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Nagamitsu...Comments?


Leatherdog

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Hello all,

 

Picked this sword up fairly recently and am curious to find out what everyone thinks...

 

Translated the "signature" as Bishu Osafune Nagamitsu...don't know about the other two kanji off to the side.

 

Its in good condition, but has a few spots of staining and a little loose grain. I'm interested in opinions regarding the inscription; it seems to have been added after shortening - which would seem to rule out an attempt to outright fake, as I would expect a maker of gimei would have taken the trouble to place the signature in a more convincing position ...could this be an attribution, perhaps to one of the later smiths who used this signature?

 

Nagasa: 25.5"

Total: 32.25"

Sori: 2.1cm

Motokasane: 6mm

Sakikasane: 5mm

Motohaba: 2.7cm

Sakihaba: 1.8cm

Kissaki: 3.7cm

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Think it is:

 

備州長船ä½é•·å…‰

Bishu Osafune Ju Nagamitsu

 

å¤éŠ˜

Komei (old signature)

 

Might be referring to a shortening. Think we talked about this one before but I didn't read those other two characters. The hamon is very nice and consistent with old Bizen work. Should be sent for papers.

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The hamon looks like old Bizen work but looks more like Ichimonji style than Nagamitsu style. Nagamitsu is usually more quiet and Ichimonji more flamboyant (note usually, there is no hard and fast here).

 

The skill of the chiseling is poor so it is enough to give it doubts about how legitimate the story is that is being told. This is the flipside of the Kanenori that we were discussing on the board, because it's attesting to a Nagamitsu one has to take it with a several hundred kilo grain of salt.

 

However, the work is consistent with old Bizen style.

 

However, it could be a shinshinto copy, as the shinshinto smiths were able to make very nice choji among those who took up Bizen style with vigor.

 

I would safely rule out any Bizen between Nambokucho and the end of Shinto looking at the hamon.

 

If the jihada is kind of weak, that is kind of standard for middle period Kamakura Bizen. These smiths were hamon men, they did not make the beautiful jihada that you see in Yamashiro or in Soshu (which is inherited through Yamashiro).

 

So I think that you can have hope that this is an old Bizen blade. It is possible that it could be ubu or nearly so and was a mumei kodachi that was later on dummied up to pretend to be an o-suriage tachi. On the other hand, could be shinshinto, a kodachi that was then dummied up to look like an old blade.

 

I think that you might be shooting with a bulb that is either behind a lamp shade or is a frosted bulb... if so use a clear bulb. Take these photos again, and show some pictures where the filament of the bulb is reflecting right into the camera. This will light up the nioi crystals and then give an impression of the detail and structure of the hamon.

 

A shinshinto hamon I think will tend to be very "clean" where the older Kamakura hamon is going to have beautiful and natural detail inside it.

 

I think that because of what is shown the sword really needs to be sent in for papers, to have a proper expert evaluate it and make a decision on what we're looking at.

 

I'm about 80% certain that the "old mei, nagamitsu" stuff is BS, but it does not mean that the sword is not old Bizen. If you have an Ichimonji kodachi it's every bit as good as a Nagamitsu. Collectors would give a left arm for either one. Which also means that the whole thing has to remain suspect until it can be handled in person by someone who can make a proper judgment.

 

My only concern looking at the pictures is that the structure of the hamon is very regular. Ichimonji brings the feeling of wildness, like you are looking at a fire burning out of control. This does not give that feeling. It's got more of a regular gunome mixed into the choji and so it then gives the feeling instead of a smith who is working within his natural form of expression, the feeling of an artist trying to match a template. So that would have me lean to a shinshinto work dummied up but I don't get that feeling enough to rule out that you have a nice old koto Bizen work. I'd lean to Ichimonji still over Nagamitsu if I were told certainly it is Kamakura Bizen, because the range is very broad.

