GRC

Thanks Piers.

...so HIRYU "flying dragons" are also SHACHI "fish dragons"?

I guess it depends on whether you focus on the wings or the fish tail?   

Here's two more examples that aren't Nanban:

I see this "dragon fish" fairly often in Nanban tsuba... I've got 17 image examples so far:

the last one is papered... what does the NBTHK call it?

Love the carved trellis with vines growing on them (on the back).

It's also interesting that the mei is done on an inlayed bean pod shape, which adds yet another layer of bean references in this tsuba's design. 

Maybe it's a new "sea urchin" or "sea mine" motif? 

awesome, thanks!!!

OK, one last bit of important historical information from: https://tetsunomichi.gr.jp/lang-en/history-development-tatara/tatara-history/ 

"The introduction of western iron manufacture began in 1857 with the Ōhashi blast furnace in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, and by 1894, iron production by western methods overtook that of tatara. At this time, tatara bellows and blacksmiths were utilizing automation and switching to brick furnaces."

This only gives a 12 year window before the end of the Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji period in 1869, for the potential for cast iron tsuba to be made using malleable cast iron that was produced in Japan.

So at best, it is possible that it happened at the very end of the Edo period, and almost certainly during the Meiji period and onwards.

Anything earlier would have to have been done using imported malleable cast iron. I'm not sure how feasible or economically viable that would have been, even if it resulted in bulk production of tsuba.
 

Regarding the "Yagyu-style" HOSHINAMAKO (dried sea cucumber) design above, Haynes points out that that the Yagyu smiths produced tsuba until the end of the Edo period, and that from about 1750 onward, Yagyu-style tsuba were being produced from by independent smiths who were "working in the style of" or deliberately producing imitations of the Yagyu tsuba. 

(www.shibuiswords.com/yagyuhaynes.htm) 

So the papered HOSHINAMAKO still falls in this "end of Edo"/Meiji window when malleable cast iron would be more readily available.

Regarding the Church collection tsuba: the stated window of time is the entire 19th century, so still overlaps into the late Edo/Meiji period. 

The quote about the Hamano tsuba is still intriguing, but taken at face value, someone is looking at the Hamano tsuba's surface uniformity and commenting on how it resembles the uniformity of cast iron. On some level you could potentially view this statement as a version of "how well made the plate was" given that it was so uniform in appearance? 

If I happen to cross paths with more examples of papered Cast iron tsuba, I will certainly take the time to post them. And I hope others will continue to do so too.  Clearly, they do exist.

Unless some new information comes to light, I'm feeling pretty "comfortable" with the very late Edo/Meiji window. The introduction of the Western-style blast furnace in 1857 is the key piece of info for me.

It's been fun 

Really nice mokume Bob, and a beautifully detailed kozuka 

Re the distinct hitsu shape. You see that in some of the Nanban tsuba like this one:

I think the motif is supposed to be a lotus flower petal, which is a common motif found around the inside of the mimi of some of the early Chinese guards (like these two) that inspired much of the Nanban-style:

These two Chinese guard images are from Mandarin Mansion online... a great info resource

Well that's certainly a very interesting example.

Nice bit of digging there Dan 

Here's a clearly cast iron tsuba, NBTHK attributed to Yagyu, complete with the telltale raised circular "scars" on the seppa-dai, where I suspect the iron was poured into the mould. There's also a lot of "webbing" remnants in the kogai-hitsu-ana and elsewhere. Maybe it was made from a sand casting with two halves?

I accidentally came across this example when I was looking for examples of this particular motif, but then noticed it was cast.

The translation comes from MauroP in an NMB post where Dale assigned everyone some "Homework".

Well, this one was listed as "Edo period" on Toukenkomachi online (and it sold already...)

No papers though...

Nice gift! 

Also nice to see some young adults picking up an interest. 

Awesome find Ron!

Those are all really nice tsuba, so thanks for sharing 

And what does it matter if the Naikatsu group worked "in the style of" Nobuiye, they're all really great pieces.

Jay, I don't know if there's any signifcance to this observation, but that mei looks pretty "heavy". 

