Tokubetsu Juyo 2016 Results

[seattle1]

Hello:

 Great "ramble" Darcy! It really addresses the predicate value of having the right mix in the pre-sorted Juyo group prior to the next step from there going on for Tokuju, and your laying out of implicit weights of age, rarity and identification with elite owners seems right on. What still lingers as an unknown for me is the transformation rate of substituting the loss of a little functional cutting quality for a gain in the aforementioned elite identifiers. I am thinking here of a single valued iso-function on a map of ascending iso-functions or bars; or to put it another way, how quickly or slowly does one give up cutting ability for a little gain in those harder to identify, but still valued, features of a Japanese sword, such as rarity, past ownership, etc.? I think that you might say that the NBTHK leans fairly heavily on the art historical context of the factors mentioned above in separating the sheep from the goats. There would certainly not be anything wrong with that approach, and it is the way museums and similar institutions appear to see their roles. That is what makes museum displays different from contemporary craft shows.

 Arnold F.

 PS: Just as an addition for clarification, when I mention cutting quality it is to image a sword's characteristics that maximize its efficiency as sword qua sword, ignoring any qualities that might reference its "beauty" or anything not directly related to its function as a sword. Needless to say, if signed, that signature would have to be recognized as actually being correct for advancement up the ladder.

[Pete Klein]

Incredibly interesting and informative Darcy (and Arnold).  Even though I do not 'follow' swords but fittings your explanation made sense and explained some things I had casually wondered about in the 'why is this better - more prestigious - more whatever' realm. 

 

If you wouldn't mind a novice's question which I believe bridges into your explanation, are there records from those early times of how swords were appreciated by the powers that be?  Polishing has changed over the centuries and I wonder if back in shall we say the Kamakura jidai daimyo would look at the sword as it is looked at today?  Were hataraki appreciated in the same way or has this been an evolution enhanced by advances in polishing?  The important people had the ability to fund the best swords but what were their criteria? 

[Peter Bleed]

Thank you ALL for a wonderful - and truly thought-provoking - discussion. I don't collect Ju-to and truly don't aim to, but this discussion helps me understand the basis of this activity we call Japanese sword collecting.

Peter

[Surfson]

Yes, I enjoyed it too.  Thanks for the insightful musings!

[Darcy]

About cutting, I think it's an interesting subject. I think that (this is based on almost nothing) cutting ability is generally lost over time due to polish. Cutting is, I think:

 

1. edge fineness

2. curvature

3. niku (key)

4. technique

5. momentum

6. material

 

Obviously 4 and 5 are in the hands of the tester. This much should be obvious, give me a six-gun and a target at 20 meters and I will proceed to miss six times having never shot one or knowing what the hell I'm doing. Same goes for swords. Anyone who's tried their hand at kendo (for fun) against someone trained knows how hopelessly outmatched they are. So, good testers will get good results. Great testers will get great results. 

 

Consider if you were testing bats for home-run-ability. Obviously then Hank Aaron is going to get more home runs than Ichiro. Is it the bat or the batter? If we record all their results and assign it all to the bat maybe we're going to get some poorly reported results. But obviously the right bat is going to perform better than the wrong bat. Also, matching bat to batter is going to be important too. There is no universal bat that gives universal results. Rather: what we have is a system which is entangled the bat-batter system. This combination we can judge and assigning everything to one or the other is not really possible.

 

So there is an inherent problem in judging the cutting ability of a blade. We have the same problem in computer sciences, where people like to judge the speed of a language, or the speed of a CPU and really you cannot judge either. What you have is a system of four dimensions: programmer-language-compiler-chip ... if you optimize the compiler enough for one language in comparison with another then the "language" can be said to run faster than another. But it's not true, it's just that you devoted a lot more time to making a better compiler. Similarly Motorola and Intel used to argue about who made the faster chip. Sun Microsystems used an architecture called SPARC that allowed development of compilers to be that much simpler than the complex sets of the others. Though the chips would run "slower" by measurable parameters program speed was often faster if you controlled the programmer's output as a constant. This was because compilers had an easier job generating efficient code. If you hand-tuned at the low level for the special features of the other chips you could get performance gains. What it points out in the end was that you always needed to judge the overall system. When Apple came out with a new programming language "Swift" and claimed it faster than "Objective-C" their old language, if you understood that this was one parameter of a system and it can't be judged on its own, you could come to the conclusion that it was BS. They set up and cherrypicked one particular program to get one particular result and used it to make a broad claim that doesn't have a lot to do with reality.

