Rivkin

There are green paper Ichimonji with Kanzan's sayagaki which repaper as shinto Ishido, and far less often, but sometimes, one does get NTHK/NBTHK difference on those, but I don't think anyone from shinshinto has this distinction. Whatever the reason, they all were "Bizen inspired" rather than an accurate copy of Ichimonji jigane/hamon.

Definitely Edo period, but need two more pictures: detailed macro shot of hamon (with a camera looking from a side) and boshi. Then one could possibly identify the smith and date very accurately.

I'll throw in a very controversial statement: Its exceptionally rare for NBTHK to classify any koto nijimei as gimei. The reasoning is that you can't prove that the tanto signed Kunitoshi was made to fake the Rai Kunitoshi and not by some later person, whose name was indeed Kunitoshi. One can argue that nagamei is factually wrong, but doing it for nijimei is difficult. The papers issued would simply note that its a Muromachi (for example) period's Kunitoshi, even though one can reasonably suspect that it was made to be fake - but it is an old, Muromachi period's fake. So I think this one will paper with >90% probability. Such reasoning aside, it does appear as later Muromachi example with genuine signature (Uda?). Unfortunately with those, sugata does not get one to a very precise dating/attribution.

Its hard to be absolutely certain, but there is a substantial and mostly uniform curvature - something that completely went out of fashion around 1630-1640. Kissaki is small, nakago is smallish compared to nagasa, so its more or less typical for late Muromachi. And not Momoyama Muromachi, but more along the lines of 1515-1550. The negative is this being a period when a LOT of swords were produced, or rather unimpressive quality save for but a handful of names. Actually were it post-1560, I would have far better expectations regarding its quality.

One of the cases where I have to start with a disclaimer that my opinion on this topic is likely to be uneducated, erroneous and subjectively personal. I think these two blades are very different and "Den" here has strong connotations. The underlying problem is Sa school excelling in basically every single style of their time. They can be strongly Soshu flavored, Bizen, Rai or their old, provincial Yamato-sort-of style. Frankly speaking the last option is the least impressive, but every seller of such items always insists it still has some connection to Masamune and O-Sa's fame. Which it does not - its just a provincial style, and more often than not - a coarsely forged one. Within "Soshu works" you also have a big spread - from things that are almost Bizen, some could be mistaken for Chogi's school flavor, with ko nie and nioi and very sparse usage of any distinctively nie based activities, to the works where the foundation of hamon is sort of in nioi, but there are lots of nie activities, sunagashi, very often there is inazuma etc. Interestingly enough, the hada can in both cases can be either more or less pure itame or large featured mokume/itame/nagare based. The work on the left is in more Bizen-like style. Jigane is probably very good, but its mostly nioi/ko nie and will not have strong Soshu feel to it. Its a style which is distinctively Sa. Its also much harder to photograph and thus pictures might not reflect the real quality out there. The blade on the right is late Nambokucho, of distinctive later style, sunagashi dominated with somewhat rougher nie. It will be much brighter, but I wonder whether Sa Yoshisada is a strong attribution here. I feel today such items would have a strong chance to be attributed as Sue Sa, or something similar. The ones with stronger nie and masame would even go Mino Kanenobu. I think most learned collectors today assign lesser value to this type of work, though I personally like it a lot. Here is an example. Still of the two blades I would take without question the one from 65th Juyo session. Later Sa works can have rougher jigane, and I suspect the 15th session examples is like that.

Late Muromachi, Kaga.

I think it depends on definition of Ichimonji. Typical Naotane Bizen has distinctive mokume hada and is in very uniform ko-nie with sunagashi. It does not exactly match any particular Ichimonji style.

If its a traditionally made sword, there is no indication of it being tired. It should survive plenty of polishes.

That's an interesting example. The polish is completely non-traditional, and one has to wonder whether the forging is also so. The style sort of emulates Nambokucho's Omiya, but there is coarse variation of nie size, with larger pieces shifting towards the ji, something one expects to find in late pieces, etc. etc. It could be a decent shinshinto example, butchered by polish, or it could be something completely non-traditional, but reasonably well done.

