Darcy

IN BEFORE ANYONE SAYS MONGOL INVASIONS!!! Take your mind. Think in three dimensions. Extend the kissaki tip. Leave the yokote where it is. What happens to the ji?

50 years and three generations and not sure how much online archives cover the signatures. But the main problem is that you came to a conclusion from whatever you were looking at of Sho-shin. But Fujishiro doesn't document him having SAKU in the mei. Nor does any papered example that is Juyo, Tokuju, Jubi, or Juyo Bunkazai. This isn't meant as criticism, this is meant as something that will save you tens of thousands of dollars if you remember and learn from it. We need enthusiastic guys to not blow themselves up on fake stuff early then depart. Usually people who blow themselves up on bad stuff depart because it's hard to face the reality of their decision making and it's easier to blame the entire hobby as being corrupt. The reality of it is that all art, antique and collectible fields have predators and also they are prone to differing expert opinions. Predators will take advantage of you on known bad stuff. Other experts can respectfully disagree, one saying this is no good, another saying it is good and you end up trapped in the middle. If you want to emotionally take the case of one expert always trumps the other then it's a fight to the death. Whereas you should probably listen to individual arguments and side with the guy who has the best argument on a case by case basis (i.e. if you see a parallel to politics here, yes there is one). Anyway back to the Motoshige, what you need to do on a signature is first at least read it. In this case it reads out with the SAKU on the end and then you check Fujishiro and see if Motoshige signed with SAKU according to him (answer: no). Next search Nihontoclub and see if you can match the signature: https://nihontoclub.com/view/smiths/meisearch?type=All&mei_op=contains&mei=motoshige Answer: no. Before we've even gotten to checking the mei, it's ruled out because we're being forced to choose between zero examples ever being seen in the history of Japanese books (which these other sources have accumulated) vs. this example being a super rare real thing. Occam's razor applies. If you want to then be extra careful you check all modern examples to see just in case if something popped up that wasn't historically known and the answer again is no (i.e. what I did, looked at all the books, for which you need the books). From there you now basically have zero reason to believe this thing. That you didn't end up here means that you need to look at and modify your methodology. Now we can look at the strokes of the mei. Without even going to the books I can tell you that Ko-Motoshige signed in two characters and is an Aoe smith, and this isn't him because it's not two characters. Also his mei is kind of funky looking. And then I can tell you Nidai Motoshige he signed in small characters so this is no good again on those grounds. Nidai Motoshige also has a clear preference for signing in the shinogi-ji and if a nakago has a shinogi and the mei is not in it, then it's questionable. Because this is orikaeshi it is hard to know where the mei was, as you'd need to unwrap it. It looks to me like it is too big to fit in the shinogi-ji though. So it leaves it possibly as a Kamakura period Shodai Motoshige work. As soon as one single person has that intuition, a faker will make a fake mei on a sword just before shortening it and then will make orikaeshimei from his fakery. Your assumptions and your greed are weaponized by fakers. You need to as a result get rid of assumptions that are not based on reasonable arguments. It will be less likely that a maker will go to the work of making an orikaeshimei fake because he could fake another mei or pull this off with less work. However, if the work was just faked a long time ago and then someone later on honestly preserved it, this is what you get from that. So there is no reasonable/rational argument that says orikaeshi means it's less likely to be fake. All it means is that it happened earlier in time to the shortening. 10 minutes, 10 years or 100 years, you be the judge. Anyway as such you need to ditch that assumption and just go on the basics. Note again that in the modern period with power tools the work needed to do an orikaeshi is a lot less than it is in the Edo period. So if you wanted to take advantage of someone and shift the mei back in time, you would do this in the 1900s some time with a few hours of effort on an obviously gimei Motoshige that you found. Now you have done two things: 1. they made the gimei look a lot older by implying that the orikaeshi is old, and so the viewer shifts the time period of the signature back enough that it seems legitimate 2. they give the impression that someone cared about this signature so much in the Edo period that they preserved it. As the phantom menace reviews say, "You may not have noticed it, but your brain did." This causes you to abandon some of your own rational processing by embracing the perception of someone else's opinion in its place. i.e. you punt. While he is waving some scarf around in your face, the street magician is undoing your watch with the off hand. This is why you don't let yourself get too distracted by some of these other things, if the primary stuff is not adding up. Now we can look at the characters and compare to a known good example of 1st generation Osafune Motoshige. Bear in mind, this thing has to do a LOT of convincing because it's not even a documented signature style. Nidai is absolutely ruled out as it doesn't match the size, style or placement of the characters, Ko-Motoshige is ruled out on the same grounds. We just need to see if this is Shodai Motoshige. Now look first at the Shige 重 character in the two good mei. The two good examples, this feels wide and fat. Chogi's mei is like this too, the same impression. The candidate feels square and normal. Look at the Moto 元 character. The left bottom leg terminates halfway down in the candidate. That looks more like Kanemoto's signature. Also note that the right leg, the L bend in it is angular in the two good examples. In the candidate it is rounded. There are no grounds for accepting this signature at all, unless you want to accept: 1. using an undocumented mei by characters 2. doing the characters differently And if you want to accept both of those then basically I could sign this with my own name and we can say it's Motoshige as well by those rules. Since we can't see the other half of the signature, we should assume the worst on it. The flip side of this is that as long as the blade is a koto blade you can wipe the signature and maybe it papers to someone good (maybe even Motoshige!) So that's the analysis route that you'd need to go if you want to believe in one of these. That's why I drew attention to "your books" as I didn't see where any references could end up with the assumption that this signature was ok. Start by assuming it's fake and force it to convince you. If you bid on it, as long as you do so with the assumption that the mei is fake, it's ok. If you think the rest of the work is good and you don't spend more than on a mumei speculative piece. I did this on a daisho and the tanto ended up being a lot better than the mei and the katana ended up being a lot worse, and it kind of washed out for me. If I did more research beforehand maybe I wouldn't have bid on it.

