Bruce Pennington

Thomas, You are a very thorough man! Thank you for what you are doing! I don't know why I got that mixed up, but sure enough, in my file for the '38, I had placed the pictures of the '41. I've separated them now. The presentation blade is a '41 and the C17 blade is the '38.

He's likely refering to the chart posted by Nick Komiya:

Thomas,I was refering to the 1980 book found by K. Morita and discussed on post 279. I don't thing he gave the name of the book, but you can see it was pg 335 in the picture he posted

It’s in post #5.

I’m good! Thanks BW.

Hmmm.... I found a Magaroku discussion on Warrelics, so maybe my brain melded the two discussion over time. I'm good at that. https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/Japanese-militaria/ww2-Japanese-swords-up-review-authentication-727600/ Thanks guys!

George, after reading the thread, I think you were all correct. Thanks for the update. Quite an interesting story, and quite an interesting character! I'm still nagged by the [something] roku memory though. This thread didn't mention the $100,000 or the fact that the guy taking the blade to Japan already had 3 or 4 buyers lined up, pushing possibly $400,000. The carrier was going to take a 20% cut for his referal work, too.

I know it wasn't the guy Ray named, and might have been the one John mentioned. All I know is that it was a 2-kanji mei and 六 was one of the characters. Something like Mago Roku? Everyone was saying that there were only 5 known in existance, and this would be number 6 if legit.

Anyone know what became of the guy with a blade by a very famous, and rare smith, who I cannot fully remember the name - something with Roku in it? It was a "My uncle gave me this sword" story and turned out to be a 1 of only 5 in existance type deals. Someone was heading to Japan for shinsa and he was told to send it to him so it could be evaluated. The person traveling had 3 or 4 buyers already lined up for the $100,000 to $400,000 range if found to be legit. Anyone know what happened? I'd post the link to the thread but I can't find it.

That’s peculiar, for sure!

I was thinking the same thing when I read Stegel's all-encompassing post. StuW has a very informative history/introduction to the Type 95 - http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/Japanese-militaria/ija-type-95-nco-sword-info-228172/- but Shamsy's and Stegel's contributions go considerably beyond that thread. I would love to have it pinned for easy access.

Part of my problem with this discussion is my poor understanding of terminology. I probably misuse the term "hamon", because I'm refering to the white, visible line along the cutting edge, sometimes straight (suguha?), sometimes patterned/wavy (various names of patterns). I've recently learned, from a discussion of the intricate details involved in the the polishing process, that the whiteness is caused 2 ways, one called artificial and the other more natural. So, what I'm taking a long time to say (Remember L.O.T.R: "Anything worth saying, is worth taking a long time to say") is I can see the visible evidence of tempering on my 95s. I assumed that this comes out white if polished, like the example Chris provided.

Neil, Here's mine. A little worse for wear than yours. I haven't studied these, and am only famiiar, in passing so to speak, but I feel like I read that the chroming was an "early" experiment attempting to protect from rust? But dropped fairly quickly, reasons not explained. I'll try to find the reference to that, unless someone else can come up with it. But I put the issue to you - do you have a sense of dating on these? Were they early (late '30s) or were they being produced throughout the war?

Always good to "see" you Ernie! They say you can skip that Man-O-pause by removing a couple of particular organs!

I think so too, Thomas. It's like they hit the end of the Iroha list in '44 before they were done with production. And perhaps they already had the "い" slated for the first '45 run, so they started over with イ, but knowing that they couldn't start over with katakana, decided to bracket it, signifying an "oops" moment. Just wild speculation, I know, but that's what I do really well, Ha!

I'm still on the fence on the issue. One of the challenges to this idea is that some of the numbers that SHOULD be in sequence have early numbers that are Koa, then mid numbers are Nan, then late numbers are Koa again. Example: Spring '43 FU 48 Koa FU 106 non-Koa Nan FU 624 non-Koa Nan FU 757 non-Koa (no stamp) FU 758 non-Koa Nan (wavy hamon) FU 795 Koa FU 960 Koa The only way I can logically see this happening is if SMR Dalian made blades, with numbers, but unpolished. Then someone randomly grabs an armfully of blades from a pile and puts them in a box to go to Nan-man Arsenal for polishing and mei inscriptions. #48, 795, and 960 didn't get grabbed and are polished and "mei-ed" at SMR, while the others are polished and "mei-ed" and Nan-man. Because of the diary entries in the book found by K. Morita, we know for a fact that Nan-man was at least polishing Mantetsu blades. If they were making them there as well, I don't see an obvious explaination for the mixed serial numbers.

Bruce, You guys are both way above my pay-grade on the late-war 95, so I'll leave that to you 2. But would like to caution against getting the feathers riled too easily. There's not a guy (or gal) on this forum that is intentionally rude. You'll find folks that are blunt. There are some that come to a debate pre-loaded to skepticism (I have a tendency to be naively positive at times!). But no one that is intentionally disrespctful. Communication via text is fraught with pitfalls because it lacks body language and vocal inflection. An example from personal experience - We were debating a tough one and a guy told me, paraphrasing, "You don't have any expertise in this, why are you even here?" When I mentioned the rude sound of his comment, he copied a link to an older conversation where I had said the exact thing to him! He was quoting my own rudeness!!! Ha! Hate it when that happens! One of the joys of this hobby, and these forums, it the detective work. In the process, we toss ideas and theories around, hopefully eventually coming across some real evidence to pin something down. In the meantime, having a good debate on the pros & cons is just part of the deal. If you plan to be around for any length of time, and I hope you do, assume the best, ignore the rest, and "party on, dude!"

For the life of me, I don’t see any numbers in the other side.

Wasn't me, Chris. As to papering, I don't remember the thread where it was shown that Japan is allowing war swords to be registered if they were either owned since the war, or were owned by family members who fought in the war. I think they've gotten pretty loose about it. I was in an antique shop recently, looking at an old gunto, pretty bad condition, and the shop owner said that if I wanted to buy it he'd get it registered and ship it to me. Agree the nakago is really unusual, by you know how it is with gunto - make a rule and you'll always find the exception! A 5-digit serial number isn't what I'd call "high". They were making 20-30,000 of these per year!

That is outside my normal scope of study. DaveR would be a good one to ask.

Alex, Haven't EVER seen anything like that! But since we're in the guessing mode - looks to me like there were numbers on the right side that have been "x"ed out with the same kind of X seen at the top of the numbers on the left. I've seen numbers filed off of saya drags by factory repair teams, then a new number re-struck. Maybe this is what we're seeing, but I can't see why fittings would be re-numbered. But then, as I wrote that, I realized the piece may have come from an original gunto that was damaged, and as they were being re-fitted onto a new blade, the fitters wanted to number it accordingly to the new pieces during assembly. Just an idea.

Taylor, Dawson says your emblem is for Lt and Superintendant swords, and the backstrap shows it is for a Lt. You can see where the original nakago was before it was cut down for the police handle, so I agree the blade is a fighting blade, not for show. Interesting piece!

Kenny, Great sword, but I like your wife better!!! I can trade you a nice copper-handled Type 95 for her! Ha! Yours is a Type 97 Navy Officer gunto. Definitely has some personality to it. You can read about them here: http://ohmura-study.net/945.html Click on the links at the bottom for more pictures.

David, I more think that kanji is a "4". For some reason, the 4 kanji gets some pretty sloppy versions done.

I haven't been collecting koshirae stamps on a large scale. I have a small section in the Stamps Doc about them. I just thought you had started a thread on it, but couldn't find it. Here's the one I came across