Very personal opinion: Wakimono are often quoted as being a problem for gokaden, but I don't feel that way. Many if not most of these schools were founded as provincial, Yamato-based shops, around 1300 or so. Attributions to these schools tend to be "soft" and are often attributed differently by different shinsa, but they are more or less all within the same class - 1300 to 1400, provincial work. Provincial school make a comeback around 1510, and with basically similar issues. The bigger problem is that Bizen, for example, being the largest workshop of the land, from time to time forged in every possible type of hada and almost every hamon known in Japan. There are ko-itame, itame with nagare, mokume, masame and even matsukawa-flavored examples. There are suguha in nioi, ko choji, choji in nioi, choji in nie, midare or gunome in either nie or nioi. There are blades that look like Rai Kunitoshi, Yamato Taima and whatever else. Kantei-ing these 1100-1300 blades can be a nightmare, especially as we outside of Japan are relatively seldom exposed to those. You can substitute such details with something along the lines "Bizen is choji in nioi with itame hada" and that's going to match roughly 30% of Kamakura examples and probably as high as 70% of Muromachi. And then you put Tomonari, Ayanokoji, ko Aoe, Rai Kuniyuki next to each other and it sort of dawns on me (don't know about others) - these people must have known each other's work more than just a bit. Some of it does converge towards the same kind of aesthetic, which is period rather than region based. Same way you have later Nambokucho blade, and you can have heavily Bizen leaning Sa or strongly Soshu leaning Chogi or even some Kozori signed piece - and you clearly see they were influenced by the same, period-based, Soshu-Bizen aesthetic.

I would say gokaden is nearly as helpful as it is confusing. First and foremost, roughly half of the blades currently on the market are shinto. Which is, except for Ishido Bizen and a few other subschools, is a tradition of its own. The sixth tradition. So you have a classification which is from the get go fails with half the blades. But it does not get any easier as you go into details of what should be describable by gokaden. Pre-mid-Kamakura blades, no matter which school they are, ko Bizen, Yamashiro or Yamato can look quite similar. Many will belong to subschools which are not clearly gokaden - like Aoe and ko Hoki. Even though ko Hoki often looks more like "mainstream" Yamato compared to, say Hosho. And Hosho school never had mainstream-like Yamato signatures, its not clear if it was in Yamato region, it has a well defined style of its own - but its in the old tables as part of five mainstream Yamato schools, so it is there. Rai Kuniyuki forged most of his blades in wide, nie filled hamon, which can be mistaken for Bizen Tomonari , but is completely incomparable to almost anything ever done in later Rai and Awataguchi, i.e. the works which sort of define Yamashiro style as it is. Soshu tends to include Awataguchi smith Shintogo Kunimitsu, whose works were never mistaken for any single blade produced by anyone else within Soshu school, but can exclude Shizu Kaneuji, on account of him going Mino. Hasebe, who is very central to Soshu, is often instead delegated to Yamashiro, on account of him having Yamashiro-lineage name. Gokaden is blood/province oriented classification. It fails utterly in shinto, when style dominated over blood. It fails with ancient swords, which were all forged in rather utilitarian style, which has rough itame-nagare hada and rough nioi with elements of nie hamon. It mostly fails at the time when everybody was trying to be Soshu. It constantly includes things that are not really that similar - Yoshii, Unju and Osafune under the umbrella of one "Bizen school", while sending works of exceptionally similar smiths to different schools because their blood is unrelated. In reality if you want to understand Koto you need to get accustomed that there were about 25 more or less prominent schools/lineages, each of which cannot be completely defined by gokaden. Even if it resided in Bizen or Yamashiro. Ayanokoji usually does not look like Rai Kunitoshi. If you want simplification, there were only 4 styles which were constantly imitated throughout Japanese history. Ichimonji, Soshu, Rai Kunitoshi/Awataguchi and Yamato Tegai Kanenaga. If you understand 4-10 masterpieces from these traditions, you can understand 50% of nihonto aesthetic.

Its a bit complicated question. Which I think only true bigot can try to answer. Classifications of historical weapons are somehow extremely sensitive to how society interprets the relationship between an artist and a community. For example, Russian books usually correlate any observable developments to Imperial edicts. Whether its bayonets, machine guns or kards, they will be described as "the pattern following the edict 471". Even if the object was arguably made in some secluded cave in India. In case of Japan one has to keep in mind that in Confucian spirit the laws had a tendency to remain active "on paper" pretty much from their enactment till Meiji revolution. The earliest legal codes defined a relationship between a person and the state as being intermediated by clan's head. Each person is registered with a specific clan name, and its your clan head who pays your taxes to the central government and arranges for legal permits. In East Asia pretty much everything requires a legal permit. Scroll forward to Edo period, to practice any craft you needed a permit, which was obtainable more or less exclusively by inheriting it from your father, all the way back to someone who received from any top government official, either Imperial or Shogunate. So every Japanese genealogy of every craftsman goes back all the way Kamakura period or earlier. If your ancestor was given a license to smith by none other than prince Shotoku, nobody could question your legal qualifications. If it was some northern Fujiwara administrator - the legitimacy would be insignificant by comparison. Also, with heavy emphasis on reincarnation it is actually suggested at times that these later craftsmen are direct reincarnations of the earlier generations. But with a Confucian sensitivity that the earlier generations were obviously less corrupted and thus in general superior. Good thing about such classification is that obviously most craftsmen learned their skill from their "parents", often adaptive ones. Also such extended family members do tend to have common traits. Bad thing is that everytime there is a fashion change and everybody in Japan starts to make more or less the same thing, you can't explain it unless you have a father figure who plainly fathered them all. Or you don't even try to explain it and are satisfied with attributions that jump between schools that are supposedly completely unrelated. The classification is more vertical then horizontal. For example, there is almost nothing in common between Nambokucho and Momoyama Bungo - except the names.

