Darcy

The sale has not been matched for quality and volume or a combination of the two since then. A lot of those blades are now Juyo (you can find them starting in Juyo 51 or 52) and Tokubetsu Juyo. I remember the Hasebe there and I remember it passing Tokuju after and kicking myself for not getting it. I bought two and would have been happy to buy more. I got two super healthy top class koto blades and prices may seem strong but that kind of thing costs money regardless of the paper. It's obvious where they were going to go. About strength of market, the upper third is far more rare than the bottom third. There is one Tokuju for every 13 Juyo and one Juyo for every 13 Hozon/TH. So that makes 1 out of 169 good blades worthy of passing Tokuju. But if you look at the price, say pull $200k for a Tokuju and $20k for a Tokubetsu Hozon Omi Daijo that won't pass Juyo. There's only a 10x discrepancy in the price. This tells us that probably the swords on the mid to low side are overpriced in regards to the swords at the very top end. This means overall if the market is rational and becomes more efficient with time (more exposure to information to make good decisions with), that swords on the mid to low end should devalue compared to swords on the high end. I think there is a little of both, that swords on the mid to low end are overpriced but they are within budgets reachable by most people so this allows for a bit more emotion/love buying without thinking about consequences. Swords on the high end of the range, honestly compare them to rare or ultimate things in any other field (paintings, ceramics, sculptures, cars, watches, stamps, baseball cards, etc) and they are relatively cheap. So over time the information is digested and prices adjust, especially with 25+ Japanese websites churning out the commercial grade stuff now vs. 18 years ago (where there were none). There is still no significant volume of top grade pieces though that can be spit into the market. Go to any dealer in Japan and say you want to buy a high class Soshu sword and they will ask if you want to look at Bizen. They just do not exist in any volume, there are less than 700 Juyo swords by the entire core of the Soshu tradition. This is not going to change significantly over time. Where I expect to see no end of the Chu-jo Shinto works appearing and going with the price slowly drifting down. Even if you isolate Juyo and Tokuju blades, within these sets there are clearly some elite blades and some that just barely cross the threshold. Papers are a handy way of trying to summarize just how elite something is but ultimately people judge this or need to judge it directly as papers are just a rule of thumb. And they support the bottom line, but don't say anything about the top line. Any particular Hozon blade could be better than any particular Tokuju blade.

At the very least it has to be considered due diligence. There is a certain moment where it is not so smart to try to squeeze and reduce the price. For this you need to develop a sense of who you're dealing with and what's being presented to you. If they are giving you a real sweetheart deal and you try to squeeze them it will be very annoying. If it's just a standard retail price and you're aware of this it's not harmful to try to get a small reduction. Knowing which is which is really a key art to master though. If you squeeze on sweetheart deals basically, you won't see them again in the future.

Why? Tokubetsu Hozon means the blade is extraordinarily worthy of preservation. Some shingane doesn't make the blade unworthy of preservation and as long as it's 400 year old handicraft from a famous artist, it should be worth extra efforts to preserve. The attitude of "it has flaws so it's bad" is a western thing entirely, until you get to the kind of flaw that makes the sword unable to perform its primary task. Things we think are health issues, they overlook entirely. For them, if the hamon is bright the sword is healthy and ready to go. For us we will take a slightly dimmer hamon and intact jigane usually and think it is more healthy, where they may say that blade is less healthy. So really brightness of hamon trumps most other things. Going to the museum to look at the Juyo or Tokuju exhibition is eye opening in some difficult to accept ways.