You've got to put both of their readings together, Seki ju Kanekiyo saku. There are a few that sign like this in Mino in the 1500s. Which one this is hard to know. Also not so important, if it papers they will just say it's one of them.

Weird shape of the mekugiana can always be a retrofit to an existing koshirae which almost matches. If you displace the hole in the tsuka the sword will move a bit as a result. However you can displace the hole lower (but not higher!) and still retain a tight fit. The hole moving south limits the sword moving north. The southward movement of the sword of course is resisted by the habaki. So you could make a long oval hole and it would still work provided the mekugiana was still round in the tsuka. If you tried to enlarge the tsuka hole to fit the sword you would have to move the tsuka hole north to match a fix that would have the hole in the nakago move south. If you move the hole in the tsuka north, this would allow the sword to slip as mentioned. So that kind of overpunch doesn't bug me too much, it can happen. It could still turn out OK just that the various negatives coming up would affect the amount I'd be offering. If it ends up being no good you have a worthless sword, unlike a koto piece. If it turns out good for him then congrats on the boldness.

Looking at it again, the bottom of the HIRO box on the left, the line looks doubled somehow. Weird. EDIT looking at that part again again, just my eyes getting tricked out by the reflection on the raised steel. But there is still a point there, that the steel is being displaced to the left by the chisel. The same angle of light on the other shows that there is no raised steel. That might indicate a different angle being used on the chisel on the two examples. Tanobe sensei writes that Kajihei tended to draw his atari out too long and make them too strong. He said sometimes when he looked at Kajihei's work that he feels a sense of guilt and that he built in discrepancies so that experts would be able to tell them apart. The implication being he held back from making the fakes as good as he could make them.