The photographs are very poor but it seems the work is not typical for Kanemitsu. Regarding the papers, with really major names one typically has to assume repapering green will yield something lesser. The problem is that with signed blades the lesser attribution is gimei. There are exceptions, mostly with blades that's been in the US for a while now etc. This being said, I actually don't know if the nakago here is the one pictured in the papers or it was made recently to look the same way as in papers. Which is hard to do with newer papers which have actual photographs.

Probably spam folder caught it.

I thought about saiha, but there are two things that to me appear to be be conciencious add-on to sori: it has old styled fumbari, mostly happening next to nagako, and kissaki appears to have old ko-kissaki dimensions. Taken together I am inclined to believe it was purposefully made this way.

No hada is visible, no activity within choji, very rough nie clustering around the upper portion of the hamon... Showa? Yes, the shape is indeed quite pronounced.

I am a simple person living life by personal and highly erroneous experience. Which tells me I am yet to see some other name repapering to Norishige or Norishige repapering to someone else, unless the original papers are pre war. Possibly something like this happened, but must be very rare. There are no green paper Norishige quite likely for this reason, unlike virtually every other major Soshu name. He is very distinctive. The wise book, which no one is expert enough to argue against, says that Norishige, Yukimitsu and Masamune are the very same thing, but there is surprisingly little evidence of that. You don't find Yukimitsu who became Norishige and vice versa. Go can unfortunately repaper, and fortunately one can repaper to Go. You need something with lots of nie, which gradually varies in size, high quality hada and from a very specific period. Its not very common to find such an item. 95% of things papering Tametsugu are from 1355+, they can't repaper to Go. When it comes to 1350-1380, there is unfortunately clear evidence that all Soshu smiths by this time already had pretty good understanding of each other's work and could from time to time emulate their peers. Daito attribution from this period has "sort of" two default judgements - Hasebe (especially if its from 1350s) and Shizu if it has togari and heavier on masame. Tametsugu is frankly speaking another big blob of judgements, which covers things that demonstrate some well defined Etchu elements. Its a big blob, as it includes those that have a lot of Etchu flavor, and those that have relatively little. There is Etchu/Kaga Sanekage, but this attribution usually means the blade shows good Etchu quality in couple of areas, but is otherwise inferior. Soshu daito which do not get Shizu or Hasebe or Tametsugu attributions tend to have something very specific which puts them into another, more specific group. Sa often tends to have almost Bizen like quality to it. Lots of nioi. Can have utsuri. Can have choji. But still clearly Soshu. Soden Bizen is even further away. Mino Kanenobu will have somewhat later sugata, with lots of sunagashi but somewhat nioi heavy hamon. He often repapers Sue Sa or Hirado Sa, and vice versa. Similar situation with Naotsuna, Kinju and a few others. For an ignorant bumpkin like myself, Tametsugu is not a judgement based on there is being a sword with features such and such, signed Tametsugu and everything similar is thus judged as Tametsugu. You can't produce this kind of certainty on the basis of second rate oshigatas. Its a name to use when one sees Etchu features on later blades, plus possibly some other Soshu lineage's features. Again personal experience - Tametsugu thus repaper to other names with about half the frequency of Naoe/Kaneuji Shizu. The latter group is such humongous attribution blob, it can, with small probability, but can repaper to almost any contemporary Soshu name. The only thing which has more uncertain outcome is Masamune with pre war papers. There are about two dozen known Kaga, Echizen, Etchu and Echigo contemporary smiths who frankly all worked in related styles. There was very likely the second generation Norishige. Do you often see mumei blades papered to him by NBTHK? But yes, there are signed Norishige from 1360s which are accepted as genuine second generation. Where do unsigned go? Was Tametsugu some great workaholic, but save for inferior Sanekage everyone else who ever signed their work in these four northern provinces had a major drinking problem? No, its a typical Japanese treatment of Koto blades - take a school with 20 known smiths, but attribute 95% of mumei blades to only 2-3 of them, based on features/quality/ or maybe even something else. So the question "what would this Tametsugu repaper to in 30 years/by NTHK/by someone else" to me is both interesting and realistic. I would share my personal practical experiences in the matters of repaper arts, but there is a tiny problem being I am not sure the pieces I since sold today still retain the entire set of papers. The global warming produces winds which sweep away all kinds of things, and I don't want to endanger my dear buyer's sword values simply based on some false sense of either honesty or community. So I'll just pontificate - I was always taught that vocalizing once's perception of art pieces is one of the main learning methods, and the more one vocalizes personal perception rather than something read out from a book, the more one could learn. Especially so when such perceptions are debunked as wrong!