First off, $10k for an Omi Daijo Tadahiro katana in good condition is quite cheap. There have been Omi Daijo wakizashi @ TH on the usual websites that have been $10k or $12k. There are a lot of examples of katana available from this smith and the typical pricing for them is 2 to 2.5 million yen for blades below Juyo, depending on what level of work you have from this smith and how rapidly the seller wants to sell it. Because it cuts both ways, if you're in the market for an Omi Daijo you can sit back and choose the one that really speaks to you. If you're buying something like an ubu Ko-Ichimonji with signature and 80cm length then you don't have the luxury to sit back when someone presents one to you, that is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for most people. So the fact that there are a lot of Omi Daijo leads people to comparison shop. A lot of people don't realize that Omi Daijo is the #1 smith in terms of volume of Juyo Token from the Shinto period and number 5 out of all smiths. He has 135 and the next closest Shinto or Shinshinto smith is Horikawa Kunihiro. This also speaks to his level of production though and the number of smiths working on his swords during his lifetime (and a long life it was). But basically the skill level in the work is highly variable. Separating this blade and what is on my site, this one looks pretty nice actually provided it is healthy. The price is good. It's shorter but not horribly short. Good blade. This part: There is no real daylight between Hozon and Tokubetsu Hozon for swords provided you can see that the blade is problem free. In a lot of cases people just don't want to spend the extra money for Tokubetsu Hozon as it won't change the market price and if you're papering a lot it can add up to some significant fees. Past that, anyone with eyes should be able to look at a Hozon blade and know it will pass Tokubetsu Hozon. If this Omi Daijo is problem free it is a very nice buy for someone, but this is basically impossible to tell from the level of photos the seller has provided. So someone has to stick their neck out and on ebay people stick their neck out if it's really, really cheap. As a side note if you were curious about the top 10 smiths in terms of Juyo examples they are: 1. Kanemitsu 2. Rai Kunimitsu 3. Rai Kunitoshi 4. Nagamitsu 5. Omi Daijo Tadahiro 6. Shizu 7. Motoshige 8. Soshu Yukimitsu 9. Horikawa Kunihiro 10. Unji Some comments: Niji Kunitoshi is #25 on the list and if we add the output to Rai Kunitoshi (as should be done) then this smith becomes number one on the list by far. That would pop Kotetsu into the top 10.

Definitely go to a show, as I don't think anyone will be so bold to put this type of fake on a table. I suggest going with something that is already authenticated.

I am amenable.

Thin nioiguchi is consistent with Naoe Shizu attribution. It can be so with Shizu and Kinju as well. This doesn't mean they all are like this, but it means that it's not something to use to rule out the attribution. Usually when I say that a sword looks like X it means because it reminds me of one that I saw and I want to see more of it.

Yeah it is a tough one, not a small kitae ware but at least not in the ji. Please take more photos of the sword, from high up and blurry it looks like Naoe Shizu.

The shumei on the Kunizane is by Honami Kochu and is a minor treasure on its own. He is either the best or second best Honami judge. The shumei is indicating that it was unsigned before it was cut down. So he may have seen it before cutting down and then supervised the shortening with the Umetada. Very likely then that this was a daimyo blade at the time. This is a Juyo candidate unless there is something wrong not shown. The shumei is going to be gone in a few years once this hits the market and someone doesn't take proper care of it, which is the sad thing. If I had this one I'd be wrapping the nakago in plastic and have a special loose tsuka for it. I've seen swords I sold with traces of shumei left on them come back into the market with the traces all gone now.

That was probably from me. The owner had extremely heavily oiled the blade and also stored it vertically. If the shirasaya is cut properly the grain is straight grain, like masame. That means a good piece of wood was used for this purpose and it was used properly. Because there are not always good sources available sometimes, you see a bit of itame style grain. Wood is not very absorbant when you are trying to penetrate it at an angle to the grain. So you can put water on the masame style surface and it will mostly bead, eventually it will soak, but it won't penetrate down. You will see it spread horizontally. It can only slowly enter the fibers, but once entered, it spreads longitudinally fairly quickly. This is because a tree is a machine meant to move fluids up and down the tree along the grain, and there is no advantage to fluids leaking out willy nilly on the transit. If you heavily oil a sword and store it vertically, the oil will slowly flow to the kissaki and then it will accumulate there in a pool. If it is a well cut shirasaya at this point the pool is accumulating and facing end grain which is very absorbant, the direction the tree would have wanted to make fluids flow. So, out it goes, soaks the entire end of the shirasaya and comes right out the other side. If a shirasaya is cut from a poorer grade of wood and you see itame or any other types of cross grain predominant in the construction, then this means that the jihada of the sword may be facing some end grain, even at an angle, you will get the same problem. Think of them like straws, if you pack all the straws against the sword aligned masame style nothing can get into the straws very easy. As soon as you put them at an angle to the steel, now the straws can conduct oil off the blade, literally sucking it off the blade. This is not so good for the sword. As well when a shirasaya is made with masame style grain, humidity cannot penetrate very easily on the sides but just at the end grain. This slows down deformation of the shirasaya and makes it more stable through the seasons. If you have a variety of grains with end grain exposed through the side then the shirasaya will deform at different rates throughout the shirasaya and also it will deform more than one made of all straight grain. Maybe not so much as to be noticed but this is what is going on. Good clear straight grain is very useful. So is burl wood. The areas in between introduce problems. If you ever saw a fence with a hole in it because a knot fell out, the weakness between the rest of the wood and the knot, as well as the knotwood increasing in size more and faster with high humidity and then shrinking faster and more in low humidity is what eventually makes a knot drop out of the wood. Basically it wiggles itself free over years.

