Is My New Signed Tsuba, Showa Or Edo?

[Dave R]

 Greetings all again. I bought this Tsuba a few weeks ago, and it was sold to me as a "blank"...... but it is signed! The Tsuba is heavy and as you can see fairly plain and I can see why the vendor thought as he did. Having done some digging around on the 'net I am inclined to think it late, probably Showa, I am hoping that someone will recognise the signature, or even identify it as a product code or similar. I have taken a variety of pictures in different light, other methods such as chalking or taking a rubbing having produced no better results than as follows. Many thanks in advance to people for their time and attention.

 

Dave R. 

[Brian]

Rough guess...Kunihiro?

Not modern or a blank. A standard working tsuba, Edo.

 

Brian

[Peter Bleed]

Yes, it is certainly one of th myriad Kunihiro disks. They are plane and generally artless. Oftent the signatures are simply crude, so I suppose they could be "working fittings" for impoverished samurai of the Edo period.  At  the last Tampa show I made so bold as to ask Bob Haynes about these things. It was a chatted conversation and so hardly repeatable, but Bob thought that this was a group or a work shop that produced blank plates for other artists. That stuck me as at least an interesting vision of how tsuba were created. We shouldn't be surprised that the process was complex and well organized.

And finally, 'cause this exhaused my knowledge,  I was wih a friend at the a Sendai flea market once where we saw a classic Kunihiro round iron tsuba. My friend said there was  a tsuba maker named Kunihiro in Sendai. Niether of us bought that tsuba  altho it was very cheap. I have never seen a listin for that guy  and the guard we looked at t was a crude hockey puck sort of item.

Peter