Hoshi

Nice work!

You are right. Slippery slopes are real. I should be a little clearer here. Amateur dealer polish done for cheap is not professional polishing. It is amateur. A professional polish runs 3-6K USD. Saito-san is recommended for Soshu-den. Sashikomi psyops aside, this style of polishing is suited for flamboyant hamons and like you said, typically bizen-den. At the end of day, go with what Tanobe-Sensei recommends. Don't roll dice with these things by going with whatever you hear from your fellow collectors. There are very few polishers capable of pulling off a correct shashikomi polish. It's almost a lost art. Dodo-san is one of the few. Polishing is like surgery. You need to find the best surgeon for your case. The top polishers are hyper specialised and in high demand. Gaijin-friendly Japanese polishers are typically not recommended for venerable masterpieces. The notion that polish gets improved by the use of Uchiko is one of the biggest PsyOps from bad polishers for clients seeking cheap remedies for complex problems. No, you cannot improve a polish by a top polishers with Uchiko. The whole notion is preposterous to begin with and It saddens me that that many still cling to these beliefs.

There is no correct use of Uchiko unless you're a professional polisher. Full stop. There is only an outdated tradition which is causing lasting damage to blades and creating a need for re-polishing to correct the mess and damage these ancient treasures. It's a destructive practice. Play with it on rustbuckets, sure. Use it on your monosteel cutter, that's fine - but don't touch an ancient and venerable blade with that stuff.

Almost certainly not Gimei. One of the great Aoe smiths of the Kamakura period. Close to ubu and long with a beautiful signature. If this one polishes right, it'll fly to Juyo and beyond with high colours. There is some bad flaw in the kissaki and who knows what else the polish will reveal. It can go any direction. I would think it's 90% Juyo (unless hagire) and 30% chance Tokuju (if it polishes right). Perhaps Japanese buyers fought this battle. In any case, it's a treasure. I hope that if a foreigner bought it, he will have it restored by the right artisan. The price reached on the curious koshirae though...what happened there I don't know. Now that one is the real lottery ticket, who knows what that wak is, and the fittings themselves are strangely exotic and could indeed reach back to the momoyama period, I have no idea.

Surprisingly cool for something on Ebay. While unsigned soshu work from the Muromachi period aren't highly regarded (and discounted heavily) - the fact that it is a katana-size Naginata Naoshi in full Hitatsura makes this a rarity. But I do have a bad feeling about it. The Koshirae makes me pause. That's the Ageho-cho from the Taira clan, first time I've seen it on a Koshirae, and it's clearly not an old koshirae. I would ask the seller to inspect the Menuki, they do look like they could be solid gold dragons, or some cheap cast plated dragons and this whole set the fruit of an elaborate dress-up party we see so often on YJP! - so buyer's beware. Something doesn't feel right here. This is likely a hobbyist koshirae project from the 20th century, but who knows...just be careful out there, this is a Japanese dealer, and problem-blades are sold on the foreign market for a reason. Treat it as a grenade with the pin removed. The seller has information asymmetry on his side and close geographic and cultural contact with the world's best experts. We do not.

Do not go on auctions when you're a beginner. You'll get burned. Go with some of the excellent and trusted suggestions above, we have good consigners and dealers in the Community. As always money is best first spent on learning and then buying (but we all kinda go the other way around about it...)

Run away from this Shinto nightmare... Good you came here. I wish you the best in your search.

From someone who is a dealer and an important member of the french side of the hobby, I would have hoped for a more articulate counterpoint. We can agree that goal here is education. This isn't the dealer page, it's fair game to debate these blades when big words such as "Masterwork" get tossed into the fray. This is the type of words one needs to be ready to defend. Masterworks of Nihonto are (likely to be) Tokuju-level and beyond. Either they are extremely rare or the word is meaningless. There is no middle-ground. We are fortunate to be in a hobby with 800 years of collecting history and numerous treaties and evaluations published, and while these aren't perfect - far from it - they do set a high-bar for argumentation and this is the level of engagement we should strive for. This is a fair work of the Shinto period which had its signature erased to pass as something it isn't. And there is nothing "wrong" with this. It stands on its own as what it is. What it isn't is a masterwork, just as this isn't a soshin Muramasa: http://nihontofrance.com/nihonto/sunobi-tanto-signe-muramasa/. Nor is its Koshirae made by Toshinaga. I would come to think that in the internet era, we should label these things for what they are (or likely to be) and not fish for true believers by being vague. That's all really. We should all strive to be better and to own up to our mistakes (as I have about the date I mangled).