Japanese dealers are also in the habit of not oiling their blades. I can tell you at least 10 times, if not more, I have spotted rust developing on their swords. Juyo, Tokuju, Jubi blades worth over $100k. Sometimes this starts an immediate flurry of activity with uchiko to remove the rust. All of this is a destructive process. The rusting and the "fixing" of it not to mention that if you need to scrub rust you're also altering the polish and ruining that. Oil is not a chemical that reacts with steel. There is no reason to not oil a blade. If someone doesn't oil a blade, they are just rolling dice. When the rust starts it won't be in any way that they can see it. When they can see the rust this means that the damage has already happened, and from here you are into control and recovery mode. It's a one way process, letting a sword decay. Oil is an insurance policy. I don't think it's good advice on the board for people to be saying don't oil a blade for a year, or don't bother oiling them at all. These processes can be fast if the sword was treated with abuse, but as in the dealer's case above, they are stored, showed briefly but live 99.9% of their life in a humidity controlled vault. In this environment they are slowly rusting. Very slowly. And we see that on American found swords that have their rust spots, as well as Japanese found swords, that a sword could be stored for 30-40 years with no oil and then after this time just have a few blooms of rust on it. That rust is highly damaging but it was also a very slow process. But it's like cancer. By the time you see it you are in reactive mode. It's better to be in prevent mode and never have to deal with the problem. Also, I have had swords go to Japan and then come back with rust on them because someone removed the oil then nobody oiled them again. Juyo blades of my own. Believe me it is upsetting.

In Japan they're usually storing the tsuba off of the koshirae from what I see. Sometimes it's shipped like that and it is a big surprise if they wrap the tsuba in the first few folds of the bag, someone gets a piece of iron dropped on their toes (if they are lucky, if not, on the floor). I know a blade that has a Juyo tsuba and the tsuba is lost now. Nothing nefarious. Just bad record keeping and carelessness. These things will come into the dealer then incomplete. Dealer subs in whatever will fit. So it can happen like that, as well as the flat out greed.

Good eye. I missed that.

It's not always a condition issue, it's a fabrication issue too. If you try to copy Norishige you're going to get kitae ware. If you make muji hada with no interest maybe you will get no kitae ware. It doesn't mean one sword is better than another. Also, I'm not telling you what to buy. I am pointing out in all situations that putting kitae ware first is putting the cart before the horse. If you want a flawless Norishige copy maybe it is out there but it won't be cheap. That is the third leg of the seat. Once someone throws away all flawed swords (99%) and wants perfect masterwork, when presented with the price they are usually unhappy.

Mayyyybeeeeee that explains the mumei Kiyondo that Condell had so many years ago. I never saw any but according to Kiyondo and what seems to be Fujishiro reporting a firsthand conversation with him, there are 30. After Kiyomaro killed himself, Kiyondo said that "After receiving an order for a sword made by the teacher, half of the cost would be accepted, but there were only thirty swords he did not complete, and due to the fact that these men (the nushi who ordered swords) requested me to make the swords in place of the teacher, in due time, I filled these promises.". The swords which are inscribed "SHI NI KAWATTE TSUKURU TÔ" (Made this sword in place of the teacher) probably should be viewed as "JI SAKU KIYONDO MEI NO TÔ" (Swords made by Kiyondo himself). Even though the Kiyondo copies of "KIYOMARO MEI" are commonly seen, these, of course, are not included among these "SHI NI KAWATTE TSUKURU TÔ". So what I gather from the somewhat awkward phrasing is: 1. Kiyondo finished the 30 swords and noted them on the nakago. Refinishing a nakago might maybe erase his additional notation. It's not clear if he started with existing material on some or others, he just says his master took the money for the orders, and the orders were not filled, so he filled them. 2. He additionally made more "copies of Kiyomaro mei" and that sounds like a polite way to say he faked Kiyomaro blades after his teacher died. They are not among the 30.

Kawazu-no-ko probably is what you're looking for. Tadpole. Round head and a tail.

