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萬延元庚申年日 – Man’en 1st Kanoe-Saru year (1860) 鈴木鉄造典直迮之 – Suzuki Tetsuzo Norichika/Norinao made this.

Just a short follow up, I agreed with Samurai Museum Berlin to display the blade for two more years (until June 2028) in there so that you all have the chance to see it .

Suishinshi Masahide had a message - Edo period and everything associated with it was bad, it was better before and way better in late Kamakura. That was not unusual thinking towards Bakumatsu, whether the subject was economy, governance or sex life. How realistic is it when applied to swords is difficult to say. Overall Japanese ones are much harder than European and conversely are very prone to chipping. Great cutters with exceptionally short lifetime. You can chop a dozen iron nails with a saber and all you are going to get is the edge being shinier in places. But saber is not going to do nearly the same damage as Japanese sword. If what you want is a cut from above against say human target, I would go with shinto. More consistent steel content and grain size distribution. More weight for the same size is not going to hurt you but makes the technique more forgiving. Will shinto be more prone to fatal damage under such conditions - this is not my experience and I have an issue finding any concrete evidence confirming it is so. Early soshu is just as hard at the edge as Sukehiro. But early Soshu was battle proven... Its a big statement with not a lot of known quantities. Battle proven (very) often means we have X money, Y people and therefore we are going to make the weapons to fit the bill, nevermind all other considerations. Or it can mean we have one guy who survived a famous encounter 20 years ago and we continue making weapons according to his vision, until 20 years later people start believing in something else... And if you are an actual weapon designer, being guided by soldiers is not going to yield a fantastic weapon. There are many reasons, including soldiers not realizing the tradeoffs between performance, reliability, cost and manufacturability, while navigating those is the key to being great weapon designer. A LOT of them will have memories of the fighting itself distorted to the point of being completely unrealistic. Or driven by a single event which drove them nuts. So you are looking for a feedback of someone experienced, intelligent, calm minded, objective with knowledge of how the technology works. How many such people exist, especially since everyone who really fights rather than participates runs the risk of being killed which if not 50% then at least 10% Back to swords, frankly speaking they all have nearly the same effectiveness, +/- 15%. Its not the kind of technology or environment where you kill 100 people and then elaborate on how it felt with say Bizen versus Soshu. In this case, "fashion" becomes important. Somebody with influence likes o-kissaki - everyone tries to copy and be cool. Then another guy says - its all hubris, traditional sugata is better, and in 10 years - nothing changed on the battlefield but we are back to shapes from 100 years ago.

On the wakizashi, 國安 - Kuniyasu

勝正 - Katsumasa

What have you got against gold? AI-enhanced comparison image:

"Dignified" generally means the same as "noble" - a long, tapering sugata, typically koshi-zori which was closely linked to the court nobles of the Heian and early Kamakura period. The wider, stouter or generally more "aggressive" a sword is, the less "dignified".

下原住正長 - Shitahara ju Masanaga

Thanks, Hiro. I have found additional evidence that Tokuho was not just a minor Obaku monk disciple of Kosen. As you have shown, he had two dharma heirs of his own. Here is another simplified lineage chart in Stephen Addiss' exhibit catalog "Obaku: Zen Painting and Calligraphy." In this volume of works belonging to American collections, another Kannon collaboration by Kosen/Tokuho is also featured. Here Kannon is depicted on a lotus rather than an outcropping above water. The translation is: Up on a green leaf, Kannon is quiet and peaceful, With eyes that hear sounds and ears that see colors-- How marvelous, how useful! Kosen's seals from this painting and two others in the catalog are shown here along with their translations.

Not enough gold! AI will be the death of us! You will never be able to trust any image ever again! Personally I prefer a tartan texture!

It’s signed Nobumasa and dated October 1943. There is a stamped “80” and also potentially a “na” stamp on the mei side. You should add "NLF" to your username - "NLF Swords.” You still throw that term around in literally every translation request you post even though it’s incorrect. These are Army swords….

This example from a still active company with hundreds of faked/copied designs, operating out of Osaka https://www.jauce.com/user/9sBuThXpTqPVk2Hk6fEs19XhMiFkU?&search=tsuba&n=100&page=1 I did toy with the idea of doing a catalogue with the fakes and the original piece they are based on - but it might end up being a very very thick book!

