sue mihara

[parfaitelumiere]

Hello,

I purchased a blade described as sue mihara, hozon.
Lenght is 68cm, 29mm motohaba, I tried to find some comparative pictures of other blades described as sue mihara, but the curvature looks strange, koshizori to my eye.
Bades from pictures, not received the blade yet, I will try to make better pictures once in hand.

[Surfson]

Sue Mihara is after 1450, which is still early in muromachi, a time when koto swords were made that often were koshizori.

[Shugyosha]

Article here on koto Mihara school: http://www.nihontocraft.com/Mihara_Nihonto.html

 

Looks a nice blade by the way.

[parfaitelumiere]

what is strange is I read about zori variation, from strong koshizori in kamakura period to sakizori on late muromachi period, I took a look at several mihara, especially a very nice very large picture I found on aoijapan (btw, how do they take these wonderful pics?!) and that one is toriizori, I also read that mikara can be confused ith other yamato schools from same period, and last I saw the identical menuki with  hozon papers, one saying west other saying east...
About the hada, it seems the polish is not that good, I have other swords from same seller, and the uchigumori is too hard on my sword, making hada look like forging flaws, but polish has a cost.
As this blade is in fact a daisho, with matching shirasaya and koshirae, I will take pictures, ask advices here before doing anything ,except finding tsuba set for them, I didn't buy the tsuba, were recently fitted san mai kinko, not very interesting stuff, the first sword I bought, same problem, koshirae and shirasaya were good, but mismatched tsuba, original probably lost, but I'm still kucky the shirasaya and koshirae were old matching set.
I admit I have few knowledge only.

[Ken-Hawaii]

The chance of finding an "original tsuba" is pretty close to zero. Even Samurai changed them out, & the good ones were sold off by the generations of "caretakers."

[parfaitelumiere]

yes exactly, it makes me think of the antique european spindle watches, many had several cases, and some gold or silver cases were sold and melt.
But getting the original shirasaya, tsunagi and koshirae, it's already a good thing.

[parfaitelumiere]

Finally received my daisho set, all is quite good, the daito blade is in good condition, no blister no core visible.
the shirasaya both are good, same for the koshirae, there is a seppa issue, we can see the seppa of both are not original, I will have ot replace them.
Other issue are the both tsunagi, definitely not original ones I think I will make new tsunagi by myself, to get daisho perfect match, like my munehisa uchigatana set.