Looks like Ozaki Suketaka to me but that is way too specific to be accurate.

Only minor comments go on NBTHK lower-level papers. 1. Den (2 billion words on this elsewhere) 2. To mei ga aru (there is a signature: this means that it is not gimei, but the period is right and the style is outside known documented examples) 3. Direct attribution... for instance, after the confirming a mei of Bizen no Kuni ju Osafune Sukesada they may elect to write (Yosozaemon) after this though his personal mei is not on this. Other examples would be (Nosada) after Kanesada or (Magaroku) after Kanemoto. 4. notes about what kind of mei it is (gakumei, orikaeshimei, shumei etc.) 5. if an attribution and they know who did it then it might say whom, like if it says Honami (kao) it might say (Koson) after this if it is Koson's signature. 6. if there is an additional origami from old times then this will also be listed in the paper if it is significant (i.e. Honami or Goto)... this prevents a paper from being added after and also substitutes if some dumbass loses the old paper (it happens, sadly) I think if it has an old shirasaya with a very old sayagaki on it this will be listed as well. The sayagaki would have to be significant. For example I had a Yukimitsu with Honami Kojo sayagaki, this is ancient. Kojo also stated it was a gift from the Shogun to a daimyo. So something like this would go onto the paper because of the judge and the historical significance. 7. in some occasions they might add that the blade is daimei or daisaku but this is not guaranteed and in some cases though it obviously is it is not even noted at the Juyo level. A candidate for this might be Gassan Sadakazu substituting for Gassan Sadayoshi or Shinkai substituting for Oya Kunisada.

Beautiful work, and I love it.

I split things two times in my life. Both times were gendai constructions by collectors or dealers. This kind of mount comes and goes and has no significance for the package as it was not there in the Edo period and was a marketing enhancement or a pleasure project for the owner. You need to always evaluate a koshirae to see if it was meant for a blade. Sometimes it doesn't even fit and most collectors will not (and should not) try to put it into the mounts so it goes undetected. Because of the reasons above and because of carelessness koshirae and swords are constantly being mixed and matched. Nice koshirae with a really bad blade will be split for sure. Then that nice koshirae might go with a nice sword that someone wants to put together. Because a buyer will indeed not pay $35,000 for a sword+koshirae original pair but he would actually buy a sword for $28,000 and find a nice koshirae for $7,000 in the secondary market and put them together. It is a real head scratcher but that's what people do. When a dealer is offering to you a chance to split, it may and probably means that the dealer himself put the package together. If you look at some websites you will see a standard mid-commercial-grade type of koshirae that goes onto almost every sword. Especially if aimed for the western market. Especially if the sword on its own doesn't have anything compelling (i.e. a Kiyomaro will sell itself. A chu-jo saku 68cm mid-Edo katana won't. So you don't need to juice up the Kiyomaro, you will however need to juice up the Chu-jo piece and you do that by making the package complete from your huge inventory of a few hundred empty mid-grade koshirae that cost you next to nothing because there is no market of collectors buying mid-grade koshirae... and a lot of western buyers especially in the mid-to-low-end won't buy a sword without koshirae because they feel it is "incomplete"... dealers do what the market forces them to do to make a buck). In my own experience I have sold mumei swords with no koshirae, and saw them years later show up on Japanese sites with koshirae. I have had swords with no koshirae offered to me in Japan, and I declined, some years later this one in particular shows up on a western dealer site with the dealer talking about the samurai who owned the set of sword and koshirae. Whether that dealer knew or did not know, the information was not accurate but will be repeated forever after as truth. If you want to look for telltale signs of retrofitting (again, people frequently post links to swords on NMB and give their stamp of approval without checking the details), you can find them. Look for filled mekuigiana in the tsuka. This is most likely a modern era retrofit. Here is an example from my site, and I documented it as a retrofit and made it clear it was not original to the blade. (Of course that scares buyers and they go buy one that was not original to another blade but the dealer didn't disclose it and they don't know how to look for it. But that's how the market works.) http://nihonto.ca/hasebe-kunishige-2/koshirae-right-l.jpg Anyway have a look at the image and the tsuka. Then if you buy a sword from anyone, look for something similar. Dealers will not be aware of it, or generally won't disclose it, it's something that is for the buyer to look at. Sometimes retrofits mean taking a tsuka from one koshirae that fits and adding it into a saya from another. These maybe you won't detect because the tsuka didn't require a mekugiana move. Or if you have a good saya that fits and a damaged tsuka you can just make a new tsuka that fits correctly and remount the tosogu. This kind of blade you will detect by everything looking old and matched but the same and wrap are new. It won't tell you for sure but knowing there is a probability here might alter your decision making process about what you want to do. A lot of buyers ask to find mounts anyway if a sword has none, or will look on their own, or try to make them. So it is basically always a bonus if you have mounts retrofit or not. Buyers feel happier once their sword is "completed." This however also makes for this weird situation of koshirae and mounts being made to go with each other, being split, floating around, and then people trying to retrofit them to a new blade, maybe being split again in the future. Who knows. This is appended with "who cares" by a lot of people, as long as the mounts are nice. For us in the west because we highly romanticize things that Japanese dealers in particular, and I suspect Japanese customers, do not. We get involved in the "great sin" aspect of splitting a sword from the mounts and refuse to do it. I myself subscribe to this line of thinking too, and I feel like I saved a few blades from this fate of having their tosogu boxed. ... But that said, if you can detect a retrofit and the dealer offers to split, do so if you want one or the other. If it's a retrofit it's just unrelated anyway. The Tokuju set above, it was a tragedy but the market forced them to do it by being irrational and inefficient.