Tanobe sensei says when you examine a signature the last thing you should do is go to the references (you need to do it, just it is the final step and you should formulate an opinion first). There are things I don't like about the mei because they are there, before getting to the references. There are some things I think are wrong and then some things that bug me. I could entirely be wrong in my analysis. It's hard with this mei because the blades signed TSUDA are made at a higher skill level later in his career. This early mei, generally the work is not as good as later pieces. So there are fewer references to look at as when they are published, people like to publish the TSUDA work. The variations in his signature have also to be understood as progression in time, they go along with his skill increasing. In the case of looking at mei from the same period they should match for their habits. Tanobe sensei also said to make a list of pros and cons about a signature. This means that it is not always open and shut but some stuff is in the grey area and then the work is going to have to be used, or yasurime, etc. The whole blade. My confidence level is based on how much I think this statement affects a conclusion of gimei. Maybe pop this link open in a new window so you can look at it side by side with my text. http://nihonto.ca/sukehiro-problems.jpg 1. this line is curved in the middle and if you look at the work, he actually uses a straight line here. It's not a sine wave basically but it is a straight line with two curved ends on it. Like you took a pipe and bent one end of the pipe and the other end of the pipe and you left the middle straight. I could be wrong, but this is what I think here and it is a subtle difference. Confidence level 4 out of 10. 2. I don't like this at all. This is two chisel marks and I don't see any examples where there is one. The one mark is rather unconfident and the other looks like it's kind of on top. I consider this a mistake until someone shows an example that is accepted that has two strokes in this part of the character. Looking at oshigata there may be extended strokes where this is two strokes but headed in the same direction, not 90 degrees like this. Confidence level 8/10 3. I would be happier if this curved outwards. This does happen with it being straight but the examples are rare. Confidence level 1/10. Note how the stroke ends in kind of a rounded feeling. This happens I think more often than in legit examples. 4. The atari at the top was done in the wrong order. The vertical stroke punches over the horizontal stroke and it should be the other way around. This does count, it is one of the gimei "handbook" things to look for. 8/10 confidence. 5. The long horizontal stroke in this case is concave like a shallow bowl. If anything it should be curved with a gentle S or in the other direction, like a hill. The horizontal stroke below it is not so well organized. I think it should give the appearance of a single stroke whether or not it was made as a single stroke. See the example I put in. 5/10 confidence. 6. Stroke order is wrong again. This mei starts with the horizontal line on the bottom of the box, then adds the atari to it, then puts the atari on the vertical line beside that, the right side of the box, which cuts into the lower atari as a result. In the other examples there is no atari on the vertical or the lower line is pushing into the vertical, and I think the vertical was cut in first. Confidence 4/10. 7. Lower right part of the SUKE rightmost radical starts too high, should be aligned with the rest of it. As well there is a hiccup in the turn. No doubt this is a hard thing to get right, to execute the smooth seamless turn that Sukehiro makes in the other examples. This part I really do not like. The top part of this line as it goes around the bend, also is not so clean and in Sukehiro's examples it gives the impression of an unbroken line, whether or not he cut it in like that. It should look like a paintbrush did it. Confidence 6/10 Overall each one of these things can be handwaved away, in such a case, it becomes hard to know when you are forced to stop handwaving. Who decides how much handwaving is the limit. Not me. But enough handwaving and we can come to the conclusion that the Honjo Masamune has been found 10 times already in the USA, with various excuses, maybes and buts. What we have to do, as Tanobe sensei said, is make a list of the pros and cons and weigh it out. It is certainly not slam dunk but also it is close enough to want to look more and see what the blade looks like as well as the finishing at the top of the nakago and on the mune and jiri. If I was playing roulette on it I would bet against it, but also would not be shocked if it went in and passed because some of these discrepancies you can find on individual items if you look hard enough. I think the stroke ordering are some of the bigger problems though, as it requires seeing the bottom of the strokes and this is clear in the photo taken but not clear in oshigata. So if you were copying from oshigata you wouldn't know which stroke came first out of Sukehiro's hand. There is an order you are supposed to follow normally and then there is what the smith chose to do. The question is, did he mix them up from time to time and my instinct is the answer to that is no. Whenever you get involved in making too many excuses for something then the reason is usually inevitable. I want to believe It would be different if I owned it, I would be looking for reasons to hope, but all of the above would prepare me for it flunking. A lot of people are never prepared for it flunking because they only want confirmation, they don't want anyone's real opinion. So when they don't get confirmation it leads them to believe there is a problem with the judge.

