Japanese Wakizashi authentication issue

[Vlad8405]

Dear All

 

I am a new member to the community and not an expert in Japanese blades and certificates but willing to improve my knowledge and collection. Reading a lot mostly in the internet space, since the translated books in my country regarding the subject are scares. Received information that this community is dealing with similar issues I am looking forward to your advise.

 

Please find attached a pictures of Japanese Wakizashi, I am planning to buy. The seller claims it is original and present the certification provided bellow, bought from Ebay, Austria made in Japan.  Since the money requested are not a small amount and I am planning to buy not only as collectable item, but also with investment purposes, I am looking for answer is the wakizashi real and are the papers legitimate? What might be the real market price for the blade?

 

Thank you for your kind understanding and looking forward to your advise 

[Geraint]

Dear Vladimir.

 

Welcome to NMB!  Your sword is a genuine Japanese wakizashi and the papers seem to be genuine also, though I'm afraid I cannot easily read them.  Don't worry, someone will soon..  The mounts are reasonable, with a  Namban tsuba.  

 

However, you say that you are seeking to use the sword for investment purposes, with this in mind most people will tell you that an unsigned wakizashi, even with papers, is not the way to go.  This is a collectable sword but given past trends it will not likely increase very much in value over the short term.  Others will advise you better on this but to get some idea of current prices look at the Dealer section of the forum and see what you could get for similar amounts of money.

 

Others will add more information soon.

 

All the best.

[SteveM]

Mumei, attributed to Fuyuhiro. It doesn't say which one...there are a lot of Fuyuhiro smiths. 

 

Agree with what Geraint says about swords as an investment.

They can be an investment, but I wouldn't choose them over other possible investment vehicles.  

[Vlad8405]

Thank you for your welcomes and advices,

 

All what you wright make perfect sense and clarify my initial thoughts and doubts  , does not seems like a investment piece , more like one for collection.

[Stephen]

Vlad your latter images are upsidedown, just in case you post somewhere for sale.

[mas4t0]

Vlad,

 

The market is mature and quite efficient, so you're likely not going to make any significant profit unless you can buy for well below market value or you have a suitable client base and sales funnel to facilitate selling well above market rate.

 

But then you'd be more a merchant than an investor.

 

I wouldn't consider anything lesser than a Juyo candidate or work from a Mukansa smith to be an investment of any kind, and even then it would depend heavily on the purchase price.

 

The real value of a sword won't increase, and it can't earn you a profit or pay a dividend, so it's purely speculative.

 

There's also the issue of liquidity. If or when you want or need to liquidate, you'll likely need to sit on it for a long time before being able to sell without discounting.

 

Finally, you likely need to sell for 20% above what you paid in order to break even after covering consignment/ auction fees and other costs. Once you've also factored in inflation, it's highly unlikely you'll be earning a profit in real terms.

 

-------

 

To give some figures to illustrate the point, if you bought a sword for $10k, held it for 10 years, and inflation was 5% per year...

 

$10k x 1.05^10 = $16.3k

 

If we then add 20% to cover consignment/ auction fees and other costs...

 

$16.3k x 1.2 = $19.6k.

 

So even at a conservative 5% inflation rate, the value would need to roughly double over a ten year period for you to be standing still.

 

That same $10k invested in an S&P 500 index fund 10 years ago would be worth $42k today and you'd have full liquidity.

 

Taken across 30 years, that $10k put in an S&P 500 index fund in 1991 would be worth $250k today.

 

This isn't to dissuade anyone from collecting, but rather to highlight that its maybe best thought of as a hobby. A hobby on which discretionary money is spent rather than invested.

 

-------

 

My personal approach is to only buy something now if it or a direct equivalent, which I'd gladly exchange it for, won't be available in the future.

 

This is only generally the case for high grade items or commissions. I'm quite young so I figure I can pick things up in the future for a lower price in real terms.

 

There are a select few specific items (most of which are tsuba) which I try to keep track of. If any of those were to go on sale I would liquidate investments and buy them immediately. These are all entirely non-fungible items where I know another quite like them doesn't exist, so to me they represent special cases and once in a lifetime opportunities.

 

If you're young and optimistic about the future you can wait to accumulate a few decades of compound interest. There are however many members here who are on the other side of this, so the economics for those individuals are very different.

[Vlad8405]

Based on all above , I am really happy that I joined the forum. Thank you all!

 

Everything make perfect sense Mark, I am not a merchant not a planning to become one either. I just what to make sure before I buy something it is authentic and the price is reasonable for the item. Not planning to resale anything latter, just to collect for my personal hobby and pleasure but I do not want to be cheated by someone trying to make a profit as well....Hope this make sense

 

 

[mas4t0]

Yes, absolutely Vlad.