Great swords had great mounts. Collectors will not pay for the sword and the mounts, they either devalue the sword or they devalue the mounts. As a result the mounts get separated from the blade. The better the mounts the more likely they got separated. Hence you see great stuff like this that have no mounts anymore. And you see run of the mill commercial grade stuff slapped onto lots of swords coming out of Japan. Cheap koshirae helps sell a blade and they have lots of cheap koshirae. Great koshirae ends up sold to koshirae and tosogu collectors, in the box or still mounted. The attached daisho koshirae is Tokubetsu Juyo. The katana was by Yosozaemon Sukesada and is Juyo Token. The wakizashi is by Morimitsu and maybe could qualify but is Tokubetsu Hozon. The koshirae is from the Mori daimyo. I found this out because I found the katana and the habaki was solid gold with Mori mon. Whenever I see this I know there is a good koshirae somewhere. So I asked the dealer, what happened to the koshirae. He got the Tokuju book out and he said this is what happened. I said they are gone yes? He said yes. I said, the wakizashi? He said another dealer had it. Nobody would pay for the package so they split it up. Crap swords with crap koshirae, nobody cares and they go into the market at $5k and are gobbled up by bargain hunters. Crap swords with great koshirae, it happens... I am not entirely sure why but it stays like that because the blade is basically a tsunagi. Cost nothing in the package and status quo reigns. This means if you have a rare sword with great koshirae you have something precious and over time it will become more rare because the destruction is still going on now.

Every now and then I get a client who complains that his Kamakura sword has a kitae ware on it. It is always a distressing thing because factory made iPhones and robot made cars have adjusted people's expectations for what "things" should be like. So I usually take some time in Japan to blow off steam at the expectation that an 800 year old tool which was used to murder people and smash against armor and got rusty a half dozen times and rubbed down for months on rocks to remove the rust and chips, sadly, shows a kitae ware now. By all rights these things should only be piles of iron oxide. They are hand made. If you get a flawless one you won the lottery. It was probably never or rarely used and carefully babied. The last time I blew off steam on it, a high level Japanese dealer said, "A kitae ware? That's how you know it's nihonto."