Also Tanobe sensei says one of the tricks is that the fakers are more hesitant and slower in putting a mei down than the swordsmith. This comes out in the chisel movement. I think the candidate is so clear you can count the individual marks and there are a lot more than in the example you got from my site. That makes it look more hesitant as the faker is making small marks and going slowly, instead of the smith who is relaxed. I could be wrong of course but just going on what I see. If you have the blade for examination you should get a loupe and look to see if there is crud at the bottom of the chisel marks. If it's old, there should be. Check the finishing on the nakago-mune as well as its shape (domed? flat?) and the nakago-jiri as well and compare it to your example.

For Sukehiro always show the full nakago, if you have the full thing available. The finishing all the way to the top is part of making a decision on them. Anyway, gimei. Upper left of the top stroke, Sukehiro crossed those two through on the three examples to the right, on the left he made 3 strokes. There's an overstruck chisel stroke upper right of the Zen. Looks like it missed and he placed a second stroke on top of it. Top stroke of the Hiro the atari have different depths and looks like Sukehiro on the others was able to make them come together seamlessly. There are little nagging issues through the whole thing. Nakago looks pretty new. What's the work look like?

221 o-suriage mumei koto wakizashi that are Juyo Token say "people picked em up and fixed em up as good as they could if the blade was worth saving" I'd expect that purified iron is a resources as anything else is and if the sword was beyond redemption it was something that a swordsmith could still break down, mix in with new material, and end up with raw material in making a new sword. I'm really enjoying the articles above, thanks Jussi for putting them up.

He has generalist expertise in the field of selling collectibles to collectors. That knowledge applies to all domains: he knows the vast majority of things are mediocre, a large number of things are fake, and a small number of things are undiscovered treasures. He's not an idiot, just may not have domain experience with swords. If you think you are a lot smarter than him, from his point of view, excellent. https://youtu.be/mHgv4McMJUk?t=30

You should worry less about the lottery aspect of treasure hunting, and spend that time reading and improving your knowledge. Money spent buying rust buckets that turn out to be Ganmaku and Shimada is better spent on a plane ticket to Tokyo and a few days going around to see what great swords look like. All of this for two reasons: 1. what you're doing is not teaching you very much about swords 2. if you really want to treasure hunt, it helps if you can know the difference between gold and brass, and to learn that you need to start somewhere on the education side, so you can return to the lottery later on with better success rates if you focus on learning first As well, everything you are looking at, dozens of eyes better studied than yours have looked at and rejected already. When you play this game you are not playing the lottery, you are playing poker. And you are the beginner at the table and those other guys who looked and passed silently are the ones playing against you. It's not to say close your eyes and don't look at these things and think about them, it's saying don't focus on them. Anything online gets a lot of eyeballs. If you luck into something it will drop into your lap. There are some ways you can increase those odds but you're not going to find a lost treasure on trocadero or on a medium sized auction house selling something. Those people are not, what's the technical term.... "xxxxing idiots." They do their homework before they set loose speculative treasures. They too know about antiques roadshow and the various pawn shop shows where people have treasures and get experts to sort it out for them. Everything you think is an undiscovered mystery is: to you. Someone else already chased that story down to a pit full of alligators. Now they're going to keep the answer secret and put it on the market and let the next bargain hunter / treasure hunter be lead around by his greed, and right into the pit of alligators. My advice is this: Focus on the information in where you are an expert and do well at your job and make a lot of money. Use that money to buy books and to go to shows and museums and see and handle good swords and associated items. After a couple of years of looking at good things, buy yourself a high quality blade that has been vetted and authenticated and polished by someone talented. With one good reference example in your hands of good work, open your focus to finding the "treasure" for free.

and Do not compute. What criteria covers "by your books?" I am not aware of any accepted example of this smith's work that ends in "Saku." There are three Motoshige smiths. The Shodai, the Nidai, and Ko-Motoshige. None of them sign like this by anything I can see. Plus it's 65cm now and is a mite bit dainty for a Nanbokucho maker plus suriage. Not impossible. Famous sword judges of old always said: "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is probably not a platypus, though the bill might fool people who want to believe they found an unusual and rare animal."

