Hoshi

Many good guesses so far I’m adding the description. Measurements Nagasa 71.5 cm, sori 1.3 cm, motohaba 2.9 cm, sakihaba 2.0 cm, kissaki-nagasa 4.9 cm, nakago-nagasa19.9 cm, nakago-sori 0.1 cm Description Keijo: shinogi-zukuri, mitsu-mune, wide mihaba, no noticeable taper. relatively thick kasane, shallow sori, elongated chū-kissaki Kitae: overall dense but standing-out itame that is mixed with mokume and some nagare and that features plenty of ji-nie, much chikei, and a faint shirake-style utsuri Hamon: nie-laden chū-suguha with a wide and bright nioiguchi that tends overall a little bit towards notare, that widens along the monouchi and that is mixed with some gunome, angular elements, many ashi and yō, hotsure, uchinoke, some yubashiri and tobiyaki, and a few kinsuji Bōshi: widely hardened and largely undulating midare-komi with a pointed kaeri Horimono: on both sides a bōhi that runs as kaki-tōshi through the tang Nakago: ō-suriage, kirijiri, kiri-yasurime, three mekugi-ana, mumei Keep up the Kantei flow!

For high-resolution close inspection: LINK

Either is has an old name, preserved through provenance, or it doesn't. I wouldn't dare awaken the wrath of the sleeping KAMI by misnaming it. All my swords have pronouns though, which I carve myself on the Sayagaki.

The dark rings are chickei. The patches on the surfaces are tobiyaki, or close to the boshi it is a long kinsuji running off into the unhardened area (inazuma is likely the right designator for this, but this can be argued). Keep the kantei flowing!

Here is a blade for Kantei. Restored and photographed by Ted and Darcy. No measurements, descriptions, just stunning photos. I'll check back in a few days. Good luck everyone. 3 guesses per person, rank ordered from most certain to least certain. Period / Tradition / School / Smith If the board can pull it off, prize for atari is 100$ in ETH to NMB. Photo link

Shodai Tadayoshi, these are commodities in Japan. The smith was one of the most prolific of all times, and only the cream of the crop of his work will pass Juyo - typically special orders by the clan who employed him. You can recognise those special order blades as signed without his official title. And even for these, they'll need to be unaltered and pristine, showing his best effort. Here is one for example: https://yuhindo.com/hizen-tadayoshi/ Now these are rare. So I don't want to be all doom and gloom, but your best bet is to take an iphone, dark room, and beam a light on the sword to get decent photos. Gather feedback, and then decide.

Well yes, experts at the NBTHK, and lifelong scholars such as Tanobe-Sensei do have a stronger word in establishing which blades are masterworks and which ones aren't. Your level of confidence is amazingly high. 3 guaranteed Juyo is something exceptional. You're setting yourself up for dissapointment, and I strongly encourage you to post quality photos on the board so that you might have a second opinion to back-up your confidence. There are some knowledgeable members here with experience submitting to Juyo and Tokubetsu Juyo Shinsa, with varying degrees of success. Shipping, handling and failure fee will cost you about 1000$. Success is an added fee accompanied by a lock-up period. It's not cheap. Good luck on your journey.

If you're going for Juyo, best post your blades here (with decent photos) and we can save you a lot of money by filtering what could pass from what definitely cannot. Free knowledge, make the best of it.

As michael said this is an incorrect conclusion. This take, however, perfectly sums up my impression as well. It's a wonderful sword and I'll be taking bets it passes Juyo over 50/50. 130 swords, I think this is a little bit on the low end of the estimate. I would put it more conservatively at 200. We only see the tip of the iceberg. There are course many variations around Kiyomaro from his different periods of worksmanship (up to blades left unfinished by him and signed by his students).

I am completely in awe and would buy this in a flash.

You need TH before applying to Juyo. These are the rules. Exceptional sword or not. There was a point in the past where they would accept Hozon before Juyo, but times have changed. This should fly through Juyo (but you never know, strange things can happen, the machi okuri is of course the main issue here) and will sell on the Japanese market for 15M yen+ in a blink (pretty neat ROI right there haha). Japanese dealers LOVE Masayuki/Kiyomaro. They go fast and make good margins. There is a die-hard group of wealthy Kiyomaro collectors in Japan who unite every year at his tomb, and there is even a dealer specialised in his work. A Masayuki true daisho was sold by Iida last year for close to half a million dollars: https://iidakoendo.com/4947/. Pretty impressive ROI if you ask me.

About 100-200 surviving examples is a fair guess including Masayuki and Kiyomaro (his later signature and style). About half of them are Juyo. Two are Tokubetsu Juyo.

Where can we bomb their sites with reviews? Their poor clients should be warned.

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.