Would love for help/information on new lot of Tosogu I have purchased.

[Hooting Mandrills]

[Gunome]

Hello,

 

A nice collection. I like the kozuka and the fan menuki

[Hooting Mandrills]

Recently picked up a new lot of fittings and had some questions I wanted to ask and see If I could get a little bit more information on. Three of the pieces have papers, albeit the older ones. The monkey menuki are attributed to Ko-Goto, the Trellis are attributed to Waki-Goto, and the menuki is signed by Tomihisa. I know for swords, the older papers were much less reliable then the newer post 80s papers, but do the same apply for fitting and would these most likely still be correct or misattributed. The menuki craftsmen has a few different people it can be, so wanted to see if anyone could help with which Tomihisa it could be from. The fan menuki are a bit trickier, these as far as I have done some research on appear to be signed by Mitsumasa, who I believe is the 12th mainline Goto master. However with anything with no papers, I'm skeptical of these being authentic, however the craftsmanship is pretty high quality and the style to me seems to fit the Goto line. On the Tsuba side of things, was wanting to know if anyone has seen a similar squirrel themed tsuba, I have only found one that is somewhat close and appears to be from the Shoami school, but not 100% certain. If anyone had any more info they could share or could confirm anything that I've tried to do some research on, the help would be immensely helpful! 

[Spartancrest]

Hi Chris. Your squirrel tsuba appeared in 2024 in this thread -

 along with this image of an utsushi  

 

Another from this thread :

  With this image  

There is also a single squirrel design with papers listed here -https://matsukaze.thebase.in/items/8490153   

And another with both ategane filled here https://www.touken-world.jp/search-sword-guard/art0002655/  and here with papers  https://www.ayakashi.co.jp/items/83815405

 

I have seen a few tsuba with "Shoki on the bridge" as well, but they tend to be cast copies [Not yours] https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/396800258462 you can tell the design is Shoki because of his "Ken" type sword as opossed to Yoshitsune and Benkei on the bridge.

 

           There are rarely only "just one" of anything!

Edited May 9 by Spartancrest
typo

[Matsunoki]

Chris, just a thought…..you might be better to have a separate thread for each item rather than overload everything into just this one. 

[Hooting Mandrills]

Was thinking about doing that but didn't want to spam out the section. Thanks for the help so far!