Brian

https://www.igavelauctions.com/auctions/japanese-swords-and-asian-works-of-art-from-the-collection-of-michael-quigley https://jssus.org/1976_Bulletin.pdf

I know it may not be much extra, but I'll add lifetime Gold membership for the winner of the auction too. At $60/year, that may help someone a bit.

Easier said than done.

Agree with Ray, and it is almost unheard of to find fakes like this in Japan, since you risk jail time. More likely this was pickup up outside of Japan.

My thanks go out to Sam and the donor (again) Really blown away by the generosity of the members here. This is a lovely Showato with a nice hamon and would make a nice display or collector sword for anyone collecting WW2 swords. Hope it find a very good home.

Yip...I am aware guys. Rebooted the server twice, but seems we were up to 100% CPU useage. And the hosts seem to be fairly unhelpful, saying it's self managed and it's my job to analyze and sort out. Pretty stressful. I am talking to a developer to do some paid support and speed up the upgrade and get Cloudflare working. I am sorry about this, but please bear with me for the next week or so. I can assure you one way or another we'll get this sorted and get back to fast and reliable service. I think we have grown so large that it's time to throw some more money at this and get everything updated. I can't even tell you why it is suddenly working ok, except maybe something was hammering us and is now asleep. lol I'm on it. If we have downtime, just know I am working on it, and we will be up and fast again soon. Will keep updates here.

Can we get a few overall shots of the entire item, not so close up please?

I am certain there will be, but it's a huge update, and I have yet to play with all the features. So time will tell but I suspect there will be a lot of improvements for everyone. Gold members also currently enjoy larger file sizes and can post more images. Plus many more features.

Kinda a significant find. One of the better of the WW2 swords and has some decent value. Follow the advise above, and don't clean anything except careful oiling of the blade. You have a few thousand $'s there, so time to sit back and take things slowly.

The fact that there are infinitely more militaria collectors than there are Japanese sword collectors speaks a lot. Most of those people collect history, not items. And I daresay that man of them have far better investments than many of us Nihonto collectors. And for many people, investment aspect is something that cannot just be ignored in the name of art. But hey...as they say, "You do you"

Indeed, and it's because searching through the hundreds of thousands of posts is one of the most resource intensive things that can happen to the forum. So it it is a necessary limit, until we can afford to have better hosting without going full commercial. Of course there is always the Gold membership that reduces search intervals down to a more comfortable limit, and I think $5/month is easily worth the convenience. Brian

Honestly, what's the point of trying to translate a mei that is clearly cast or stamped in, and not carved? I wouldn't go past that point before calling this a fake. Sorry.

Well, you got your wish, your account is gone. However you do NOT get to insist we delete all your posts, as that messes with topics and threads and makes some conversations nonsensical. So no..I don't remove someone's past here. In cases where I am asked nicely, I will delete certain posts on request, with a reason. But not when someone demands I delete past threads. And no, they aren't "your" posts anymore. Read the conditions when you join. Stuff posted here becomes open info, you don't get to remove at all. Not sure what led to this tantrum, but good luck with whatever other forum you found.

Jacques, that's an opinion. And one not shared by most.

Going to look at pushing forward the update and maybe moving towards Cloudflare etc, so see if I can mitigate the hammering on the server.

This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure. We don't delete accounts. We assume you are capable of just not logging in.

Thanks David, will sort it out tomorrow. Appreciate it!

Utility knife carried in a side pocket of the scabbard of a Japanese sword. Considered part of the fittings. The blade is called Kogatana, and the handle is kozuka.

I'm able and willing to make changes. That comes with the territory. If people want to send me corrections and the page they are on, I'll do the necessary. Can I confirm the Kanekado change above?

A quote from one of the software developers: "Nearly 60% of all internet traffic is now from bots and they consume content 6 times faster than humans" It's not so easy to just block AI Bots and do rate limiting. Technology is getting around blocks and hammering sites. Another quote, this time regarding clamping down on VPNs... "I find that when I'm on our company VPN, I'm challenged on almost every site I use. It's a sad state of the internet honestly, but at one point a site that usually gets 200k requests in a day got 90 million, and we had to pay for all that junk traffic - and that was just a single site." Scary stats.

Yeah, saw it was slow this morning and had them reboot the server. I think we are sometimes hitting max memory and resources, maybe due to bots and AI harvesting. I am going to need to consider moving to other hosting, the problem is if we go to cloud hosting by the software providers, I'm going to need to come up with an additional $100+ a month, and that is certainly not an easy task. Giving everything some thought as to what I will do, but for now everything should be ok. The internet is changing, and AI is data harvesting at a crazy rate and hammering websites, along with repeated bot attacks, and anyone running a website is seeing changes to the way hosting has to be managed. I'm on it though. Sorry for the downtime.

The one thing that I am constantly surprised at, is that people are surprised that exceptions happen. Where there are rules, there are people who will find ways around them. Attitudes can soften without a change in law. Sometimes someone calls in a favour. Sometimes there is money involved, sometimes no-one cares enough to be strict. Why do people assume all Gunto are now allowed when a few slip through the cracks? It was always going to happen. I'm in the gun industry for over 30 years now, and I can't count the number of times I have seen things happen that weren't supposed to happen. Sometimes it is because of lack of knowledge too. Because the Japanese have less access to Showato, i believe that there is more info on them in the West than in Japan. Many dealers may think that some Showato are forged and handmade enough to qualify as art. Some people at the relevant authorities may believe that forged and folded, but oil quenched is ok. Some may believe that occasionally Gendaito end up with Sho or Seki stamps, and give the owners the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it's just hasty decisions, sometimes carefully calculated ones. In short, this doesn't surprise me even slightly, and it is happening without a change in the laws. Just one of those things that we have to accept without changing our minds about the way these swords were manufactured

Every minor software update requires a (paid) update to all the themes installed. That's why I am waiting for the new software update before I spend money on themes that are not going to work with the new software. One of the nice features of the new software is a button you click to change from light to dark theme instantly anytime you like.

Yeah, doesn't pay me to update the alternate themes right now as we will be forced to go to the new software update before the end of the year, and that will involve a ton of changes to themes and other features, so for now I'm just in the planning stages for the update, and working on finding a developer to take us through it, as it's a major upgrade.