 

Included below is a middle period, likely Fukuoka, Ichimonji master work. This is a little bit more regular and sedate than the true grand flamboyant pieces, but you can still see the wildness and natural nature of the hamon. It is very organic, the structure it has feels like the structure of fire or anything that grows and is natural. When someone tries to replicate this centuries later, they have no idea what the smith actually did to pull this off, so work off of theories and attempts to duplicate it, and usually then a forced feeling comes through in the work. It's probably not until Ka that people really pulled off the same feeling, I am really enamored of Shibata Ka's work, the two that I have seen very much impressed me.

 

ichimonji.jpg

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Thanks for the info...I'll try to take more photos this afternoon.

 

As a point of interest, not that it helps us with the origin of the blade itself, this piece was captured by a Marine flamethrower operator during the battle for Iwo Jima. He passed away in 1971, and the sword was rediscovered by his daughter when cleaning out the house recently (I assume after the widow passed away, but she didn't say). She said it was her father's prized possession...but she sold it to me. :roll: (Not that I'm complaining too much). It's nicely mounted, but the tsuba is long gone, unfortunately.

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Hi, I've just finished looking at about 40 Ichimonji recently and I have the Bizen Ichimonji book open in front of me. The hamon matches o-busa choji with maybe a little togari-gunome thrown in, which is ok for Ichimonji. What is the hada? Look for itame, mokume or masame. Quite a few that are ubu or suriage start with suguba before evolving, not a rule. Most boshi are suguba, gentle notare or hakikake, though some continue with a choji pattern, but more suguba than others. In all the swords I've seen and that are illustrated in this book there are no examples of this type of nakago. It seems crude in comparison. Even the o-suriage swords have had their nakago shaped and bent to maintain conformity. This is what makes me wonder, but this is speculation on my part and as an exercise for me. I would check those points though. Surely a Bizen feeling here. John

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I'm not sure about generalizing the Ichimonji boshi as suguba, the school runs about 150 years and has several major stylistic changes. I shot four for my book, the Ko-Ichimonji has suguba, the other three all are midare boshi.

 

Nakago is always going to be depending on whether it is ubu or not and when the shortening was done and by whom. If this was a kodachi, it's just been shortened a small amount and the nakago would have been filed straight.

 

A friend of mine has a 36" tachi, the only modification is that they filed the nakago straight on that thing too so it could be worn as a katana. No idea how they got the blade out of the saya.

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Regarding the possibility that this might be a very old blade...should I still be able to see the yasuri? Also, the nakago is a "chocolate" color - not blackish...looks older than shinshinto, but shouldn't it be very dark if koto? I've not got enough experience handling old blades to feel confident making a call on my own. If the blade is slightly suriage, would the entire nakago have been refinished, and the patina and yasuri date from the shortening, or should the larger part of the nakago have original rust/filing?

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Guest Nanshoku-Samurai

It's looking pretty interesting in my oppinion! Should be sent for Shinsa. Maybe you should send it to Bob Benson for a cheap oppinion. He can then put it to the Shinsa if it is good. Good luck! I think it could be a winner!

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This is more of a style of gunome than of choji I think... also you can see how clean the appearance is, it's lacking the detail and substance of the great older Bizen works.

 

I'm attaching a great Ichimonji from my book and you can see how much is going on in the hamon.

 

So the backup theory on your blade is it might actually be one of the late generation Nagamitsu, into the Muromachi period. Blade was shortened afterwards.

 

http://www.nihonto.ca/Ichimonji.jpg

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Sorry...the boshi is obscured by staining, and isn't visible. Back to the patina on the nakago I mentioned a few posts ago; could it have been refinished completely at the time of shortening, or should I be looking at original patina?

 

Attached is a pic of the kissaki...it kind of looks like boshi in the photo, but I don't think it is - I have trouble seeing it at all with the sword in hand. Likely just an effect of the photo.