What they do in the Juyo is they give in the commentary a rundown on Masatoshi. They will start by saying he is a son or the fourth son of Seki Kanemichi and/or they talk about his brothers, then from there you can figure out that you are dealing with the Shodai. But you need to read the commentary on each and then make sure that there is nothing at the end that says something like "this one is made by the second generation." The only mention so far of the 2nd generation I can see for sure is that his work is inferior to the first, on these things. But you won't get any of that detail below Juyo so your contact is right, unless you got really lucky on a paper. This is the reason to go for a sayagaki often times as Tanobe sensei would make the call. I think though that the yasurime are going to be putting this right on track. When you plug it all in: Chu-jo saku Shinto smiths are generally not making Juyo (it does happen), no break from style in the yasurime though in the Juyo works implies it's all one guy making these. If the Shodai made breaks to kiri yasurime then it stands to reason after 30 blades you can expect to see one. All of this points the most reasonable explanation at 2nd+.

I need to amend my previous comment, I went back through the Juyo and they are restricted to the first gen. There is a bit of variation in the mei so I thought I was looking at two generations. NBTHK doesn't often put a generational note on the front. So going back then two things, no 2nd gen in the Juyo at all, and as mentioned no kiri yasurime. So it's not likely first generation. Fujishiro has first gen at Jo-jo and 2nd gen at Chu-jo which explains why 2nd gen is not coming into the Juyo. Fujishiro says it goes out to 4th generation but doesn't have any examples.