Ogh. Very personal and erroneous opinion. Etchu Tametsugu, Echizen Tametsugu and Mino Tametsugu are somewhat different styles. They have slightly different Dozen names. Etchu Tametsugu is reminscent of both Go and Norishige. The difficulty in distinguishing lies in both Norishige and Go (supposedly in this case, as no signed blades) working each in two styles. Tametsugu is easily discernible from either style of Norishige on a number of points, mostly related to the hamon. The only papers confusing the two are from Edo period, where Tametsugu works were regularly passed for Norishige. It is more difficult with Go since there is some overlap. In general Go judgement suggests much more aggressive use of nie which exists as well separated particles, possibly including ara nie and also Go attributions include earlier and very high quality pieces. Some Go blades are the absolute best in nihonto. The early works by Tametsugu often tend towards proper Matsukawa hada. At the end around 1365-1380 (Echizen/Mino) we are however ending with the style which is itame based with some nagare and mokume, heavily relies on gunome with sunagashi, which can have even decisively Mino appearance. There is somewhat diminished connection to either Go or Norishige and more similarity to other Soshu smiths. One can notice that very few books give the beginning date for Tametsugu's work. It feels that the reason is that those are not dated yet exhibit conservative sugata, which can be consistent with dates as early as 1335-1340. This can be consistent with Norishige dying and Tametsugu lunching on his own, but then the problem is that normally having such difference in style and long work period could argue for two generations, but Tametsugu is granted exception. Old genealogies do not mention the second generation, however signatures known are generally oshigata based, and even they do not cover the entire assumed length of activity.

For me the issue with old papers is that they are often optimistic or rather blindly based on earlier evaluations, which affects all grades, Juyo included. There are supposedly some papers that were done under Honma which are conservative, I am too lazy to check the date on yours - they are almost non-existent by now. This is unfortunately the kind of blade where the judgement will be based on how conservative you are. One needs to cut some slack to chu-jo-saku smith on account some of his signatures possibly not being recorded in reference materials.

I am sorry to say this, but unfortunately you provide extremely non-informative pictures. You always need one high resolution photo of the nakago, one of the entire blade shot from above (on the towels on the ground), one macro which includes hamon, in some cases you definitely need boshi (I think here you do). Despite the issue with not seeing signatures exactly like that I would be cautiously optimistic. The writing is done in very determined, confident steady hand, the yasurime does not appear to have shinshinto traits, the coloration is brown, there is a lot of variation of how it looks on different photos, but on some the color appears ok. The work is ok for Ishido school. He is a lesser name. He moved around, which can be associated with having different styles of signature. The white paper was issued in good faith. There is a decent chance it will repaper.

Thank you very much!

I think its definitely crosses into ayasugi hada. It is not always sine waves, can be connected "O" as well. Gassan is a possibility here. Sometimes one also finds similar hada with such smiths as Fuyuhiro (possible here) or Naminohira, Kongobuye (far less likely here).

There are not that many chances to mistake sue-Soshu with Fukuoka Ichimonji - unless one is dedicated enough to spend hours trying to find oshigata that looks alike and skips the rest of the description, like nie deki or nioi deki, utsuri etc. In real life or on photographs jigane, hamon would be completely different. Ko Hoki or Rai Kuniyuki could give one trouble though.

