to auction it in reverse because they assume the price is too high. The big question is: how good is this in terms of Kiyomaro's overall work. Is this upper level or lower level work. Because it is only expensive on an absolute scale but on a relative scale it isn't. For me, Kiyomaro blades never impressed much. A lot of ho-hum. Until I saw the works that were on exhibit at the Met and then I went... holy crap. So that's what the big deal is about. I haven't seen enough to make a full opinion or know for myself what the answer is to this question. They are not growing on trees. Any legit work of Kiyomaro is going to pass Juyo should someone desire the papers. I don't think the auction is to just advertise the blades. Sometimes things are just what they are and it's easy to try to read too much into things. It's not all a scam. It's not all a scam. It's not all a scam. In this situation he's asking a fair price for the kind of sword that a lot of people really want and opportunities to buy do not come along very often. Is it worth it to any of us to pay for this one: probably not. It is worth it to a lot of people to do so though. For one of them this is not overpriced and they'll miss an opportunity by trying to go backwards and offer him less than what he's asking. Sometimes the suckers are the ones who missed the opportunity to get something because they didn't truly understand what they are looking at. And if someone saw a chance to snag a Fukuoka Ichimonji at less than 4 million yen it's not about getting suckered, it's about knowing the time horizon is short and taking advantage of the seller. Such a buyer is possibly someone who's going to turn around and put it back into the market with a longer time horizon and saw a chance to make profit. The same way you can make a profit on someone who needs to sell a house tomorrow if you're willing to scoop it and wait a year to sell it at a higher price. This sword is something to watch with interest because it is a major smith and a rare item to come onto the market. I just don't think that the western market is a place I would take a Kiyomaro because it would go for a lot more on the Japanese market than what westerners would want to pay for it. So, I am really curious about this approach. As can be seen by the fact that Tsuruta san went to a western auction and paid 50 million yen to bring one home... the Japanese market will support Kiyomaro. Nobody should think he did that to keep it for himself. He's not a dumb guy so if he brought it home at 50 million yen it's because he knew he could sell it on the local market for a lot more. Times have changed somewhat but a Kiyomaro that reflects the kind of work that was exhibited at the Met is always going to have a market in the top levels of Japanese collectors and price is going to be secondary compared to the opportunity to own it. The major failing of western collectors is the thought that there is an unlimited bucket from which these things can be pulled. I'll just wait for the next one... If you are going to talk about mediocre Muromachi schools then yes, there is infinity. But when it comes to the upper echelon, no, there may not be another one come up at any time that is in your reasonable future. You can't just walk around and plunk your money down and walk off with a Masamune because you wanted to buy one. Similar to Kiyomaro. You can't even walk into a major dealer and say you'd like to buy a Soshu tradition Juyo Token. They may shake their head and say we have none. People assume if they can find one online then there must be hundreds available, and nope. There's only about 700 major Soshu Juyo blades in existence. So when you watch something like this go by you should pay attention. And don't just assume that he's reaching for the clouds with his price and he will deal it out the back door for 30% less than he's asking. There is no reason for him to flush this down the toilet at 20 million yen because the Japanese market will support the price. Some things actually are rare. And people who treat rare things like they are commodities kind of get it wrong. There actually are collectors who want something special and beating someone else down by 10% is secondary to owning something significant. This is a perfect example of real rarity. There are 45 signed examples at Juyo of which 20 of them are katana. So ... if you want one this is your chance. And it would be typical for a westerner to think, as mentioned above, that there are more of these than there really are and they can just talk him down from his price by 20% because hey, it's an asking price so it means he's trying to scam someone. People have a lot of trouble trying to peg what the value is and in these cases their approach to trying to discover the price is by probing and it just reveals that they don't know. For me this one is a learning opportunity and it's nice to see something like this become available. It's a really rare thing. I have more questions about it than statements. It is not the most flashy work of Kiyomaro but it is not sleepy. I think its solid but there are only a limited number of them, and this one represents 5% so where did it come from and why was it buried so long? Those are not suspicious questions those are just questions. This is going to be the only opportunity many people would have in their life to ever buy one. If someone had the kind of cash that they can knock something like this down and they are a significant collector of swords then this is one to buy I think. More people do need to understand rarity though. Surely there are more buried out there. Not the majority. As I wrote earlier nobody knows what is truly out there but after 60 years a lot of what we'd expect to come out has indeed come out. We're not at the point where we can dismiss surprises from ever happening, we're more at the point of knowing that there WILL be something exciting popping out every year at Juyo. But we are I am pretty sure past the peak and on the downswing. Over time less and less like this will manifest themselves out of thin air. For those of unlimited budget, this is an opportunity.