 

I simply wanted to be sure that your expectations were reasonable (which they are) so that you'll be pleased with your purchase in the long run.

 

Best of luck.

[David Flynn]

From the shape, I'd be looking around the 1660s.

 

[Gakusee]

Very solid thoughts above. 

I concur with Mark that unless you have bought something substantially below market (and that is extremely unusual and rare), if you are to seek nihonto as investment, you should go for high-grade items, preferably also rare. The problem is that many people are chasing such items despite their high price and they are acquired fast. 

 

With wakizashi blades, I am afraid to say, it is very, very difficult to hope for rarity, value appreciation, etc. If genuine and signed, by definition they will be Muromachi and later blades. And one needs to be careful with the quality/desirability of some Muromachi blades (many were produced back then and quality was not always good). If Shinto and Shinshinto, then you need to factor in the maker/rarity.

 

I personally do not buy wakizashi blades unless they were shortened early Koto pieces as I am interested in Koto. 

 

On this particular blade:

- some Fuyuhiro are very pedestrian and uninteresting

- some are highly rated Juyo pieces and seem quite flamboyant, in decent Soshu style

- the white papers seem 'legitimate' but are old/outdated/discontinued and replaced by other, modern papers (this is a separate and involved topic)

- one of the papers is a registration card (torokusho) = an internal, Japan-only licence for the sword to exist within Japan legally (normally not exported outside of Japan)

[mas4t0]

I have one anecdotal, but true, example of a healthy profit being made quite inadvertently on a wakizashi by a close personal friend in London.

 

I'll have to keep this vague, as the details of the transaction were shared with me in private. In brief though, the blade was by a Living National Treasure smith (forged after receipt of the title) and was sold privately at a 50% profit within 24 months of purchase. There was nothing underhanded in the transaction and the buyer (a mutual friend) remains fully satisfied.

 

I share this story not to argue with Michael, but rather to illustrate his point; this remains the only example I'm personally aware of involving a sizable profit (recently and in real terms) being made on a wakizashi by a collector.

 

Clearly in this case though the individual's pre-existing network played a significant part.

[Nihontocollector752]

Ah this topic of swords as an investment is a great starter to discuss where the market is going and in general how to establish what makes a sword a valid opportunity for investment.

 

The yuhindo.com site actually has so many great posts that when put together will establish a pathway to what a collector should be looking for in an investment grade sword. I do not agree with the 5% appreciation rate as above because you would have to have entered the SP at the right time to realise these gains and this is not always possible. 

 

On swords first

 

I have been told that when it comes to swords we must, like any other investment, know what we are investing in. There are very lucky individuals who have come across, either by luck or by knowledge, specific pieces taht have gained immense value. Examples on the NMB like the Kiyomaro or recently found Norishige.  These things happen and that makes them equivalent of investing a small amount in a startup that rises to unknown heights and the exit is grand, very rare indeed. 

 

To invest in swords, following the yuhindo.com articles would mean:

 

- knowing what is the acceptable foundation for a puchase across a given timeline. Like mumei in koto is generally accepted by collectors so you would always have a market. Now what that market capacity is depends on the quality, condition, school, size, and provenance amoungst other aspects. 

 

Take a smith as an example for focus:

 

Reference

 

http://www.sho-shin.com/ikkanshi-tadatsuna.html

 

Ikkanshi Tadatsuna is a smith that gets thrown around so often as a big name. This happens with later smiths like shinshinto Kiyomaro, smiths in his same timeline of Shinto like Sukahiro or Yasatsugu, etc. I will not touch koto because i know little of Koto and the subject there is so vast it would be like trying to discuss a commodity like gold as an investment. 

 

Tadatsuna, like many smiths made swords in many styles but if you want to look at an investment piece then you need to look at certain criteria that make it an art investment or an investment for the aesthetics a smith is known for. Like any artist, Monet for example, they have a style and a criteria that sets them apart as a master in their own right. For Tadatsuna it is the combination of his flamboyant hamon encompasing Choji coupled with a tight and discerning jigane to exemplify his main proposition of Horimono executed in perfection by the smith himself. So if you were to find a sword by Tadatsuna without these figures then it is nice but not investment grade. The reason i touch on the Tadatsuna is because his most wonderful and investable swords are Wakizashi, like so:

 

https://iidakoendo.com/5592/

 

To place this in a modern and affordable perspective. There exist masters of the modern age in swords. There are people on the NMB with knowledge of modern and WW2 smiths that dominate the collecatble categories and are still affordable. Because, like any art, we want to buy the next rising star, Monet is up in heaven and shining like Tadatsuna. For example buying exclusive and very well known examples of WW2 or pieces from the Gassan schools of Meiji which will reach their 100 year age barrier soon and eventually fall into a cycle of mass apperciation in pricing is going to happen. Especially for the still reasonably affordable WW2 pieces, i myself have been buying in that region recently. But, you need to keep it Archetypal,  it needs the originality and quality associated to be viable as an investment. 