 

We can think of this kind of system with an analogy that is maybe easier to understand, which is, one car being faster than another. Well, straight line or on a track? 0-60 or a quarter mile? Who is driving? I guarantee you can put me in an F1 car and a real F1 driver in a Mustang is going to beat me around the track. Which "car" is faster then? In a straight line a top fuel dragster will destroy everything but the problem is that if you run the engine for more than 5-6 seconds it will blow up. So it depends again on distance. I can outrun on my feet a top fuel dragster maybe if you make the distance 20 miles. 

 

Sword cutting ability does not stand on its own any more than any of these other single parameters of a system stand on their own. 

 

Here's another parameter in sword cutting: what cut are you going to make. I can hypothesize that the type of sword meant to cut bone is going to probably take on a different ideal shape than one that is to cut flesh. To understand this try to cut through a block of cheese with a standard chef's knife. That knife is sharp as hell but it gets hung up in the cheese. A wire does a better job though it doesn't have much of an edge. It just doesn't get hung up. Take a piece of paper now and try to cut it with the wire and it's not going to cut at all. Try to cut a tomato and you'll make a mess. The chef's knife in this case performs splendidly. So, if we change the material we change the ideal form of the tool meant to cut it.

 

So now we have a system of sword-man-material and the sword is just one parameter then of a three dimensioned system. There is no real way of assigning cutting ability to the sword as a result of this. There is just an ideal sword that solves the function if you assign the other two variables. 

 

Think back to the baseball player, take a pitcher throwing a 98 mph fastball, take Barry Bonds on steroids at his strongest, and the type of bat that will solve the function for highest probability of a home run is going to be different from Ichiro against a knuckleballer. There is no universal bat that solves for all players and all pitches; there is no universal sword that solves for all cutters and all materials.

 

So inside the system, each parameter has sub-parameters. We assigned two of the five above to the cutter. Three of them belong to the sword. Edge fineness is partially a function of the sword and the smith's choices for his steel and hardening, and the rest is the responsibility of the polisher. Bad polisher = bad edge = less cutting ability. Given the assumption that an atom-width infinite-strength wire will probably cut anything very easily, we'd assume and expect that the finest edge will produce the best cut. I think that's OK. So, give a polisher mashed potato and ask him to produce an atom-width edge and he can't do it. Give him diamond and he can. The harder then the better probably for what the polisher can produce and then it's controlled by his skill. 

 

Now, we have the conundrum in that the harder the more likely to chip. Bizen swords maybe have less edge hardness with the intention of making them more reliable. The other guy's super hard super sharp sword does not help him so much after it breaks in half. So, what cuts better, the sword that broke in half with the perfect edge, or the Bizen sword that didn't break but maybe didn't take such a fine edge? 

 

So what is cutting ability when measured in the lab vs. the battlefield? Cutting ability doesn't mean so much if it doesn't add to your ability to win a battle. So robustness comes into the question as another parameter in a function that is a superset of cutting ability, and that function is maybe survivability, and then when you multiply by cost you get another higher level function which is utility. 

 

A blade with a mediocre edge but doesn't break and costs next to nothing has a high degree of utility. But this starts to digress too much.

 

This starts to point at the fact that cutting ability is not everything. US military learned this in Vietnam where the first M-16s or maybe the predecessor performed great in the lab but in the field, mud and lack of 100% care caused performance to fall to next to nothing. Your average AK-47 can rust out and you can kick it until the parts start to move and then you can probably fire the thing. And its cheap. Simple and cheap. Measuring for accuracy and penetration power and all this jazz in the lab doesn't mean anything in the field if the weapon stops functioning due to the environment.

 

Cutting still is an important parameter of the utility and survivability functions. The two parameters left are curvature which I will deal with now. By the Edo period swords are not being used in the same way as when they were made in the koto, so they are cut down. The smith is not responsible for the shape that they took if given to an Edo period cutting master. The shape would be rather random: determined by who cut it and to what length for whom. It's not an ideal shape for the techniques of the time and for cutting a stack of dead bodies by a guy on foot. It's randomized and so results will be somewhat randomized. Keep this in mind now, that koto blades cut down will have a random component added to their "cutting ability". 