Not this one. The problem with a smith like Kiyomaro is that the fakery has to either be on some mumei masterpiece Shinto (which is a unicorn) that was floating around beforehand and then upgraded with a fake mei (double unicorn), or it has to be a purpose made fake coming from some period after his death. Anyone coming after Kiyomaro and faking him will not give you a blade of any quality or any value after it's rendered mumei. There isn't anyone significant enough in that time period who would do it, and make it have value. That's why nobody has knocked the signature off of it. Economics is a big argument in many of these things if you want to understand what you're looking at. If you did remove the mei and tried to paper this at the NBTHK it would likely fail. NTHK would likely flunk it and tell you it is Showa work. It's garbage. Find yourself a gimei Hankei and you open the period of the fakery up. Fakery periods cannot be earlier than the smith, that's the Kiyomaro issue above and makes it most likely a Showa fake. Gimei Hankei now should ring a few bells: 1. fakery period is from the 1600s until now 2. if the skill is high it could be a koto work since this smith copied Norishige In this case you take the gamble. In the case of Hankei I saw this happen and the result was Shizu. The blade was o-suriage and someone dummied it up as a Hankei wakizashi. Pop the mei off and you get an upgrade in this case. If you cannot judge the work though you could have bought a Showa fake. But knowing when you have one situation and the other takes a bit of common sense mixed with knowledge. Chasing gimei Kiyomaro is a fool's errand though because of the time period. Chasing gimei Kotetsu or Shinkai is another one because of the styles. They are all going to be lesser value garbage. Hence, they tend to retain their mei and continue on the sucker-circuit for people who think they are good. Fish long enough and someone will take a stab on it. Once they have their options laid out in front of them by a polisher or a dealer, they always do the same thing: they inject it right back into the market. Because they are told, strike the mei off of this thing and you have nothing of value. Sell it as-is and you can retain some of the value you sunk into it. This is why they churn and churn and churn. People need to look at the evidence and draw a reasonable conclusion. If you find a gimei Horikawa Kunihiro you could have Soshu or Yamashiro work. If you have a gimei Umetada Myoju you could have Soshu or Yamashiro work. If you have a gimei Kunikane you could have Yamato work. Depending on the condition of the blade and nakago and if it appears it could be suriage or maybe a mumei hirazukuri wakizashi. This is where some experience comes into play. At an extreme one could even hope to get a Rai Kunimitsu out of a gimei Tadayoshi. They hinge on being guys that copied koto work so there is a chance that this is really koto work. That's where the focus should be if you want to speculate on something fake. But the flip side of this is that these situations are quite rare as those works that are being covered up do as mumei on their own, have value. So when you sort them into piles A and B, pile A with useful gimei you can remove and get value out of is very small and pile B are fakes that came much after and will have no value and is quite large. Depending on how smart or stupid you are the sorting will be different. But if your pile A ends up big and your pile B ends up small, this is a sign that you are not a good judge. Speaking as a guy who bought a gimei Yukimitsu that ended up as most likely Soshu Sadamune in Tanobe sensei's opinion. I knew that was gimei but I knew I was looking at Nanbokucho period Soshu work in wakizashi form. I knew it had to go to Nobukuni at least. Speaking as a guy who bought a fake Masamune paired with it and thought it could be Shizu but ended up being Shinto. Once it was Shinto and posted here as a Jo-jo saku smith and the work itself beautiful, it still has almost zero value one it is mumei. But I knew at least I was looking at fakery and did a so-so job at sorting my piles out. So if you can get it for ten dollars, knock yourself out. If it costs $20,000 like this fake above, you are doing something extremely stupid. If you spend $70k like I did you need to be reasonably sure of your skill and what you're looking at as it is a huge risk. I can tell you if a fake Kiyomaro was in the same auction, by the math I wouldn't spend a dime on it though because I know that there is no future of that blade that can end in a good story. All of the potentials turn out as a dud. If you have a gimei Yukimitsu and you know that it is Soshu nanbokucho work for sure, because you have owned many Soshu Nanbokucho works of the Juyo level, then you know that all of the futures of the sword are good. It can come out as Sadamune, Nobukuni, Akihiro, Hiromitsu, Takagi Sadamune, and only a few others. So you can look at the worst case and use that to underscore. This hinges entirely on knowing what you're looking at, and I applied the exact same logic to the Masamune and failed. I failed in that case because I do not study enough Shinto work and I was unable to come to the conclusion that this was Horikawa school work copying earlier Soshu. I thought it was enough to be koto Soshu and I was wrong, due to lack of knowledge and experience. I hoped for Shizu. I was prepared to settle at Naoe Shizu. I still got master level quality on it so I wasn't wrong in judging the maker's skill, I just hoped too strongly and didn't distrust enough in what I was looking at. As I said above, the fake Rolex only costs you $10 and therein lies the crux of the matter. If your fake Rolex costs you $20k then even if it ends up being a real Timex under the hood you have still screwed up in a capital way because you got sucked into the dream of Kiyomaro and beating the market.

In this case it would remove so much nakago the result would be a frankensword that nobody would buy. If you hired a polisher to make it o-suriage and gakumei the cost of doing that would be higher than the value of the remaining work. This one will go around and around as people speculate on it, buying a good smith "Cheap" and getting burned. Once they are burned they will pop it back into the market disclosed, or undisclosed, depending on how good a person they are.