Dale, Christian, Ken and Dan, thanks for the quotes, insights and examples 

At the very least, I hope that his thread gets more people to "keep an eye out" for examples to contemplate and discuss.

I sure learned a lot, and got to think through some ideas, and fill in some gaps in my knowledge along the way.

Dan, I think you're right that that tsuba is cast. This crane design was certainly very popular and has been mass produced for a long time. And to top it all off, this one sure has the look of "considerable age".

Here's some of the more suspicious areas that are likely indicators of casting: the missing section in one of the raised feathers (large arrow), the bubble-like divot and the spherical blob that rises above the rest of the iron (small arrows):

Anyway, the point is still that there are lots of cast tsuba out there (of varying ages and qualities), and we simply can't pin a date of production on them just by looking at them.

Ultimately, for me anyway, the key piece of information I would like to have, is the date that the Japanese started to make malleable cast iron ingots.

And because the Tatara could not have made these ingots, the Meiji period's push for more modern industrialization certainly sounds like the best bet for that date so far.

And 1867+ certainly does give the Japanese enough time to crank out a ton of cast "shiiremono" before the end of the century, which could account for many of these older, well made cast iron tsuba.

Here's the one that I am pretty sure is cast (but might just be poorly made?), and is papered by the NBTHK.

I posted it in another thread a while back and it's actually the one that first got me wondering if the NBTHK would ever paper a cast iron tsuba.

Initially, I wrongly thought the sekigane was fake and just painted on, but others pointed out that in a different closeup view, you could see that it was proper sekigane 

Thomas,

"

53 minutes ago, Iekatsu said:

In order to make this a useful study you are going to have to find examples with reasonable provenance, that is examples that are manufactured in Japan and can be reliable dated to the Edo period or earlier.

This is exactly the problem I was alluding to earlier...

Who exactly is to say WHEN the Sekibun was made? There's really no way to know.

That one certainly fooled the Bonham's experts, all the bidders in 2010, and then again, all the bidders on the one that sold in 2022, and it was located in Japan.

Asking for one with the perfect provenance still doesn't help answer the question of WHEN all these cast tsuba were made.

Anyway, I think I may have one papered example on file that I'll dig up right after this.  

I think the Kinai dragon is probably a good place to keep looking because it was so popular, so there are many examples to dig up.

By the way Thomas, if you're looking for tagane-ato added after casting, I think both examples of the cast kinai tsuba show that. The first example has enough tegane-ato to have even been mounted more than once..

Here's another cast example of the Kinai, complete with inlays in the eye (although one has fallen out):

You can see the little casting artifacts that look like little raised spheres on the close up (red arrows).

Can anyone say with certainty when this one was made?

OK, that I did not know, thanks 

Can you then explain what Lissenden is talking about here on pg 140:

"Unfortunately the production of a model in beeswax, preparatory to the casting process, is a work-intensive and highly skilled job. Moreover, the wax mode l needs to be remade each time, being necessarily destroyed by the process. This drawback can, however, be readily overcome by the production of a matrix, which may be of a more easily worked material such as wood. Such a matrix can be repeatedly used and requires no special skills for its production. By pressing warm pieces of wax onto this sample image, a negative matrix may be created and, by repeating this process, a positive impression obtained from this. In such a manner, the two faces of a tsuba could then be joined together and used to create a wax replica of the original. Because of the high output and the low production costs of this group of tsuba, it is probable that such a method as this was the one used for the production of many Namban tsuba."

Thomas, I completely agree that images of each of the specific "evidences for casting" in Lissenden's thesis would have been extremely helpful.

I'm generally not in the habit of storing images of cast tsuba, because there are literally tons of them among the ~10,000 listings on YahooJ every week.

Here's a few examples of some that I did keep as reference:

A very convincing cast tsuba, as already discussed in the "Sekibun belly flop" thread... so sorry to bring it back up again Bob, but it really is a great example that you won't see many of at all, suggesting that these were produced long ago:

2010 at Bonham's, described as 19th century                                                            and it's twin discovered in 2022 on YahooJ

When you zoom in to the close up images, there's lots of evidence for casting, but you sure wouldn't know unless you started scrutinizing it up close.The eternal question though is 

The eternal question is still, WHEN was this made and how do you know with any degree of certainty?