This is from Tanobe sensei's article on gimei swords and gets at what I am talking about in regards to first principles examination for gimei... just the start of things. I have sat there and given him a sword. He will quickly glance it over, then take the tsuka off and study the nakago. When he examines a nakago he uses a loupe and is looking at the depth of the chisel marks and regularity, he is looking at the corrosion on the walls of the marks and at the bottom, as well as the depth and overall patina. Yasurime are also evaluated for age, skill and regularity. After this he will examine the rest of the sword. Even if the blade is Juyo or whatever he will do all this before looking at papers or anything else and without any reference books. He writes that the NBTHK when they evaluate a sword they begin with the nakago, they are not playing the kantei game... they start with this data. After this is done, they will look at references. Generally we can assume that an authentic signature, a so-called "Shoshin-mei" is executed with a strong, vivid chiselling. That means in a fluent typeface without stagnation and the like. From the moment a signature is engraved it is exposed to rust over the years, which also accumulates in the lowest traces of the chisel and the yasurime. Also, the so-called "tagane-makura" – the "chisel blur" which results from the removal of the steel by the chisel – is lost. On the basis of all these factors the tang finally obtains a decent and natural appearance. This is not the case with gimei. Here, the speed at whcih thie chisel was handled is different (because it always takes longer to copy something as good as possible as the real thing). There are also fine discrepancies in the depth of the traces of the chisel, the force applied to the chisel and the existence of the tagane-makura (that means no abrasion process from over the years or centuries). This also concerns the yasurime, whose angle, thickness, depth and force is more or less different. In most cases, the patina of the tang, as well as the colour of the rust in the deepest areas of the chiselling and the yasurime doesn’t make a uniform impression anyway. The forcible application of chemicals does not, of course, show that natural patina which emerges over the centuries. All these factors together do not make an integral whole but give rise to an instinctive suspicion. This especially concerns signatures which do not seem to "fuse with the tang" but look like they are "hanging somehow over the tang" (that means the cases where the signature isn’t engraved deeply enough into the tang). A good example where this peculiarity may be seen are in the signatures of pictures 1 and 2 (page 26 and 27), where the individual characters are copied exactly, but the typeface as a whole leaves, on the one hand, too little place and, on other hand, places to much space between the characters. Regarding the typeface, early blades from the Heian and Kamamura period show signatures which make an unaffected, classical and elegant impression, which reflects the entire energy of those swordsmiths. But it is interesting that signatures of the Muromachi period have a certain playful innocence. Among others, it is the hardest task of a gimei to reproduce such a particular atmosphere of a signature.