Hi Rob search for “legend of the badger tea kettle” ….very well known and much depicted in varied Japanese arts

Thanks for explaining that's been bugging me for a while! Are "noble" and "dignified" just two different translations of the same Japanese term?

Thanks for your articles Alexander . The thought that items that I now own have passed through the hands of previous collectors ,who have also treasured them , has always interested me . One minor criticism . In your article on Walter Behrens you perpetuate the myth that Henri Joly was Belgian . He was born on the 24th of Feb 1878 at Chartres France . His 1901 and 1911 census entries confim that he was French . The attached tsuba is one of two I have that were once part of Henri Joly's collection .

It matches my pyjamas!

Blade length is measured in a straight line along the back, from the tip to the notch where the habaki sits, the mune-machi.

I mean the thing is the whole "mt fuji" hamon thing is very much a generalization. Not all Shinto smiths focused on pure aesthetics. In fact ohmura even makes note of this, pointing at that for the most part blades made in kyushu seemed to perform rather well. For example, take a shodai tadayoshi blade and compare it to a tadayoshi 8: yeah the shodai will have nice jigane and may have cleaner lines, but the overall sugata and features of the blade are almost identical. Same can be said with ishido smiths. Are there exceptions? Of course, there always are, but the blanket statement that all of them were made for art isn't really true. They were still carried regularly, and tons of people relied on them for personal defense. The priorities shifted. It's like taking a modern pietta Colt single action army and comparing it to the original: they're made for completely different purposes. Also I'm in the camp that Japanese swords are primarily designed with unarmored or lightly armored targets in mind to begin with. Yeah there are swords that may be more robust, but at the end of the day it's a sidearm. Like owning a Glock 17 and expecting it to do the work of an ar15. Yeah there were definitely flaws with the cutting tests, but there were also destructive tests done. I'm sure you've read the sesko writeup on the masao vs naotane test.

What are your thoughts on this one: https://www.jauce.com/auction/u1227971547 It feels off to me. The sekigane look fake, the sloppy execution of the bamboo(?) and other bits, the too small kogai ana, along with the dusting of rust all make me feel that it is more than a little suss…

Not so sure about the swinging sabers at nails statement lmao but yeah I agree pretty much with everything else you said. The Japanese sword in general lends itself more effectively towards a proficient user rather than a random grunt who will try to use the kissaki to pry at stuff.

The thing is you can't really quantify what type of blows caused kirikomi, so even that is hardly scientific. Obviously if a blade survived with multiple deep kirikomi, it did its job well, but I guess the main point I was getting at is there isn't really a solid way to tell besides time travel whether something like an onizuka Yoshikuni or kunihiro would perform just as well in such a situation. Also, people like to waive around random mumei swords they own with kirikomi as if that is some sign of them surviving battle, but as a kenjutsu practitioner I can guarantee that at least some of those kirikomi could've been caused by martial arts use. This is different of course if a blade has solid documentation showing it saw usage however.

Probably circa 1550, can be either Bizen or Mino, would look at nakago which might reveal which one.

Kenny: My guess would be the last one - Masanaga. John C.

BaZZa.

Augie, the signature reads KUNIYASU, not kaniyasu. To identify a swordsmith, you have to compare the work (in the blade) with certified examples. You need to see the blade (in good traditional polish) in-hand for that. The signature is the final factor of evidence in this comparison.

You heard him translation monkeys, get to work…..and don’t forget about the johanna, whatever the hell that is. Tell me again why you don’t charge for this service Brian? Ridiculous

There are now two places available for this workshop. In case someone wants to take part, I can help finding accommodation. However, in the tourist season there are not many guest rooms available in my little village, so it is advisable to make an early decision. See you! TSUBA forging workshop 2026 GB.pdf