You can just hold certain Muromachi blades in your hands and that should be enough to know that some of them were very far from perfection. But you can't judge the best of them by mid to low class Muromachi works.

Interesting example with a cool hamon. Is it signed? Not clear from the photo. But it seems to be exactly what we're talking about.

If you love it and it brings you enjoyment, ultimately that is worth the price of admission. If you never sell anything then as long as you're OK with what is paid in exchange for the enjoyment that it brings, everything is good.

Only two options, EMS and checked baggage. Or put in your teeth and swim...

Also as far as I know it the sword that took the most at western auction was the Ichimonji from the Compton collection. $418k. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/a-fukuoka-ichimonji-tachi-2344121-details.aspx?from=searchresultsintObjectID=2344121sid=9d6e1680-4de3-446e-83f7-9635538c5be6 No photos on Christsie's site but I can vouch for it as being spectacular. Those are just highest at western auction though, there is a fair amount of traffic of higher end pieces in these ranges. I saw a Kanemitsu go for 45 million yen at a Japanese auction and have held five in my hands that had prices above $1 million. Well one of those is asterisk'ed because the owner refused $1 million for it and when he died the family liquidated it for half that.

Yen was on average maybe 175:1 in 1986. This is not the same sword as the one from Sotheby's. It's unusual for a Kiyomaro to pop into existence like this. The papers are not that old, 2009. One dealer in Japan told me, "Nobody truly knows what is out there." This year I bought out of Japan: Norishige katana with Honami papers, Osafune Kagemitsu tanto, Enju Kunitoki katana with Honami Kozon kinzogan mei and kao, Aoe Yoshitsugu katana with Honami Tenrai kinpun mei and papers, and nidai Hasebe Kunishige signed tanto. All of these were papered at about August 2015. All of them showed signs of being in storage a long time, similar kinds of rust and those without rust showed signs of quick touchups except for the Kagemitsu had been polished. They were just sitting somewhere until this summer undisturbed and those are high level makers but nobody knew about them. This Kiyomaro apparently was sitting around until only a few years ago undisturbed. A signed Samonji tachi appeared out of nowhere 10 years ago after everyone had written books saying there was only one and dying before the blade was ever seen. I had a Rai Kunitoshi tanto with a 1289 date and the books all said his earliest known work was 1291. It was found after the books had been written. Who knows what is still out there, even in Japan where you'd think that everything was already known. It's pretty exciting.