 

The other deal is niku. Take a boat now that's meant to travel through water. The shape of the underside is meant to cut the water in the most efficient way possible and this is going to take different forms based on the ideal velocity of the boat, the size of it, and what kind of weather it's intending to deal with. What you want for a waterjet hydrofoil is different from a sail boat is different from a jet boat is different from a jetski is different from a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. But those shapes are all programmed for an ideal. One would think that the koto makers putting emphasis on utility and cutting ability will create a niku that is designed to part flesh and not get hung up in it based on the length of the sword which is a big determinant on its velocity which determines its momentum which is also affected by the man swinging it, and his strength and skill. Once you cut that blade down and polish it for 300 years the relationship of the niku to the length is completely different from how the swordsmith set it up originally. This also randomizes the performance vs. his intention.

 

Therefore to take a work of "Mihara Masaie" and then do a test cut with it and then assign "Mihara Masaie" a cutting ability based on the results, with all of the variables above, is probably utter hogwash. You would need to get a mint condition blade or at the very least a suriage one with healthy niku. Once the niku is gone, you end up with something like the chef's knife cutting the block of cheese or at least taking a step towards that. 

 

So what we have in the Edo period ends up having way too many random parameters to properly assign to koto blades of a sufficient age by this analysis.

 

Now, let's look at Sai-jo O-wazamono as wikipedia has it now:

 

Osafune Hidemitsu (長船秀光)

Mihara Masaie (三原正家)

Osafune Motoshige (長船元重)

Nagasone Okisato (長曾弥興里 Kotetsu)

Nagasone Okimasa (長曾弥興正)

Seikan Kanemoto (清関兼元) 

Magoroku Kanemoto (孫六兼元?) = Kanemoto II

Izumi no Kami Kanesada (j和泉守兼定?) = Kanesada II or "Nosada"

Sendai Kunikane I (初代仙台国包?)

Sukehiro I = Soboro Sukehiro (ソボロ助広?)

Tadayoshi I (初代忠吉?)

Tadayoshi III = Mutsu no Kami Tadayoshi (陸奥守忠吉?)

 

....

 

So this list is has 6 Shinto smiths, 3 late Muromachi smiths, and then 3 Koto smiths (of middle skill).

 

What this tells me is that it was probably fairly easy to access healthy blades for 9 of them (Shinto and Muromachi) that had the original lengths set and original niku set by the smiths. The further back you go the less you see high rankings. That has a couple of things affecting it probably, the first being that nobody is going to go test cut the family's treasure Masamune. That is going to affect a lot of blades. The worse condition the blade is, the more likely you're going to allow it to be test cut -or- maybe it's just a mumei koto that you don't know who made it and then you'll test cut with it being ignorant to its value. 

 

That, and the older a blade is the more likely it is to be in a poor state of health... and the healthier it is the more valuable and so the less likely to be used for test cutting. This makes the major smiths of the koto period, especially high ranking known "valuable" smiths of the time, to be very unlikely to be used for test cutting. So what we probably see are the results for their worst examples in terms of original length and original niku. That means they are competing with a great handicap against blades made in the Shinto period for Edo period typical use with original niku and length, straight from the smith. 

 

My opinion is that any reasonably healthy blade in the hands of a specialist cutter is going to perform very well provided it has the correct shape for his technique. And in addition then that the koto grades are under-reported in a direct inverse correspondence with the reverence given to the maker. 

 

I don't think any maker could get praise if they just made a beautiful blade that was completely non-functional. So my belief is that when koto were gendaito they were probably put to the test too, and that form follows function. In the case of "money is no object" you got results like Awataguchi and the circle around Masamune and the best Ichimonji products and the best Osafune products (along the main line). If you wanted cheap but durable then you'd end up with something like Kozori, close enough for the man on a budget. 

 

The only way we can really judge how those blades performed is to take a 3D laser scan of some of the ubu kokuho in mint condition as a starting point, though we don't know the techniques they used today, we could still get a smith to make one and then robot mill it to micrometer tolerance. From there just give it to the guy with the most skill available and hope for the best. I think the results would be good but it is very difficult and expensive to do this kind of test. And still won't be so accurate because we'll never truly know how they used those blades at that time. 