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OK, The boshi appears in the pic to be a continuation of the same hamon, ko-maru, if the faint outline can be beleived. The mei is in the place you would expect when you look at the upper mekugiana, but if the lower mekugiana is the original and the sword is suriage there would be remnants of a mei there, on the lower one. So this sword seems to be either suriage mumei, machiokuri and gimei or o-suriage machiokuri and gimei. The signature either way is a later addition. So, what does this lead me to think? Muromachi/momoyama gimei kazuuchimono Bizento. Just my poor opinion and waiting for others. John

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Guest reinhard

I don't intend to do kantei on the basis of photographs, but there are very obvious deviations from old Bizen style swords (Osafune and Ichimonji).

 

- the shinogi-ji is very narrow > ShinShinTo or later

- the hada seems to be very tight and crisp

- the nioi-guchi is very tight and constricted (shimari)

- no utsuri is visible (this might be due to polish/photographs)

- the outline of the hamon lacks the natural and relaxed quality of old Bizen masters

 

This is a good learning piece for approaching any blade and for what one should not do. The first step is supposed to be: NAGAMITSU never signed a tachi on the haki-ura: NEVER. Therefore there's no need for checking mei or nakago. The mei is either false or a later attribution; ergo: forget mei and nakago! If you're still interested, the next step would be: What can it be instead? To find out you have to clear your mind from thoughts of Nagamitsu, old Bizen, KoTo. One has to start at the very beginning of kantei with an open mind.

 

reinhard

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A ramble on classification... inspired by the shinogi comment, but more about what I seem to keep encountering in regards to sugata and determining when and what a sword is.

 

First up, utsuri rarely shows in photographs. Of all the swords I took photos of, especially for the Bizen book, only three really had it pop out and only one was Kamakura period. Out of polish blades are also less likely to show utsuri, so its absence means nothing while its presence is a determining factor. A lot of the time on the gold old blades you can even read in the NBTHK comments that utsuri is there and then you can go nuts trying to see it, finding the right light and intensity and angle... this is with the sword in hand.

 

Sugata is also something that is an ongoing thing where we are given instruction to place too much emphasis on it, leaving us thinking that it absolutely determines period and/or school. We went through that before when someone had mentioned that a blade did not have enough sori to be koto then we went through and found many old koto blades in o-suriage form that had less curvataure than a similarly sized shinto katana.

 

My own Yukimitsu is a blade with a very shallow shinogi and deep ji and overall wide mihaba and extended kissaki and looks allllll the world like a Nambokucho period blade from around 1350 and it is classified as late Kamakura to a smith who ever saw the first year of Nambokucho. This kind of sugata puzzle has come up for me over and over again. Either the attribution is wrong, or we are too strict when determining swords to rule things out based on what we see. "It can't be X because of Y" is a really strong phrase and I think with Nihonto it might be uttered too quickly.

 

For instance, the shinogi depth on this sword, part of the problem is that the angle of the photos are being used to present the hamon. This is causing the shinogi to recede from the viewer and present an impression of being more narrow than it is. On one photo that the sword is not angled away, creating a flatter perspective, I tried to measure it out as best I could.

 

It is coming in at about 1:1.95 shinogi:ji.

 

Compare:

 

Osafune Kagehide (middle Kamakura): 1:2

Soshu Yukimitsu (late Kamakura): 1.3.8 (very narrow)

Ko-Aoe (early Kamakura): 1:2.3 (slightly narrow)

Osafune Hidemitsu (late Nanbokucho): 1:1.7 (slightly thick)

Osafune Kanemitsu (middle Nanbokucho): 1:2.1 (very slightly narrow)

Ko-Bizen Masazane (late Heian): 1:2.1

Fukuoka Ichimonji (middle Kamakura): 1:2

Osafune Motoshige (middle Nanbokucho): 1:2.35 (narrow)

 

I am not super confident of my measurement based on the photo, but I used the one that had the least issues regarding perspective and measured accordingly. So perhaps a real measurement on the sword would clarify more...

 

But...