Hi, Perhaps my perspective can help. I think the scientific perspective is a dead end. Why? Because controlled test conditions are impossible to create on historical swords ("too many variables that can't be systematically varied"). Research on Japanese steel and destructive testing on Google Scholar typically yield these ridiculously small sample studies, often with a no-big-deal Muromachi blade or two, sacrificed for metallurgic examination, which typically then leads the authors to make broad conclusions on Koto steel. This is over-generalization and unrigorous. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the folk-science of Masahide's testing - I am somewhat more sympathetic to his approach. Try to cut stuff, make notes. Again, very limited. End of the day, nobody is going to sacrifice a meito on the altar of a Kabuto test cutting. All in all, the fact that Shinto blades have a higher average carbon content leading to brittleness is well attested, and even today's centralized tatara process suffers from overcarbonisation, which is the most common complaint of modern smiths. But this is besides the point. If you want to understand the battle-worthiness of swords, you need to study the market, the method of warfare, and the needs of customers. This is fundamentally more interesting approach than attempting to misapply the scientific method: study the consumer demand profile and the market feedback mechanism. The market creates incentives, producers react to these incentives to make competitive products. Koto school that flourished produced in-demand swords. The main factor driving sword demand during the Koto period was battlefield feedback. Therefore, an efficient proxy for period-controlled, battle-worthiness is the popularity of certain Koto schools and maker that were in high-demand by the elite members of the bushi class. In other-words, if Oda Nobunaga or Toyotomi Hideyoshi took a liking to a certain smith, it's because the product got the job done, pretty was secondary, and they had nearly two centuries of accrued smith reputation to work with. Better, they either had first-hand experience, or second-hand experience from testimonials of their retainers or rivals. Nicknames at the time were simple and to the point: candlestand cutter, helmet cutter, etc. Collecting good swords as war booty, off the dead hands of rivals, was a competitive field at the time. What happens during Muromachi? Well, the demand profile changes. It's no longer about absolute battle effectiveness as it was during the Kamakura Golden Age, it's about getting production to be as cheap as possible to equip flocks of Ashigaru while maintaining a workable sidearm product that was used only in last resort. Different demand profile. That, and exporting swords to the mainland in high volume to quality-insensitive consumer to fund your armies. These were the early Toyotas, or the Shahed drones of today. It works and its cheap. And during Shinto time? Well, peace is upon the land, at long last. Sword smithing loses touch with battlefield reality. Imagine your arms industry producing weapons during peace time, without any adversary to provide feedback. And besides, all the people with money already have their ancestral collectible stashed away. But swords needed to be made in small quantities, this is where you start seeing hamons that feel extremely contrived, with painted tobiyaki and mount fuji impression rendered as hamon. Authorities knew this and of course a few swordsmith had access to their collections and tried making reproductions of Koto swords (Momoyama times, for instance), but it's a slow decline after that. By the middle Edo, the sword industry became so atrophied and the Shogun had to stimulate demand by providing honors and subsidies just to get some talented people moving into the field so it wouldn't completely die out, and a few talented smiths were found in Satsuma (Ippei Yasuo, etc) that genuinely stood out. Things got bad, and everyone knew it. Customers started asking for "proof that it cuts" and that spawned an entire test-cutting industry which was profoundly misguided as the test cutting was performed exclusively on naked or barely clothed static humans in a standardized posture across standardize cut angles with a strange and unrealistic weight attached on the tsuka. That certification industry became very profitable not because of the test-cutting per se, but the side-hustle of creating snake oil out out of harvested body parts. A grim and decadent practice. So Masahide walks into this dying field, realizes something is deeply wrong, and sets himself up on a journey to rectify it and go back to the "old ways". During the Bakumatsu period, one starts to see swords getting longer and more brutal looking. This was a thing in Japan, the closer to civil war, the longer and more brutal the swords got. Nobody wants to be the one with the tooth pick when all hell breaks loose. Kiyomaro cracks the Koto recipes and produce secretly Sunno-To for the Imperialist faction as a side hustle. Naotane cracks it on occasion as well, creating the closest Bizen-mono Utsushi ever made. There is a genuine effort in making functional swords again, and demand is met by the samurai population getting prepared for the inevitable showdown. Money flows into the underground markets and civil war brews. Nobody is looking for mount fuji as a hamon or a fancy Tadatsuna Horimono at that point. So what do we learn from all of this? Well, in the end, it is the desires of the customers that drive the market and product development, and the customer gets his desires from his current priorities. In the Kamakura period, this was about that solo duel on horseback against your sworn family enemy that you'd call out on the battlefield for a one on one in an effort to get his head and earn some glory for your clan. A blade severed by impact meant death and ridicule, and it made you and your entire clan look bad. And people watched and took notes. Battlefield effectiveness at whatever the cost was the goal. It was about having the ultimate weapon, the ultimate horse, the ultimate armor for those one-on-ones to grind up on the honor ladder and hopefully be rewarded by your Lord. I will skip the mongols and the effect it has on Bizen-mono, but things evolved quickly there as well as a result of pure feedback. During the Muromachi period, Ashigaru armies with cheap yari an arquebuses was the meta. No more heroic one-on-one for trophy hunting. Just bloody volleys, and once the Takeda Cavalry went down, it was the end of an era. War had forever changed its face, and demand would never be the same again. And yet, hard earned reputation during the Golden Age would persist to this day. I hope this helps, Hoshi