 

Now all that said there is only one Juyo Token blade with a four body cutting test and that is a Tegai blade. Tegai as a school is not (I think) falling into any of these ratings, though Shizu Kaneuji was re-tested at some point (according to Markus' book) and took a Sai-jo O-wazamono ranking (though he is not in the list in Wikipedia). The fact that his ranking could change again points to the sample being used, and great age being a huge variable in performance since it means the niku is messed with as well as the length. That leads to random results as I propose above and we see it in that a smith like Kaneuji would be elevated. He being a Tegai smith at his source then, this reputation agrees with the four body cutting test blade (in mostly-suguba by the way). This blade is 74cm which is something to take note as well. 

 

The three-body test blades are dominated by Shinto smiths which is to be expected (36 of the 37). Easier to test without crapping your pants about breaking it, they are replaceable at the time of testing. Healthier, they were shinsakuto or gendaito at the time. Unaltered lengths, so programmed by the smith to be ideal cutting implements and not messed up by anyone down the line. 

 

So we probably have some selection bias which skews the results is the first of the conclusions. 

 

That leads to the second conclusion which is that koto blades in their time most likely cut just as well as shinto blades did in their time, and it's not possible to say anything very conclusive about one school vs. another on cutting ability. The data is just not reliable. The reports that we have, I would call "floors". They represent the minimum possible ability vs. the Shinto ideal brand-spanking-new sword. If a maker of a blade that was 400 years old at the time of the testing was able to out-perform any modern blades, this would be a surprise. 

 

We can point at the Yamato Tegai blade with the 4 body test or various koto smiths like Motoshige or Aoe Tsugunao with ultimate or high rankings and say, those are degraded rankings... the implication then is scary. 

 

Like if you took out a 400 year old car "as-is", with equal drivers on a reasonable circuit to control for the other parameters and it beat a modern car of any sort, that would be frightening for what it said about the knowledge and technology of the bygone era.

 

So, if I am right, cutting ability in terms of the swords parameters are length, curvature, niku and edge quality. 3.5 of the 4 controlled by the smith at the time it's made. Where does the beauty come in? 

 

Beauty is symmetry, uniformity and mix of hard and soft steels. A beautiful blade is going to be form following function to achieve a blade with a very hard edge but being durable otherwise. Screwing up the symmetry is going to blow your cutting ability. Screwing up the uniformity will introduce weakness that will lead to bending or breaking. Screwing up the mix of hard and soft steels will lead to a more brittle or more bendy blade. Some of those affect cutting since they directly work on edge hardness. All of them work toward utility because we all know that it is easier to make a hard blade that takes a razor sharp edge if you don't have to care about it breaking. 

 

Finding that ideal point in the curve of maximum hardness plus maximum durability is (now, I am guessing) going to overlap with a blade being very beautiful. That is the maximum survivable blade (survivable for the owner that is). It is not necessarily the highest utility blade because it doesn't factor in the expense of making it. If you can't afford the sword it's useless to you right? And we discussed earlier the impossibility of arming a lot of guys, especially without a lot of skill, with ultimate weapons. Economics is the last function that increases the utility.

 

If you can reduce the cost of the blade by 90% while reducing the survivability (which I think is parallel to beauty) by only 20%, then you have a big increase of utility. That's the cost/benefit maximum that maybe you see with Yamato and then even more with Mino and Sue Bizen. 

 

A blade that is 50% as good but costs 1% as much is way, way more bang for the buck. It's less bang overall, but just more bang for the buck. So, the intention comes back, about who the customer is and what problem are you trying to solve by making this sword.

 

The fact that mid to late Muromachi blades almost never go higher than Juyo Token reflects that they are high utility (they rate well for cutting ability, and they sure did pass the AK-47 tests in the field) but as blades just don't hit the peaks of the old blades. But that was the whole idea at the time. The ideal was just to find the cheapest blade that fit the minimum performance requirements. I think Yamato is affected by that somewhat and cost is no object is Yamashiro and Soshu. Bizen covered all the bases... Bizen being made where the great resources were but no built-in market, they (guessing again) seem to have marketed to everyone. 