 

Koto is Koto and far from many to be an investment. To give you an example or an anecdote, koto is like going to JP Morgan private wealth after having built an emipre in disposable income and giving them $X and saying manage this for me and give me 5% a year guaranteed because i am already ok to take the risk and i am looking for wealth preservation with a small upside, rather than investment with a bigger potential.

 

More recent smiths that will break thei 100 year mark and paper with the NBTHK eventually to Juyo ( they will and it it will eventually happen for younger blades, eventually) are like investing in Tesla at the beginning and seeing a greater upside. But, you need to do the work, the analysis and the hard work of hunting the right ones. 

 

Market segmentation

 

For Monet the market is the global rich, like Koto, the global rich know Masamune, Bizen, Norishige, etc. They just do and they have fancy advisory that tells them to buy here and there. But the biggest market opportunities for Koto still remain Asia and primarily Japan. The 

Japanese know what they are buying and they will place preference on what they aquire. Chancese are that the forigners that have been buying big Koto have an avenue in which to sell, they are prepared. 

 

There is no such constraint for newer smiths, you can spread the word and educate on newer smiths that are affordable without running into the pain of explaining that Masamune is the the great smith to own ..." if you have a million dollars to drop" 

 

Everything is subjective to analysis, hard work and patience. Look for investment grade with the right parameters and as long as you are willing to wait you will reap a return.

 

However, if you invest 25k USD in the right places today with good advice, you will most likely end up with far more income in 20 years than investing in a sword. Fact of life i am afraid.  This is our curse as collectors,  we need some justification for our burning need to claim  a piece of the past.

[Kmad]

Hi

I think it depends on the price you buy the item for, before a judgement can be made on investment item or not.

I have had 7 Japanese swords and sold 3 at a good profit and sold one on at a slight loss, all sales within 6 months of purchasing the swords. 

For the 3 I have kept I have been offered many multiples of what I paid but I have decided to hold on to them at the moment. Look back on my posts and you will see some of my  aquisitions  it shows you what can be found. Maybe I am just lucky but my strike rate is similar on other collectibles I purchase and sell on.

I buy from car boot sales and sites similar to Craig list but I think if you have enough knowledge and are prepared to wait deals will and do come along. I find the trill of the hunt far out weighs the waiting.

best of look on the searching, regards

ken

 

[Sunny]

wow ...very nice ...I love the fuchi design as well as the tsuba.

looks complete.

I just sold something that looks very close to this so I was tripping out because it's in the mail right now ...so I was like ...how ???

Thanks for sharing 

[drbvac]

I have never made any money on moving Nihonto in 40 years as I usually bought what I liked regardless of papers or not etc. Dealers buy for half what they sell them for and sell for double what they paid for them !!  Very few collectibles on earth are money makers in the short ( less than 100 years) term.  I always look at the price we pay as the "rent" to take care of a very old piece of art that happens to be a weapon that there are not a whole lot of. Again - like any collectible - very hard to get when you want one and can be for sale forever to get your investment back.  Those that can buy and sell and make a living have to be good at what they do and have access to great blades at reasonable prices or be willing to pay the price for polish and papers which can add 2-3 thousand to the original cost.  If you could lease them it may be a perfect way to enjoy the beauty without tying up a lot of cash.  BIGGEST problem as you get older what to so when you are gone because most of our wives have NO IDEA what they cost or any clue what they may be worth or who to even contact to sell them. Last thing you should do is donate them to a museum where they will sit in storage and deteriorate as very few know how to maintain them !!!  On that note - enjoy it all while you can !!

[DTM72]

10 minutes ago, drbvac said:

because most of our wives have NO IDEA what they cost or any clue what they may be worth or who to even contact to sell them. 

^^ Ain't that the truth^^ lol

[ChrisW]

Word to the wise: inventory tagging with a VERY conspicuously kept and portable item manifest is best!

[mas4t0]

12 minutes ago, DTM72 said:

^^ Ain't that the truth^^ lol

 

Really?!

 

I always make sure to get pre-approval from my wife of any big expenditure, lest she think I'm keeping more mistresses than agreed.

[ChrisW]

34 minutes ago, mas4t0 said:

 

Really?!

 

I always make sure to get pre-approval from my wife of any big expenditure, lest she think I'm keeping more mistresses than agreed.

I feel like we have some firm believers of "Its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" here.

[mas4t0]

18 minutes ago, ChrisW said:

I feel like we have some firm believers of "Its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" here.

 

With the sums involved, I just hope everyone makes sure their wives don't think they're keeping a secret second family.