In the end it adds another filter to the hobby: collectors challenged in their ability for critical thinking will drop-out. But a few of them would have been good additions... The problem is the hobby struggles to attract new people. This is good for the buy-side of things but terrible for the sell-side of things. The hobby is petering out in the US as most of the old guard is off to heaven and the younger generation that has money is obsessing over classic cars. A lot of it has to do with the fact that its just harder and harder to treasure hunt in the USA, which arguably was one of main motivators for new entrance. So the bounty-hunter types are off chasing other things while Stimulus checks are being spent on buffer-wheel polish. No growth in the entry-level collector population: prices for mediocre things go down. SBG is the gateway into the sword world and squeeze in an ungodly margin out of the few that cross the gate only to see that landmine blow-up in their face some time later. And then we have 99% of the buy-side in Japan for masterpieces run by a just a few whale. The GINI coefficient of the Nihonto world is more skewed than girls swiping Tinder for dudes. But the battle up there is fierce and good things are becoming harder and harder to find, and those that buy them aren't leaving an estate for poachers to pillage, rather they leave behind well-endowed museums for a hundred years which will dry up the supply. Look at the Sano Museum. Now imagine the Sawaguchi Museum. So SBG if you're reading this, welcome to the sh*it list of the Nihonto world.

Yeah I remember writing to them about their disastrous and overpriced offering of antique swords with invalided papers. No response. In the end it's their business team which chose this course: maximize profits extractable from low-information buyers reliant on our platform. So be it. Let the invisible hand do its work here. What saddens me are all the buyers that will get burned and exit the hobby once they find out the truth and go to the secondary market with their green-papered shinto swords. This always hurts.

Wonderful story, thanks to Ian for sharing and documenting so carefully.

It's a very tricky kantei, to evaluate shinto work with a soshu inspiration. These kantei shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's a best guess. I'll preface by saying again that it's a nice sword and it has a strong Shinto Soshu-inspired character, with the pronounced ara-nie, sunagashi etc. For all the anons reading this forum regularly, I would like to explain a bit more why this is typically the type of sword which will be found without papers in Japan. The reason is that it is more profitable to attract a gambler and sell it for what it isn't (late Nambokucho Soshu) than to have it papered and sell it as a mumei shinto piece. So even if it had papers in the past, the way to make money on this is to dump the papers in the fire and put it up on Yahoo JP with a fresh Sayagaki and cobble up some story. These are the economic incentives at play. Before the nitpicking occurs I will just say that unpapered swords in Japan which would kantei to grandmasters do obviously exist. However, they get trawled by the dealer filter and they will paper those worth papering and dump the gambles in YJP! or to some other dealer at their auction until the system sorts itself and that everyone can make a bit of money. Shrines, old collectors, etc, have unpapered swords. There are also discoveries being made where a "sword stash" is found hidden in traditional houses. Generally the person who finds them will go the dealer and when she or he hears the costs and time involved in the restoration and all the social stress associated with owning weapons in Japan, they go for money now. The encounter with police can be terrifying and after the stress associated with the torokusho process, these objects are more likely to be seen as problems to solve than objects to keep and restore. The social stigma helps the business model. What needs to be understood is that mumei pieces from the shinto period are radioactive in Japan. It's a big value drop. I bought a sword to Naotane once for about 5K, had the signature been preserved it would be worth 30-40K on the Japanese retail market, that's just the way it is. Which means it's also a great occasion to get top quality work from a famous school if one is ready to accept this flaw (which I accept readily given budget constrains). The most likely reason for a shinto sword to be mumei is that it's been used as a deceptive device to extract money from an unsuspected buyer via fraud. It's not just signature...even a little machi okuri can be what can be seen by new collectors as an unreasonable debasement of value. Shinto strives for perfection in condition.