I don't think Sukehiro would fool anyone into thinking his work was koto Yamashiro. He made suguba and it is very good. I had one by the first generation. Osaka shinto usually makes itself stand out very much in the bright and tight jihada and hamon, and thick nioiguchi. It's hard to state it all in text but the effect is very sparkly and beautiful but it's not something that you would confuse with Rai. It gives an impression of newness throughout. The Umetada argument... honestly I have no idea where you guys are trying to come from like this. If this is shodai or nidai Tadahiro it is coming with a huge gap between the time that shodai Tadayoshi learned under Umetada. If his signature was going to follow or be influenced by the signing habits of Umetada then that would come from his time immediately under Umetada. Not suddenly out of nowhere at the end of his life. This is the classic case of putting the cart before the horse. You're starting with the conclusion that this thing is legitimate and then arguing for ways that it could possibly end up being legitimate. This is not how the game works. We start from a conservative or at best neutral position and then allow the sword to speak, and then follow Occam's razor where it leads us. Every time the sword does something awkward or unusual in its conversation with you, you are presented with a fork in the path. Each time you have to take the path with the marker that says "unusual" the greater the chance you end up at the destination "gimei" and this increases exponentially. One is a pass it's probably ok, two is uh oh and three is: bzzzzt. You have to let the work lead you, and if you insist on leading the work you will almost always end up in the wrong place because you can make up arguments for almost anything. I have a Norishige for sale on my site which is a good learning experience because it too has an unusual signature. However, this one is dead on knockout for Norishige work. The NBTHK makes a point of hammering that one home. The signature passed their examination for being the correct period. What is left is just one unusual thing and that is that the style of signature is somewhat unusual for Norishige. Now, if the work were not correct and looked like Yukimitsu and the tanto were 32cm and not correct for Norishige and then the mei was the wrong style, now you have a problem. You've quickly moved into very shaky territory. But since everything else is bang on what it does is argue to expand the definition of what the signature styles of the smith are. It helps that there is another just like it in the Juyo so it's not standing alone. If you had to bet money on the Tadahiro (and honestly you are betting money on these when you buy them) then over the long haul your money is best played with the odds not against them. If every time a sword comes up that is not right, that has a big name on it, and you consistently side up with the "buts" and "maybes" 3-5 times in the conversation with the sword then you're going to end up being burned 19 times out of 20. It's not an opinion it's just math. I don't see any reason for cautious optimism even. All I can say is that none of us have a record of being uniformly correct and I am not above the NBTHK or NTHK and so maybe they would disagree. That is just butt covering boilerplate and stating the obvious, that I'm not a top scholar or a perfect judge. But I don't see why anyone would find there to be a reasonable hope that this one is correct. All there is is a real outside shot because the mei has some serious mistakes in it and the quality is not up there with what it should be for Shodai or Nidai Tadahiro. It's not a bad sword but what is going on here is exactly why they made these things. It's just enough to confuse someone into believing it when they want to believe (in my opinion). Hope is just not a good way of doing analysis. If this were a dead ringer for Shodai work and the mei were closer and stronger and more ducks lined up then there would be more hope. If this was a smith that we had 20 good signatures of then there would be more hope for edge cases. But Hizen swords have thousands of available works to call on. So when one doesn't match the book, you have a serious problem and arguing but and maybe is not as strong a stance as when you have a really old koto blade. Starting to overlap and I think I stated the case, what I had to say is to absorb or discard at this point for what it's worth. (Also please note that the hope card on these unpapered "edge case" blades is what creates a market for them. Some of the "sensei" have put stuff like this on ebay and their websites and littered the ground with sparkly glimmers of hope, but careful parsing of their descriptions reveals all kinds of legal back doors that they have carefully engineered to say, "well I never explicitly said it was good" ... but they have created an environment which was crafted to give hope that it was good and in these cases, especially when or if they have easy access to papering services, it leaves it an open question about why they would sell such a thing with no papers when papering it removes all doubt and would let them sell it for much more... perhaps they just like the cut of your jib or the look of your face or feel like donating a few thousand dollars or more of value to you today because it's sunny out... then again maybe they know it's no good and carefully craft an environment where you can believe and they can have a back door to escape down... however they do it it's actually a misunderstanding of how fraud laws work because you don't have to explicitly make a fraudulent claim to be guilty of fraud... purposefully withholding information or letting someone lead themselves to the wrong conclusion based on partially sharing information or putting such an item within the glow of authenticity is fraud. Some of these guys have histories of quietly distributing bad stuff that would surprise you. This one not Nanbokucho as stated. This one not sho-shin gendaito as stated. And so on. But each time someone played the hope card on themselves and fell into the trap. We have all been there, and when I got started I bought a sword with a sayagaki by Kanzan to Sadamune... sold to me by someone in my city who I thought to be a friend. I thought Sadamune would be too much to hope for especially at the price of $10k as offered, but I could hope for someone Soshu and in the Nanbokucho period and the doors were open for something good. Well after I bought it an expert in Japan (and a real expert) said the sayagaki was a forgery. It eventually came out that the guy who sold it to me submitted it for papers. When I had come back to him with it being a forgery he defended it by saying look, this is a good blade because it received Tokubetsu Hozon papers when I sent it in. To Kaifu school. Which the guy deliberately held back to create the impression that it might be something better than Kaifu. Though he made no lies, he presented this in the air that it was something that it was reasonable to have an open question about, and he figured he could sit on the mental fine print of me not asking if he actually had papers for it or not, and that he could hold them back and let the sword sell as the potential for something more. He knew something that I didn't and let me speculate that it could paper to something better. A lot of sword guys think this is OK and it's not. They think it's paying your dues. But its fraud and victimizing someone. If you have a gold coin and find out that it's copper, and then turn around and sell it to someone as this coin you found and it sure does look like gold, you're defrauding him by letting him believe that it might be gold when you know it's not. And this is how a bad signature sword goes around and around and around. Because every time someone finds out it's actually no good they are the one that's burned and instead of eating it and removing the signature they will feed it back into the market and try to recover their money. There is an Ichimonji that I keep encountering (though not for a while) that has been to the NBTHK god knows how many times and a Rai Kunitoshi with no boshi that people keep submitting to Juyo. Condell was tired of people asking him about this Rai Kunitoshi by the time I saw it first well over a decade ago. I got tired of seeing it jump from table to table and people asking me about it. I told one friend who asked me about it who wanted to buy it that it had no boshi and Condell knew about it long ago and the blade had been tried a million times at Juyo and kept failing because it has no boshi. But it wasn't enough to squash the hope and he bought it anyway. Pretty sure he sold it again some time after when it failed to pass Juyo, because it has no boshi. What people fail to understand is that an otherwise fatal flaw is dealt with in stages depending on how important the smith is. If you have something that is like Ko-Hoki Yasutsuna it could possibly pass Juyo with no boshi provided it is ubu and zaimei because it is an incredibly important thing and the age gives it a pass on no boshi. This same thing won't work if the blade is end of Kamakura and mumei. But that blade could get Hozon or Tokubetsu Hozon considering. Move to the Shinto period and no boshi is now a horrific situation that will stop all papers. Go back to the Koto period and but a no boshi on a Kozori work and it's not going to fly at Hozon either. This is what is out there and what they have arrived at based on the relative importance of the work though I can't say for sure they would do the same thing today. The point I am hammering here is that hope is somewhat close to greed in that the combination of the two makes people take chances they otherwise wouldn't take. Hope is not an investment strategy (so people usually find out) nor is it a gambling strategy or a marriage strategy or a kantei strategy. Sometimes it turns out OK just because it was the 1 time in 20 that the stars aligned. And often that's enough for people to take the chance again later on. Hope is not your friend though, it's your enemy. That's why we don't listen to it and start from the position that such and such a blade is sho-shin and then argue for ways for it to be sho-shin. Because there will always be a way. Maybe this week Masahide broke his hand and Naotane was sick and so Masahide had to get his grandmother to come in and finish the sword for him and this is why the quality is not so good and the hamon is unusual and the mei is not right, but I'll sell it to you for cheap and if it papers then you really come out on top. Hook line and sinker someone will take the gamble because they want to believe and they want to win and it's more exciting than actually going out and spending the money on a legit one. I cannot for the life of me understand why people would go out and buy fake Omori work for 30% to 50% of the price of legitimate Omori work. Everyone wants to say, well, the signature is not legit but it's really Omori school work. And probably it isn't. It's probably just someone later on down the road faking it and cloning the style, and if you had real Omori in your hand beside it then it would look like a laughable POS. Absent the real thing it's just close enough to get by and someone will buy it thinking 30% is a good price for Omori school... but if you look at a fake Ferrari vs. a real Ferrari the price is not 30%. A fake Rolex vs. a Real rolex and the price is not 30%. A fake Micheal Jordan rookie card vs. a real one and the price is not 30%. So why are people going out and spending 30% for the fake Omori and presumably making this decision over and over again and building these collections based on hope while they let a real one sit there unbought? Because it's too expensive relative to the fake one? All other examples in the world indicate that the fake one at 30% of the price of the real one is the one that is REALLY expensive because it needs to be compared not against the real thing but against what it is: anonymous mediocre work by someone who couldn't get by making his own stuff so he made a cheap knockoff. It's the same as buying SONNY from Shenzen instead of SONY from Japan. That's what it needs to be compared against. Tell me what you see. This was a pretty random stumble to find, in this case they are both reflections of the same thing but they're done at different skill levels. The top one should not be argued as work of the hand of the bottom one though in any way shape or form. Though they look the same and are the same design, it's not right to say that well, maybe but then possibly in this case blah blah. It's just not the same guy no matter how you cut it and getting confused between top and bottom examples means that you'd need to learn more and see more. Trying to put a spike through the heart of the hope argument here. Maybe and but and hope are enough to submit something for papers to make sure that you're not wrong. That's about as far as they take you. And this sword in question, if the belief is so strong that it's masterwork, then there should be no question about spending the money to send it in for papers.