mr kojima talked a bit about koto steel a bit in this article: http://www.ksky.ne.jp/~sumie99/Masamune.html the last paragraph, regarding a masamune.... "But still I have a question, if such a blade is good as weapon. Of course I know that, soft and tough edge is better than sharp and brittle edge in some situation." so it seem that between koto and shinto blades, it is less about the difference in quality, but a difference in use and therefore a difference in structure.

Great show and thanks for organizing it! I have not been able to participate for two years and the experience was exhilarating. I hope everyone in the field gets to enjoy a show like this at least once.

Maybe a smith was messing around and experimenting with quenching. Clear as mud.

Jerald posted those pics here on April 16th - slighly larger versions, that is. John C.

Hamish, you may well be right! Some KO-KINKO are a bit plain and, inspite of their soft material, quite functional which certainly has to do with the times they were created in. But they are recognized and valued. AKAO TSUBA can sometimes be simple in their design, but very elegant and artistically refined in my humble opinion.

Alex, I absolutely share your opinion. Coming back to the title of this thread, I am often more impressed by the inherent craft in a TSUBA than by its artistry. I can admire the work in a gorgeous and opulent 19th century KINKO TSUBA, but for owning one, I would choose a genuine KACHUSHI TSUBA with a well-made DOTE MIMI. But they are no longer underrated and now sold for big money!

This one sticks in the memory from a dealer’s fb page a few years ago. T’was beyond my means, but I still think about it occasionally. Hats off to whoever picked it up.

Just a few pictures from the show. This was from Sunday. Saturday was much busier! As always, Mark and family put on a great show! Lots of great items to see and had the chance to meet up with old friends.

Absolutely. One of the concepts I have been taught is that what we paint evolves as our minds evolve, becoming truer as we discover the depths of our True Self/Original Nature--like a spiritual diary. I have seen motifs rendered before and after Zen masters had their enlightenment experiences; they often brush the same motif hundreds or thousands of times during their lives. There is greater and greater clarity. Keep at it!! If you would like to see examples of Enso painted by Zen masters through the ages, you should get the book "Enso--Zen Cirecles of Enlightenment" by my friend Audrey Seo. Here is my Kaisan Sokaku included in this lovely book. Compare Yamaoka Tesshu's mei from age 37-52 as his enlightenment deepened. They have even done an analysis of the ink grains in his strokes to show the complete absence of hesitation when the grains line up in one direction. He brushed more than 1 million works, as part of his practice, but also as a means of raising funds for a temple and providing for lay Zen practitioners. Yamaoka literally wanted to save all of the souls in Japan living in his time. I have works by him across this timeline. He died at age 52 of stomach cancer. It is said that he is the only known case of a Zen master from the Meiji who died upright in meditation.

I like this one. mei Ichiiriuku Hisamitsu

The same ones from 2024 ??