It looks like a classically shaped and styled Soshu tanto crossing into hitatsura, which makes it one of the most copied sugata and styles, and accordingly can be difficult to identify precisely. Knowing kasane would be very useful here, but one can try without it. If one assumes its an original from Nambokucho period, then it should not be Hasebe because of the nakago, it can't be Akihiro because he did not do kaeri half nagasa long. Generally such execution is seen on extremely rare occasions with Hiromitsu and thus Masahiro, but it did not gain popularity until well into Muromachi. Also is their case the hardening along the mune seldom exhibits such well defined and sharp togari, its also more of Muromachi feature. Still, sometimes on hitatsura blade the length and togari of this era are excaggerated by oshigata makers, what in real life looks like faint disconnected tobiyaki becomes a single contour with sharp edges. One can hope that's not the case here. Can be Nobukuni, but highly unlikely. P.S. Just by chance I was going through some blades and remembered that hitatsura with very long kaeri and sharp togari close to mune in Nambokucho does occur with later Etchu students - Tametsugu, Hojoji Kunimutsu and Etchu Kuniyuki. Rather rare examples, would match the work here quite well. These are rare works, and unfortunately them being quite late in Nambokucho sugata can be tricky one to rely on. Out of these three Kuniyuki is most well known for this style, I guess. Kasane would tell more... So in all likeness this is late Muromachi, someone who worked in Soshu style, which is also a somewhat more natural match for sugata. With different nakago I would bet on Muramasa, since the hamon is reasonably symmetric and now and then he did work in such style. As is, we are talking about the period when even major Bizen smiths occasionally made hitatsura, and half of Mino guys were churning them up as well. Signature placing is not very Bizen-ish though. Can be Masahiro, Hiromasa, Tsunahiro, Fuyuhiro, Shimada or even Muramasa with a very unusual nakago. An upper quality example for any of these names. Occasionally one sees an almost exact later, Edo period, copy of such work, but nothing here clearly suggests this to be the case. So unfortunately this is the case where I would even theoretically not aim above dozen. First choice - late muromachi, sue-Soshu. Second choice - late Nambokucho, some Etchu Soshu smith, most likely Etchu Kuniyuki. In hand or with photographs one could easily spot the difference - Etchu examples would have much stronger hada, with a hint of Matsukawa, with plenty of ji nie and strong black hue to it. Kasane would be thinner. Nie would have pronounced "belted" structure. Sue-Soshu would have generally coarser nie, coarser hada, less pronounced color.

I saw this blade before and will be just repeating my thoughts that for me Hasebe attribution would be a strong alternative here. Early works by Tametsugu have a distinct similarity to both Go and Norishige, in terms of both hamon and jigane. Here the jigane is bright, well forged itame, something definitely more often seen in Kamakura branch of Soshu. The attribution to Tametsugu would involve pointing towards his later period, when he was moving from Echizen to Mino; however, if I remember correctly no extant blades with Echizen signatures exist, and such reference thus relies heavily on Edo period publications. No guarantees some of those are not gimei. There is however undeniable similarity of his works to those of other Echizen smiths, Echizen Yoshizane and Nagayoshi, and quite a few others, many of which are dozen to Tametsugu attributions. But they still tend to have strong Etchu-like feel to them. Matsukawa hada is common, nie tends to form long, broad lines, which are in Go style "vibrate" and thin out as they go into ji. None of which is obvious here. There are couple of segments where the nie forms "belts", but they are not a dominant feature, they don't really couple well with hada in the ji, and one could argue that things like this are occasionally seen in other Soshu works. Overall tobiyaki and tight itame are not very characteristic of Echizen Soshu. Go is famous for tight itame masterpieces, but those also betray strong similarity to Kamakura's forging and are given strong consideration to be attributed to Kamakura's Masamune. This is something I would argue is far less common in later Etchu and Echizen pieces. These three images: https://www.zonerama.com/Nihonto/Photo/7069496/258726106 https://www.zonerama.com/Nihonto/Photo/7069496/258725328 https://www.zonerama.com/Nihonto/Photo/7069496/258726106 to me have a much more Hasebe look than anything out of Echizen or Etchu. Truly, Hasebe tends to be rougher in hada, and with strong o-mokume in the center with nagare towards ha and ji, while here mokume appears only in couple of places. However, Hasebe did forge in tight itame. Actually, there are not that many valid alternative attributions for this blade. It does not have a lot of sunagashi/kinsuji, which many of later (1360+) Soshu lineages would exhibit plenty of. Hamon has more "nie cloud" rather than gunome or togari-based appearance, which more of less definitely excludes another set of Soshu branches. It does not have strong nioi-tint to it, especially close to the ha, so we can't blame the unusual on Sa's influence. I would argue that here: https://www.zonerama.com/Nihonto/Photo/7069496/258727154 https://www.zonerama.com/Nihonto/Photo/7069496/259051137 The blade does look like Echizen Soshu, but that's one very small segment. I am sure I am missing something, but can't figure out what it is.