[seattle1]

Hello:

 Thank you once again Darcy for your digression, in indubitable style, on cutting ability and its relation to the assessment of swords. I do think though that there is a disjunction between cutting ability in the stylized tameshirgiri sense and the paper awarding ladder process for any of the major paper issuing organizations in Japan. The six characteristics you mention are of course relevant to assessing cutting ability. My curiosity is simply one of the relationship between the functional qualities of a sword qua sword, and the additional qualities any given sword might carry along the lines of rarity, aesthetic qualities, age, reputation, ownership history and how these things contribute to the rungs of the paper quest ladder. Obviously the proportionate mix probably varies by the height of the rung; such extraneous features probably meaning nothing at the Hozon level, and perhaps almost everything at the level of a Kokuho. To use a little economic jargon, the marginal rate of substitution between the functional attributes of a sword and the extra-functional characteristics, if I could coin a term, varies in its designation level, Hozon to Kokuho, in terms of the slope of the iso function for that level of paper. I can hardly imagine the empirical data required to be able to plot those relations, but the result would be fascinating.

 Interestingly the inclination to substitute among the foregoing certainly would vary between issuing organizations or origami and sayagaki writing individuals. Some would emphasize the functional blade and others would give much weight to associations of one kind or another. To quote Albert Yamanaka from the Nihonto News-Letter (April, 1969), p. 31: "We are certain that no swordsmith made or forged swords with the intention of turning out a great work of 'art', though he certainly tried his best to turn out a very 'keen' blade." More recently Nobuo Nakahara in his Facts and Fundamentals of Japanese Swords (2010), p. 114, writes: "What I am really trying to say is please do not treat swords as pretty pieces of steel. They are supposed to also be fully functional weapons."

 It seems to me that in the ladder climbing exercise we all participate in, a lot of attention is given to things that are tangential because those who evaluate have their preferences. My curiosity is directed to how much they do weigh in and how that varies with the level of certification and approval, and I know that cannot be answered in a concrete way. The NBTKK and the NTHK doubtless have different critia for their top papers, and of course standards change with time. The recent NTHK (NPO) issued Yushu volume (Heisei 27), illustrates at least one late Showa maker, Nankai Taro Masataka's blade dated Showa 48 (1973), and that blade could never have been intended for any combat function that almost all pre-war blades might have been expected to possibly encounter.

 Arnold F.

[drbvac]

The breadth of knowledge in the forum again is amazing and just in a conversation members will impart more information than one could research in hours because there - it is not in context - worth the price of admission in and of itself - Thanks Darcy, Arnold and others.

[Darcy]

I am overall I guess hearing that there may be something traded off between a Yamato blade and a Yamashiro blade, in that the Yamato blade somehow is going to be more of a cutter than the Yamashiro. I am hearing that the fancy features of Yamashiro and Soshu are bonus bells and whistles that are applying in a realm outside the need to function as a weapon. 

 

I'm not sure if that's the intent but that's what I am hearing. I disagree with the thought because I believe that form follows function. I think if you gave the Yamato smiths the same customer base as the Kyoto and Kamakura smiths then their blades would evolve along similar lines. I don't think they are as functional then at the end of the day as these other blades, these Bizen, Yamashiro and Soshu blades are chosen to be elevated not because of some rude bias against Yamato and Mino, but because in general they are better swords. They are better swords because more time and more work and more technique went into making them, and probably as equally, more failures went into the scrap bin instead of being handed out to a lower ranked customer. 

 

I don't look at anything on a sword as being extraneous except in the Shinto blades when they start getting into Mt. Fuji and priest hamon and the flowers floating in the stream hamon. None of that does anything much for the sword. 

 

So the word "extraneous" that keeps coming in, I don't see it. 

 

Yamanaka saying that swordsmiths were not attempting to make art is in agreement with what I'm saying here. That is form follows function, and so whatever you see there that is there during a period where these blades were going to war, it's there for a reason. If you look at an F22 raptor everything you see there has a reason. It looks like red hot flaming death because form follows function. They wouldn't do things that ruined performance in order to make it look cool. And what is there looks cool because it enhances performance. 

 

A "functional" blade the way I think of it is minimal effort to get the maxium effect. In this they are simply dropping out features and qualities that incrementally raise the performance in order to make the blade more economically viable for the customer base. The blade does not perform as well, in this theory. Like if you took a Corvette and customized the hell out of it you could give a Bugatti a run for its money around a track. Probably won't beat it but the performance per dollar spent will be higher. But when money is no object then you measure performance by the top line.