Hello everyone, I also wanted to share with you my result at the last NBSK contest. Last year, at my first participation, I received the “Kasaku” (佳作) award and it was a great honor for me, as well as seeing my work exhibited first at the Tetsu Museum in Sakaki machi (Nagano) and then at the Meiji Jingu in Tokyo. The results were published in last days, and I can proudly say that I have confirmed the Kasaku award for the second consecutive year, in a context where the level is extremely high and the pursuit of perfection is constant. This year, I decided to raise the bar with a more elaborate work and a more challenging execution technique: from the choice of an “archaic” hitatsura hamon, complex and highly dynamic, to the realization process itself, which led me to a nearly three-dimensional result. I worked in multiple layers, with different dilutions, using brushes and a shodō ink stick, following the teachings I received during my last trip to Japan and after countless hours of experimentation to find a balance that satisfied me. It was a process with no margin for correction. There are some imperfections but that's okay, we have to know how to accept them. It was a long process—a true pursuit of perfection—almost a form of active meditation in which time seems to lose its meaning. The choice of the kakemono (made in Japan), too, was not accidental: on the shirasaya there is an old label bearing the name of the blade, “Amanokawa” — the Milky Way — likely inspired by the long sunagashi and the brilliant nie that characterize it. For this reason, we chose a display that would evoke, even if only from afar, a starry sky. Below I leave you some photos, and thank you for your attention.

@Sukaira Oh i wish but my budget is about half of that currently 😆 dream blade tho

Hello, It contains a poem by Ono-no-Komachi, a 9th-century poet. It starts in the center, then moves to the left, and continues to the right. 心から　　　うきたる舟に　乗りそめて　ひと日も波に　　濡ぬ日ぞなき kokorokara ukitarufuneni norisomete hitohimonamini nurenuhizonaki meaning 「I willingly chose to board this painful boat, and not a single day passes without being drenched in tears (waves).」 （It expresses her lament over the suffering caused by a love she herself began.） Hiro

I started practicing kyudo in Boston in 2005 every weekend for about 1 years. With my move to Florida, practice was quite irregular. From 2015-2025, I didn't practice at all due to chronic pain from a nerve injury for which no form of therapy including surgery and every procedure and medication known to man provided even a little benefit. I stopped Zen practice. I stopped iaido practice. In my desperation and state of heightened anxiety, I convinced myself that the next procedure would be the magic bullet. However, even partial relief never came. There was no end to severe pain every waking moment. Then I realized that I had no weakness, no muscle atrophy, and no ongoing acute tissue injury. Every imaging and nerve conduction study was normal. The pain was just a loop that had taken up occupancy in my brain--just neurotransmitters running amuck. Pain-->anxiety-->more pain-->more anxiety, etc. I started to remind myself that there was no 5-alarm fire. The anxiety died down. About a year ago, I resumed daily kyudo, iaido, and Zen practice. Next weekend, I'm going to my first kyudo intensive in the past 20 years in nearby Eustis, FL. https://www.facebook.com/events/1392050959279976/?ref_source=NEWS_FEED Here I am in 2008. And here is a video I just shot yesterday. It's been a long journey...

I hear you. The 18 year old in me is frustrated to find himself in a 63 year old body. However, I am sometimes surprised at how much less pain I feel after intensive training. I did a 4 day zen intensive training recently consisting of 8 hours a day of zazen, chanting, and hojo walking. I was pretty convinced I couldn’t do that much sitting meditation without severe pain. I actually had less pain after the first day. Very encouraging.

Thank you for the explanation. Makes sense. The rough part of getting old for me is the mind still thinks its 22 when I could run a sub-4 minute mile. A few steps to the mailbox reminds me I'm now on social security!! John C.

And in a more concentrated form on a ‘funa-dansu’ ship’s safe, designed with a heavy front so that it would float door-down (relatively watertight) should the sailing ship sink. These were expensive (for me on my salary) about 20 years ago but they’re a tenth of the price nowadays. I had a set of keys made for it, and one day about 10 years ago I found an old drum lock that fitted it perfectly.

I've posted this on another thread (cultural refreshments) with a little more explanation, however I thought I would add a pic on this thread as well. A suzuri-bako I built to match an old door I bought. John C.

"And here we have a beautiful example of a MacTavish-den tsuba..."

"If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" @Spartancrest Dale, I think you just pointed out the Abyss staring back at me. The tartan one sent shivers down my spine.