 

The above shows that there is indeed some variation on the old blades, partially from state of polish and partially due to the initial length of the blade. I think in general the ji becomes wider faster than the shinogi when the blade becomes long. This is what gives the narrow shinogi ji generalization on the archetype Nanbokucho period blade. But up until the end of this period, you did have swords in all shapes and sizes and that is, I think, going to end up in moving the shinogi around. Given also blades getting chips polished out and adjustments to the shinogi you get a further fudge factor added to the measurement.

 

I would be hesitant to make a big judgment based on something like this, unless it is the case of something on the extreme, like the Yukimitsu above or say perhaps a Miike with the shinogi line running down almost through the middle of the sword...

 

Where the attribution or gimei is showing up on this blade I think is not important one way or another in determining its period... as far as I understand it the attribution will come up on the side meant for facing outwards now, so basically katanamei, regardless of original use.

 

I also then took the sugata picture for this sword and put it up superimposed on a Ko-Bizen sword by Masatsune. The sugata matches quite nicely.

 

overlay.jpg

 

I tend to push away from things like sugata and depth of shinogi, etc., because of this kind of thing above where it's easy to be lead astray by pictures, and look more to workmanship.

 

The workmanship though, the quality and work in the hamon and the ji, these I think are harder to lie with. A certain sword may have certain dimensions because of the man who was going to use it had requirements... or if it was made for a boy, or a kodachi instead of a tachi, and so on. There is a lot of variation from the archetypes and we have to keep in mind that sugata is one thing that is very flexible in terms of the skills needed to construct it being fairly constant and basic in comparison to the others.

 

Ji, hamon, etc., these represent techniques close to a school, many lost over time, so are less likely to lie. But sweeping conclusions based on observations again get really hard because of the long timeframes involved and the many smiths. Some are easy: Norishige, Ko-Bizen, most early Soshu den. Rai. The thing with these are that they are all on some kind of extreme or demonstrate some special feature that others do not.

 

I really wish I had some proper photos to post of a tachi owned by a friend of mine, because it is 36" nagasa, with koshi-zori, midareba utsuri, and choji-midare hamon and mokume hada. Strictly following the rules of kantei brings you to the exact wrong answer and 150 years off the mark, and reading the signature places it exactly where it should not be made by a smith who could not have made it. But if we skip past that and look in detail at the work, the quality of it, it might help (but in this case still would probably be impossible).

 

Anyway, my own personal thoughts are that I think based on the hamon above that the blade is not Kamakura period Bizen, but I think that the sugata shows that it could have been.

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:clap:

 

That's for both Reinhard and Darcy, for getting us thinking. Excellent points, and a great article to consider. We all try and fit swords into these nice little boxes where everything matches, but in reality the swordsmiths weren't working according to a textbook.

Good to get some discussion going on swords like these.

 

Thanks,

Brian

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  • 3 years later...

NTHK bounced; shinshinto copy attributed to Dotanuki Munehiro...any opinions as to whether it would be worth it to have the ko-mei removed and re-submit? I like this one well enough just because of the WW2 history - WW2 Pacific campaign study is how I got sucked into Nihonto to begin with...

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Chris,

 

Thanks very much for your work facilitating this event; unfortunately I wasn't able to attend, but Mike Vinehout, who brought my blades up, reports that it was excellent.

 

You are most welcome! It was a lot of work but I have heard nothing but positive feedback which makes it all worthwhile....

 

I have owned a signed Dotanuki Munehiro in the past and his work, at first blush, can be mistaken for older work....He was an excellent smith and one of the best of the whole Dotanuki line.....

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  • 1 month later...

In my humble opinion this is not nagamitsus work shape is wrong (sori)hamon is way off horse tooth choji most common suguha on early works san saku boshi is missing choji is not the tadpoile of earlier bizen smiths but matches later bizen smiths (sukesadas) I have nagamitsu kagemitsu and kanemitsu as well as yasumitsu not close to them PS hada is too weak for nagamitsu

LKanarekMD

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