This is a good point too. The NBTHK has not been consistent on these kinds of things. Sometimes they seem to interpret use and label by use. Sometimes they interpret by length. For this they use 30.3 for tanto but seems like 60 for wakizashi. Naginata Naoshi are often just labeled as katana or as wakizashi, sometimes as naginata naoshi. Sometimes it can have two different designations, one for it passing Juyo and one at Tokuju. Yoshimitsu's one piece that is intact and not a tanto is labelled as a wakizashi at Tokuju though it is ubu, it looks like a kodachi, and it is signed katana mei and made in the late Kamakura period and the concept doesn't exist yet. Also a wakizashi at Juyo. But it got resubmitted later on for Tokuju again (this is usually because of lost papers but sometimes because some matter is not fully settled). On the second pass through Tokuju it is now correctly described as an uchigatana. The length is only 58.2cm so the first two just did strict categorization based on length. Now it's been interpreted as: what was it made for. So the result is more satisfying ultimately because it's describing what it is, not rigidly pushing it into a category into which it doesn't belong. This would support what you say, if it's a katate-uchi and made as such then the length plus or minus some shouldn't matter. But that does open up a really thorny problem because we have all those nanbokucho period "wakizashi" which are really developments of the Kamakura uchigatana in many cases I think rather than all elongations of tanto as people commonly think. I think there are both concepts converging into one, a tanto that is longer than a tanto and a very short uchigatana becomes some kind of a useful sidearm and probably precursor to the wakizashi. But wakizashi as we think of it seems to be a late Muromachi to Edo period thing. The others are just called wakizashi because they are about the same length. There really probably needs to be a separate name for them.