Stephen hit on 60% of the story. There is a blonded area in the shirasaya. On an old shirasaya you prepare the surface by sanding it, to remove oil, wax, debris, give yourself a good surface for the ink to stick. When you sand it however it doesn't make a window like this and especially go back and look at the edges which are wavy. It's not possible to make a hard border wavy line with sandpaper, this was furniture stripper that went on with a brush and the wavy outline is natural then from it flowing a bit. So something on the bottom was removed on purpose. Look at the top. That part has no such removal. The top is possibly legitimate. Now, the vendor is not disclaiming this sayagaki but claims it is the signature of Kunzan (Dr. Honma Junji) in 1986. The upper part of the date inscription reads 九 - 9 八 - 8 六 - 6 丙 - fire 寅 - tiger Obviously you see a problem here. Several. Someone forgot the "1" at the top for 1986, plus Dr. Honma along with the other Japanese experts did not use the Gregorian calendar, but used proper Japanese dating, this should have been Showa era. So I think we can conclude very strongly that the bottom part is a complete fake. The vendor though in their description strongly backs the attribution from this fake sayagaki saying that if you remove the fake signature that this would pass as Kanemoto. This fake sayagaki being the primary leverage. If this was described as a forgery then their description would read, "Fake signature of Kanemoto. Plus someone forged part of the sayagaki. Trust us this is legitimate work of Kanemoto." Yeah... ok. Here's the kicker though. This is the final part of the story that you need to understand. How does something get like this in the first place? Go back and consider the fake sayagaki part. The fake sayagaki is missing the length. The length should always be there. Why is the length there? The length is there because it is a FINGERPRINT. If the blade is not exactly the length on the sayagaki ... then the blade and sayagaki do not belong to each other. This is the part that the forger removed. This shirasaya belongs to a different sword than the one that is currently inside it. If I were someone with no scruples and I wanted to maximize my revenue, this is what I would do: 1. Separate legitimate Kanemoto from its shirasaya. Sell Kanemoto in new shirasaya with good papers. 2. Erase length information from legit sayagaki. 3. Replace with fakery. I cannot record the length because I do not have a candidate sword to use it for, but since I know fake Kanemoto comes around, I will find one sooner or later. I have to do this NOW because I need the wood to oxidize and age where I stripped it. I don't have my fake yet, I am just storing this as a bonus for the future. 4. Set aside while I wait, this also lets the wood oxidize and start to match where I removed the original information. Ideally I leave this a long time. Depends on my balance of greed vs. desire to fake, remember, my best ally is people's greed who want to believe. Also it helps if they cannot read Japanese and see that the date is done incorrectly, and it helps if they have not studied much and don't have examples of Homma sayagaki in high resolution that they can compare against. 5. Keep trying until I find candidate blades that match my faked up shirasaya. They are all about the same length since it's end of Muromachi stuff so I know I will find one. Tweak shirasaya if necessary. 6. I find one, mount it, and I sell new combination of fake blade with Dr. Honma's attestation attached now. I don't offer any guarantee myself of course, but I just say this is Dr. Honma who made this. If someone asks me in private I will say you know, the NBTHK doesn't have Tanobe sensei in there now and they are too nervous to accept this. I think the mei is good I just want to be conservative on my site. Even if the mei is no good Dr. Honma thought it was good. So you can probably remove it and get Kanemoto for it. (And maybe that could actually happen, but that's not the point, I am dressing this whole thing in a pretty dress to set up a certain kind of mentality... Dr. Honma thought it was good and the NBTHK now is not reliable so you are given this impression now and again and again and you go on messageboards and then post based on this repeated information that you keep receiving and ...) 7. Profit. I only screw up if I am too greedy and put it up before the wood has properly oxidized. There is an alternate scenario where just the bottom had some kind of an inscription and the shirasaya is original to this sword and so the entire top and bottom is faked. Same result. /puts on photographers hat What a scanner or camera sees and what your eyes see when you decide to do this are two different things. Your aging eyes in yellow incandescent light see what is available to see at 3000 kelvin color temperature. The scanner and the flash at 6000 kelvin see different colors since they use a different color light to induce the image for the camera. What is obvious under a flash is not obvious under room lighting conditions, which could lead an observer to not see the removed parts of the sayagaki in room lighting. This also holds true for swords, and is one way of detecting if a mei has been there and removed. This Hiromitsu on my site for instance has a removed signature. I didn't know when I wrote it up because in room light the nakago looks uniformly patinated. This probably had a signature that was put over to Go Yoshihiro or else was just made mumei to fake it up as Sadamune if the removal was old enough. Compare the room lighting picture and then look at the same area on the flash photography photo. Deep gray on flash photography is very old, the oxide combination is different than on repatinated steel which retains more red. The work was done long ago according to the texture of the surface. But not as long ago as the original nakago according to the balance of oxides revealed by the higher temperature flash. The take home here is not to distrust sayagaki. The take home is to look for these issues and when you find the issues, to realize that you are looking at a crime scene. You can walk backwards and recreate the crime with the information available to you. Something that doesn't fool you may fool someone else. And the converse applies where something that doesn't fool someone else, may fool you. That is the second take-home. Bear in mind too that it is pretty easy to make a shirasaya a little bit longer by adding some horn koiguchi and also just by splitting the shirasaya and reshaping it then regluing. Easy to shorten by cutting at the top. From there if one can use a magical tool that can search the internet to see if a legitimate Kanemoto was sold sometime in the recent past that might add some substance to the crime scene investigation. (Edit: side note on the Hiromitsu it almost looks like there are three different ages of the surface coming out in the flash photo? If not three, then two. Maybe there is the original nakago which is to the upper left and retains some yasurime. Or that could be refinished. There may be a larger area then where maybe the original signature was wiped and then a fake installed over it. Then there is the final area where for sure a fake two character signature was removed and patinated over again. So this blade either had a long mei of Hiromitsu and then wiped for Sadamune or Go in nijimei and the surfaces all say this with three surfaces. Or it was a nijimei Hiromitsu which was wiped and altered for Go as "Yoshihiro" or Sadamune in nijimei. And yes the HIRO character is different from Go and Hiromitsu but that didn't stop this from happening, there is a Hiromitsu out there that has only one character on it now because the MITSU was wiped and the YOSHI was added above the Hiromitsu. In the modern era the YOSHI was wiped and then the HIRO is just left to stand on its own after all the games are over.)