That is quite right. It is indeed 2020 and not 2009, no confusion intended except my own.

The certificate is from 2009. You took a long time to show us! Someone removed the mei, reshaped the nakako and added a mekugi-ana. I suppose, to make it pass as Nanbokucho Soshu work. In this context, it's important to recognise that the attribution is more of a shinto shrug than a slam-dunk. This is quite typically the type of sword you'll find in Japan without certificate. It's important to buy it knowingly, and for what it is. It's nice work.

Gokaden is a simplifying idea, and with any simplifications, nuance and exceptions are pruned away. In statistics this is called "clustering" by maximising similarity within categories and dissimilarity between categories. You choose then the number of clusters that give you the best explanatory power vs complexity as the tradeoff. Once you get a grasp of Gokaden, quickly move towards a more granular view as, quite honestly, it isn't a great rule of thumb but it does get the job done at making you learn further as you'll find yourself scratching your head and comparing books. Great points have been in this thread. of note: - Koto and Shinto are qualitatively different things. Don't apply Koto rule of thumbs to it, it's really it's own thing, and while it has spawned from mino, it turned into a beast of its own... - The two most useful levels of classifications to understand Nihonto are: province-level + period-level. e.g. "swords of Bizen province in the early kamakura period" and you go from there. - "Provincial" vs "famous sword production sword center" is one of the most powerful heuristics. Provincial swords are often more similar to each other than they are close to those from the key schools in the top production centers. A useful way to think of it is as a default. You'll find similarity in Pre-Sa Chikuzen work, Ko-Uda, Bungo, Ko-Mihara, etc. Typically this is manifested in the methods of hada constructions, provincial swords tend to have a rougher hada and tend towards a more more dim, less active hamon. To these I will add: Try the Great Smith View of Nihonto: There are approx. 10 master-innovators that have defined the craft by being the source (or close to the source) of significant innovations and/or founding extremely influential schools. This is the canon and where everything else after tries to get back to. Once you get it, the rest will click much faster. It's similar to master paintings in this sense and probably many other fields. At the end, I think a lot more could be achieved if we had better mediums of learning. A lot of knowledge is needlessly hidden behind paywalls (physical books) or culture-walls.

It's a fake. The legions of Kotetsu/Masamune/Kyomaro you'll find on YJP have only one thing in common and that's fakery.

This one here ranks amongst the most beautiful I have ever seen.

Great entry into the hobby. -papered -polished -good condition -fine koshirae

It's a dress-up sword. Made to look Koto. Suriage, extra "drilled" mekugi-ana, etc. Whoever did the job done believed it had a chance to be sold off as Koto. Shinshinto or Showa, based on the features of the steel. That would be my guess. Notice it is also supremely healthy.

I regard Tametsugu somewhat similarly in width as Sue-Sa. It's almost more of a school/regional attribution than it is a specific call to a singular smith. So much gets baked into it and the variability is pretty staggering. Concerning this first/second generation of Norishige, at the end when a blade gets "Norishige" as a mumei piece, it means the workmanship is up there with the grandmaster, but for all we know there may be a significant proportion of masterworks of lesser or forgotten smiths baked in as well. While the NBHTK never re-attributed to Norishige at Tokuju, it has re-attributed a Sanekage to Go.

A most excellent choice of polisher. I'm relieved and happy you decided to go "all-in" without cutting corners. This is the right way to do it. This is a very technical blade to polish, the shape is complex - numerous carvings, Masayuki worked with complex hamons with soshu flavours. You did right. I'm excited for the pictures.

Wonderful, congratulations Georg. I can't wait to see it polished. You should get it professionally photographed and filmed in Japan. I suggest Ohira-san, which can be reached here.

How eloquently put Michael. I can only wholeheartedly agree.

Sanekage and Tametsugu can overlap with Norishige and Go. You'll find blades re-attributed at Tokuju to either. Some work of Tametsugu may evoke Go. In this example here, the Sayagaki mentions that in the Monouchi area, the blade is reminiscent of Go Yoshihiro. This is not the case with the blade above though, which would be later work in my opinion.