 

If the Shogunate or the circle around the Emperor thought Yamato weapons to be superior they would have adopted them and that style into their midst. But when the call came to bring smiths to Gotoba, there were no Yamato smiths brought. All Bizen and Yamashiro (and Bitchu, should really hold them out seperate). When the call came to set up smithing in Soshu, the call went out to Bizen and Yamashiro again. I don't like to second guess the Emperor in the year 1200 about who the best swordsmiths are in his land that I do not know or understand very well. And partway through the next century when the same sources are used to set up in Kamakura, I don't argue with the Shogun's ability to evaluate the state of the art. Presumably both want the best technologies and learning for their projects. Those were cost-is-no-object projects so they went to where they could find the cost is no object manufacturers who sit on the top of the mountain of quality. I don't think the mentality exists to say give me a pretty sword, a non-functional ornament that does not cut as well as the country blades or the monk's blades. 

 

And this is important against what was quoted above: "What I am really trying to say is please do not treat swords as pretty pieces of steel. They are supposed to also be fully functional weapons."

 

Every feature in there that happens to make it beautiful is actually something the smith is developing to make it a higher performance tool meant to help you survive a battle and to kill human beings. I think this is the reminder. Not that pretty swords are to be shifted to the side and warriors swords don't look like that. 

 

This is what falls in place then when assessing swords at the top levels. The best swords are still supposed to pass with all of the conflicting things grabbing and pulling the judgments in whatever directions. At the end of the day if your sword doesn't have much to say for itself it's not going to pass. Form is supposed to follow function, that is everything that you see on the blade is an expression of some feature supposed to improve the performance. So you should be able to go backwards and examine the features and from there backtrack to make some judgment about the performance. 

 

Swords clumsily made, cheaply made, with major problems and lack of balance in features are not thought to be good. It happens to be that these are not the same words we would use to describe Bizen, Yamashiro, and Soshu works in general (esp. those of the Kamakura period). We can't generalize Shinto, Yamato, Mino, Shinshinto in the same way. And Gendaito not at all. 

 

So I think it's really boiling down to is where Yamato fits into this thing. The words bias were at the beginning I think and the impression I'm getting now is that pretty features are not supposed to mean anything, and they surely do. Because control of the material and control of the hammer and control of the forge are going to result in beauty. 

 

I had a Ferrari and it had a cheap radio in it. It had nothing much of an interior. People who expect luxury expected wrong. What it was good at was going fast, around corners and in a straight line. The engine sung from about 12 inches behind your ears. Nothing in this machine was thrown on as some blah blah that had no purpose in it going fast unless the law mandated it or customers would not drive it without that. The machine was very pure and the shape was very pure and the accidents of this design generated something that was uniquely beautiful. We can't dismiss beautiful cars as being those that can't go fast because every car that goes fast is oozing with some sort of beauty. As their form evolves to something that can go fast, that shape, the design, the technical approaches for this machine to solve the problems it needs to solve, they fill the machine with a sense of purpose. A layman can't touch a part and say well what's this do to make it go fast but some engineer has put his time in to making it just like that in order to improve the situation from the previous iteration.

 

So I think all of those swords converge on certain ideals. And in this they all share that same beauty that comes from perfect execution of plans to make a great weapon. In appreciating the beauty we are appreciating the skill and craftsmanship of the maker. 

 

As soon as that guy starts drawing chrysthanthemum into his hamon he is saying it's not a real weapon anymore. He's turned it into a joke. He's got the form ahead of the function and he's trying to make it beautiful in this way and that way and it can't be done if his intention is to stay true to what the thing is supposed to be.

 

I don't see anything wrong with what they're (NBTHK) doing in the end (with assessing Tokuju), how they're trying to sort out the best swords and if the bias is on Soshu, Yamashiro and Bizen it means that this is because these are the best swords (as a group, or that the best swords out of their group tend to be better than the best swords out of other groups). The others are getting included when they have their own genius work that deserves to be there (ranks with the best in the first three), but some of that other stuff does not go head to head with the older great work and so is getting in on a quota system (and in this we see Tatara Nagayuki accepted while a Soshu Yukimitsu may fail, and head to head I will take the Yukimitsu any day as the superior sword). With exceptions for guys like Kiyomaro maybe.

 

When those quota blades go through it makes you sick usually if you held a masterpiece from the koto period that is 2 times the blade that quota piece was.

 

Now, if things do slide for anyone's standards (I ignore the NTHK almost entirely), then that organization has a problem. I don't see it with the NBTHK (yet?)