Still a bit more!

I just want to repeat again this is a good sword. There is frequently cheerleading on this site for questionable items, clearly gimei items that are Showa fakes of Shinshinto swords for instance, and many such things. This is a good Koto blade that you could submit to Juyo. It will be hard to pass in the current day and age but you could sit on such a thing for a few years, and it is worth a few submits. Even if it doesn't pass, you can relax and know that this is the same quality as blades that have passed in past years that would cost you twice as much because the papers were elevated to Juyo. This is the kind of thing that you can carefully look out for at a lower-than-Juyo budget and take as a Yamato example in your collection, and it has better fittings than the slap-togethers that come out of several Japanese sites. If you look at those sites you will see that the koshirae are all uniform lower to lower-middle grade and have the same general "look" to them. They are all components that if taken separately would have zero value. They are used on low grade koshirae to add to swords to increase the appeal to western audiences that want a "complete" sword. In this case here, you have a better class sword and better class koshirae that are more than slap-togethers. You can have something you can try at Juyo, again it may not pass in today's day and age but it's better to pay for one at this level and have not not be able to pass today than pay double for one that passed in the 70s and can't pass now.

What does this sayagaki say?

Yasurime are what we'd call a checksum in the software world. When the yasurime don't match his habits from published examples (in this case appear to be kiri), you have a big red flag on the rest of the mei before even getting into studying that.

This is a good sword.

The thrust of the low and wide and high and narrow is not that someone should go buy the most expensive blade ever by the way... it's that there is a danger of getting a certain amount of money in your pocket and then blowing it, and forever moving sideways. That builds the infinitely wide and very low collection. If your total budget is $1500 and you want 3 blades you can find that. In which case you are better with 3 blades than 10 blades at $150 each. Because quality increases rapidly you allocate funds poorly when you go too wide. A side effect I didn't talk about is the base cost of the side materials (papers, polish, shirasaya, etc). If you go wide and say buy from dealers at around $7k you are mostly paying for a lot of shirasaya and habaki and polish and very little is going directly into the sword. It can make sense if you are finding swords on your own and then your cost is not factored in because you probably paid far less than market value by discovering it yourself. In that case though you can't control what you get. Someone here I think wrote or told me that they had a rule, anything they bought had to be better than what they already had or they wouldn't get it. That kind of rule of thumb stops the infinite sideways expansion of a collection. I am writing the posts for a larger audience than the people on this board, many of whom may never have seen this board and are thinking about a first blade, many of them are not going to be also the self-helpers from this board who can go to a gun show and find something and know what to do. They just want one or a few blades and want to buy vs. find stuff from first principles. So I'm trying to at least seed the thought that planning is essential. Even if it is just ever only one item to own. Especially if it is one item to own.