It's not so much about trying to memorize 25,000 signatures, but about becoming an expert in artifacts... about becoming a signature expert... knowing how things work, what is likely to be correct and what is not. The problem is always that books are not exhaustive and treating them as a canonical set of signatures "or else it's gimei" doesn't allow you to ever change what you know. Once written the book can't be updated. If science is frozen in time at any point of time, a lot of bad ideas remain with us. The nature of science is that evidence contrary to the theories when introduced, if shown to be true, forces the theories to be discarded or updated. The nature of swords is that when evidence contrary to the theories when introduced, causes the evidence to be destroyed. This is a bad habit. The main problem is that this process is iterative: we discover new swords. If it doesn't match the book, erase it. Keep looking for swords. This guarantees erasing of outliers. But if you got 10 outliers together in one shot and put them down and they all confirm each other, you'd have to update the book. This is the whole problem then, the process of selecting them one at a time and destroying them by pronouncing them as not matching the book. A real Rai Kunitoshi example. If we just look at the main line signature, as soon as you get to a single daimei by Rai Kunimitsu you have to rule it out because it doesn't match the signing habits. So you erase the mei from this sword because it does not match the book on Rai Kunitoshi. You keep going and every time you encounter a new one "ahaha, gimei, not in the book, erase it." Now you get to the Rai Kuninaga, and go aha another gimei! Erase that too! Then Rai Kunitsugu daimei .... so many fakes of Rai Kunitoshi! Erase! So eventually over a century you now have erased half the work of Rai Kunitoshi by erasing all the authorized signatures of his that were executed by his students. This has not accomplished much that is good. Instead those mei have to be looked at as Fujishiro did, and classified as potential positives since the era was correct and the work was correct. So he dug deeper. He researched the student signatures and found matches to Rai Kunitsugu and Rai Kunimitsu and so concluded these are daimei. I read what he wrote and then I analyzed all the signatures in the Juyo and found that he seemed to be correct and furthermore following in his footsteps I established Rai Kuninaga in there too. In my case, the NBTHK has already accepted those Rai Kuninaga daimei but they don't label any of the daimei so I had to figure out what they did. Now, 60 years later, their analysis forms a book that is "all the Juyo" and can be used for book matching. But the basis for it was first principles research. If instead you flip open Fujishiro though you will exclude the Rai Kuninaga daimei and you will erase them, causing irreparable harm but bringing evidence into alignment with Fujishiro. Fujishiro had the right idea, but was not exhaustive. It comes down with koto blades to being able to ascertain the age and the style of the smith in the work. So you do have to have expertise that spans over all the work of all the smiths. This considerably narrows though because 90% of the 25,000 smiths mentioned don't matter much due to lowish skill and there was no reason to target those for fakery anyway. So they have lower bars to jump over. As the NBTHK has shown some restraint in classifying signatures, some of the outliers are let through with notes and in later years some of these have been validated. There is a shumei on a Masamune tanto that was listed as "to mei ga aru" indicating skepticism at Juyo. This blade passed Tokuju later and the shumei was accepted and attribution to Masamune cleared. Same situation with a Rai Kunitsugu daito. A signed Ko-Bizen Kanehira passed Juyo with "to mei ga aru" expressing doubt on the signature, this passed Tokuju and was resolved to be sho-shin. In that same Tokuju shinsa an Awataguchi Kuniyoshi that was "to mei ga aru" signature in Juyo passed Tokuju and was not resolved, staying as "to mei ga aru" but still attributed to Awataguchi Kuniyoshi. So it shows they are still studying and prepared to update what is an acceptable signature (i.e. Kanehira) but not just doing this out of the desire to do it (i.e. Kuniyoshi not resolved). What I'm getting at is that a real expert in signatures has to work from first principles. In this way you don't rely on being an expert in every individual mei but knowing the principles of fakes and sho-shin mei you start from there. Books are major assists because they are digested knowledge presented to you from a past expert. Especially if those books came from guys like Fujishiro who worked from first principles, but if you don't work from first principles yourself, then the quality of your work is going to be lower than someone who does because the books are not exhaustive. The older the work is the more tentative someone's conclusions should be. This is I think why there are no "to mei ga aru" (i.e. "needs more study") notations on any Shinto or Shinshinto works that passed Juyo. They are all koto. The younger the work is and the closer to the modern era the more we know about it by having access to larger numbers of examples and historical documents, and thus the generalizations about the signatures become stronger. Also, fakers of those newer blades have less time in which to work. If you are faking Naotane it means you come from the time after Naotane, not before. So the hallmarks of your fakery are something that can likely be deduced as there are fewer candidates and reasons why this may have been done. If you are faking Soshu Yukimitsu it could be from anywhen and much harder to sort out. To try to wrap it up a bit, this is only really a pushback against opening Fujishiro and declaring a blade of arbitrary period to be fake. That is a fairly specific use case. If the mei looks wrong to you... And the style looks wrong to you... And the quality looks wrong to you... And it doesn't fit with Fujishiro... Let the hammer fall then, it failed on all accounts. But if everything else is right, it's harder to say it's not in Fujishiro so it's wrong, especially with an older work. So we can presume that a shinsa team is at least looking at these other aspects as well before going to Fujishiro. How much reliance goes to Fujishiro on the traveling roadshow is hard for any of us to know who are not on the panel. I recently brought a sword to Tanobe sensei that is a smith who is in the meikan and the sword was in the Kozan oshigata. There are no other reference works except itself being documented as an example of this smith. So it is frustrating in a way because you look it up and there it is as the example. But it is good in a way because it showed that it satisfied the Honami criteria for becoming a reference work on its own. Tanobe sensei discussed all the options and worked them out on the spot, thinking and evaluating, and this process continued well after I was gone and eventually concurred with the Honami on it. Fujishiro is of no use in this scenario nor is trying to memorize 25,000 signatures.

Kaei 7 is 1854, the year Kiyomaro committed suicide (in November). Sho-gatsu is the first month and is on the blade accepted at Juyo. So you have an 9 month gap showing no work leading up to his death. There are two dated like this and I can't find anything dated after this. If someone has an example dated later in this year it would be nice to see it. I don't have the Kiyomaro Taikan and something may be in it. This example that I singled out is the closest one to the candidate blade. The older papers on the Tokubetsu Hozon blade go at length to state that it is made in Kaei 7 though it is not dated, and then furthermore add that it is a "nightfall year blade", blade made at the end of one's life. The story of Kiyomaro dying with open orders that he didn't fill, point to him being not productive in the end and we know Kiyondo labored after his death to finish the orders. How much did Kiyondo take on his shoulders leading up to Kiyomaro's death? The presence of that mumei Kiyomaro that came out of this same dealer seems to indicate to me that there were other blades with weak signatures or no signatures at all that came out of the shop. Cary Condell had a fantastic but mumei blade attributed to Kiyondo. Kiyondo's best is better than Kiyomaro's weakest. There are a few different scenarios but when they overlap with the other practical analysis I think a conclusion is inevitable. For the record I think the body of the work in the blade is indisputably Kiyomaro and this is why it got to the level it did. If there are questions about such a piece there are two easy ways of resolving them: get a sayagaki or paper it to Juyo.