 

I thought when I started collecting swords that all this "koto is best" crap I was reading in books was just crap. I bought a Shinto sword and it was really great. Didn't ses how it could be otherwise.

 

Second blade, Izumi no Kami Kanesada. Copy of Rai. Didn't understand that it was a copy of Rai but I saw it was very different. Next I bought a Juyo Shizu and a Juyo Gojo and I said wait a second, it's all true. All of it. I had enough to see that the Shinto blade I had was a toy compared to these other things. Gave that one back to the vendor and explored koto. Now I am told I am a koto snob (fair accusation, I am). But there are Shinto pieces and younger that are wonderful.  But these really come from a different civilization.

 

I think the NBTHK is on the right track, as much as they can be with a group of people who will never agree in full and evolve over time. 

 

EDIT: just to clarify the generalizations (writing these things late at night when I can't sleep)... when I talk about the superiority of Yamashiro, Bizen, Soshu vs. everything else, it's as a whole or on an average. There are blades of all sorts from all schools or also don't fit into the Gokaden that are pieces of master craftsmanship that hit the top levels. I'd need a venn diagram to properly express myself. I'm trying to avoid saying that all elements of A are better than all elements of B and sometimes the language I use makes me sound like I'm saying that. 

[Gordon Sanders]

Wow!! Darcy that was eloquent and to the point. ! :-)

[Ken-Hawaii]

Dacy, please correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the vast majority of tameshigiri tests run during Shinto? In other words, few cutting testers had ever cut a body in battle. Randy, maybe you're the right person to ask whether Samurai kept "notes" on how well their blades cut during warfare? Battle-tested (i.e., Koto) blades seem to provide the best types of criteria for actual cutting ability, rather than the bodies of criminals.

 

Ken

 

[Randy McCall]

Randy, maybe you're the right person to ask whether Samurai kept "notes" on how well their blades cut during warfare? Battle-tested (i.e., Koto) blades seem to provide the best types of criteria for actual cutting ability, rather than the bodies of criminals.

 

Ken

 

While I can't speak with authority on this topic, I have to say I'm unaware of it being a widespread practice, though with many samurai being inveterate diary-keepers and also proud of their blades it wouldn't surprise me if some did. 

 

Certainly there are individual family or clan histories of the battlefield feats of great warriors / clan leaders which lionize the qualities of their blades.  Most these histories are somewhat-to-very-suspect when it comes to facts, however.   Perhaps Markus Sesko has more detailed information?

 

Perhaps more useful in this regard are official reports from --- or messages sent during -- actual battles, recording the actions of individual samurai and recommending reward based on these actions -- the equivalent to "being mentioned in dispatches" of more modern times.  Some of these reports honour the quality of the weapon owned by the samurai in question.  Being official reports for reward, they are much more likely to hew closer to the facts than personal or family histories.  I am unaware of anyone compiling these reports with an eye towards matching them with existing nihonto, however.

 

In the Bakumatsu era, at least one smith was tracking the effectiveness and durability of nihonto in use;    Suishinshi Masahide, the "founding father of the Shinshinto era", was researching this topic to prove the superiority of his technique of forging blades over more florid styles. 

 

To quote from Nihontocraft.com:  Suishinshi Masahide and the Functionality of Nihonto: http://www.nihontocraft.com/Suishinshi_Masahide.html

 

"...Masahide gained this knowledge empirically through repeated eye-witness accounts and reliable sources concerning swords in actual use. The following are 25 incidents that Masahide mentioned, in which blades with a "Hade" style hamon were broken. It is a direct translation.." 

 

Almost half of the 25 incidents record blades used in combat situations, of one type or another, rather than swords being broken or damaged during test cutting, or even just by simple accident.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Thanks, Randy. I remember reading that, & wondering whether those incidents should really be considered as "battle-testing" of the blades, especially number 12.

 

Ken

 

[Gokaden]

 

To quote from Nihontocraft.com:  Suishinshi Masahide and the Functionality of Nihonto: http://www.nihontocraft.com/Suishinshi_Masahide.html

 

Of course you can breake the Kissaki if you try to cut stone

 

"19. An Etchigo Takeda retainer hit his katana on a stone lantern in the garden of a Shinto shrine. The kissaki broke off"

[Bugyotsuji]

Late to the table as usual, but for me this thread was most informative. Many thanks, Darcy.