I don't think anyone will disagree with you that it has use as a martial arts term. But you didn't google far enough on your first dissent. When you got conflicting information you played the "it's just westerners / I haven't seen" card, and sometimes that just means you haven't seen it. Not that it isn't there. This is always a danger that we can all fall into, the "I haven't seen it so it doesn't exist." Even the Japanese experts have fallen into that trap and the more confident we become in our expertise then the more likely we are to fall into the trap. Self included.

http://www.touken.or.jp/english/translation/698.htm "Definitely, the first impression is a popular uchigatana shape to accommodate Katateuchi one hand" http://www.touken.or.jp/english/translation/634.htm His father was Gorosaemon-no-jo Kiyomitsu, and his active time was around the Tenmon era, and many of his swords were shorter, and the nakago were katateuchi (intended to be used with one hand) or a little longer. http://www.touken.or.jp/english/translation/670.htm Yosazaemon no jo Sukesada and Gorozaemon no jo Kiyomitsu, their swords are usually 2 shaku to 2 shaku 2 sun which is short, and both the mihaba and kissaki are standard, and there is a short nakago, which is a katateuchi uchigatana shape. http://www.touken.or.jp/english/translation/667.htm The upper half has sori, and from this, it is possible to judge this as a shape seen often around the date on the ura side date (around the Tensho period) for a katate-uchi or short uchigatana. http://www.touken.or.jp/english/translation/669.htm From 2012, another typical description: As an almost correct anwer, some people voted for Katsumitsu and Tadamitsu. These smiths have suguha work with a bright nioiguchi, but their active period was around the Bunmei and Daiei periods. Because they were active at a later time than Yosazaemon no jo Sukesada and Gorozaemon no jo Kiyomitsu, their swords are usually 2 shaku to 2 shaku 2 sun which is short, and both the mihaba and kissaki are standard, and there is a short nakago, which is a katateuchi uchigatana shape. This katana is much longer and wide, and the shape is from the second half of the Muromachi period, and it is characteristic late Muromachi work, so you should pay attention to this type of detail. Explanation by Hinohara Dai. ........... It may be that more correct use of the phrase would be "katateuchi uchigatana" ... but they are using it to describe a type of sword and a type of nakago in particular and have used it independently as I used it above. The salient point is that uchigatana isn't the right word to describe these one handed swords. Maybe it is necessary to append uchigatana to the phrase though. Anyway I don't invent this stuff out of thin air because I feel like it.

The practice of having people pump your auction up is called "shill bidding" ... just FYI, I don't follow much on ebay or know the drama but that's what you call it. There is so much shady crap going on. And I am shocked at what people want to spend on this stuff. They just think that because it's on ebay they're getting a ground floor deal. I've seen a self-styled sensei sell gimei garbage unpapered and wrote his text for a lawyer to read and tell him he wasn't guilty of anything while doing so. Sold for a lot of money too. Just has the perception of getting a deal there. A lot of people, this is the only thing they want to collect. Perceptions of a good deal. Reminds me of a time I went to Florida and went to a restaurant that had posted newspaper reviews in the window, all praising it. I ordered some pasta, hard stuff to mess up. What arrived was a bowl about twice the size of my head filled with enough pasta to feed a family. I am not a small guy and I left the vast majority behind. Partially because it was too much but partially because the quality was horrific. But hey, you gotta eat. The mystery of the great reviews took a while to understand but finally I just settled on the fact that it was not expensive and served so much in portion sizes that people always left with this happy glow of "I got a good deal." Saturated in quantity with quality nowhere to be seen. The same kinds of people who would be angry at paying so much for a small perfectly prepared portion of good from a Michelin ranked chef (almost wrote smith). But you can see the parallels.

You can use it but you need to be very observant and very smart about it. Ted Tenold wrote a good article on this for the NBTHK/AB as well. I owned these and made them available for some NBTHK/AB study sessions and Ted wrote the good article at that time. Then I gave it away to a Thai collector. So they went back home.