Here's a glaringly obvious cast iron tsuba that someone unfortunately paid way too much money for:

Again though, I have only come across one with this design, so presumably made long ago.

And how about this one that looks convincing at first, until you zoom in (it was made somewhere this morning... but still looks "right" at first glance):

This one cost someone a lot of money:

We know this one being made now because there are multiple examples and multiple surface finishes.

Back to the oldies:

Here's a real Kinai tsuba and then two "shiiremono" castings both of which were mounted on swords at some point:

Jean, Lissenden describes how many wax impressions could easily be produced from an initial mould... so not a one by one process.

Photo of tsuba molds from the Nara soft metal casting site (white object at bottom right is plaster poured into the mould fragment at the left):

So again, like Lissenden points out, as long as you have a mould, you can easily press wax into them to produce the desired outcome as many times as you want. 

Here's the Lissenden pdf:

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4129/1/4129_1648.pdf

He uses about 150 different sources as references

Yves, I did a bit (OK a lot) more digging...  

Here are some key points from Lissenden's Namban a Reappraisal (I sure have been referencing his work a lot lately lol)

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4129/1/4129_1648.pdf

1- Flat seppa-dai are more likely to be from earlier Chinese imports.

***note that this differs from my initial statement in my earlier post that was just based off of "memory", so I wrongly placed that in the "points for Japan" section.

2- The relatively simple oval or rectangular seppa-dai is also more likely to be earlier and Chinese (correct, in earlier post)

3- The symmetrical design is more likely to be Chinese (new detail)

4- The beaded mimi was likely a Japanese embellishment that was added onto their copies of the earlier Chinese imports (new detail)

5- Improvements to the undercutting & carving developed in Japan. (correct, in earlier post)

6- Chinese overlay work usually uses two directional cross-hatching, whereas the Japanese use more. (correct, in earlier post)

*I found the source: James McElhinney, who wrote a book and the article: Asian Export Sword Guards  and has a facebook page with the same title. 

Then there's this categorization of Nanban guards by "Mandarin Mansion": https://www.mandarinmansion.com/article/nanban-tsuba 

So in summary, you've got 5 reasons to say it's Chines, and one reason to say it's Japanese...

My best guess is that it falls under category "2b": Made for the Japanese market, by a Chinese maker living in Japan.  

OK, I'm done now...

And just to add to that thought of mass production of cast tsuba...

Casting then hand finishing certainly worked out just fine for the Nanban-style tsuba.

This style of tsuba was produced in both China and Japan throughout much of the Edo period. 

So here's a question the Nanban casting situation brings up for me:

If we suppose that every Edo-period Nanban tsuba that was cast, was produced in China (or at least outside of Japan), then WHY and HOW did so many of them end up in Japan?

Why wouldn't the Japanese just produce them themselves, given that the style was so popular in Japan for so long?

And, here's a follow-up question about the economics of mass tsuba production that still needs to be resolved...

Let me start with a few observations:

1-There are so many cast tsuba out there, some with a fair bit of "apparent age", and many have clearly been fitted onto swords (as can be seen by the punched tagane-ato (and I mean real punch marks, not ones that were integrated into the casting moulds).

2-If we assume that there was no casting of iron tsuba in Japan during the Edo period, then ALL of these cast tsuba either had to be produced in Japan during the Meiji era (1867-1912) and 20th century, or were produced earlier in other countries.

3-In the late 1800s/beginning of the twentieth century, genuine tsuba were being purchased by the barrel in Japan at pennies a piece.

4-There was recently a collection of proper Edo period swords and tsuba (including a Nara Joi that was published) that came up for auction from an American collector's estate who had done all of his purchasing in the 1950s and 60s. Some of the original price tags and correspondence with the Japanese dealer were also present in the auction listings. Some of the tsuba were originally purchased for LESS than $1, and this dragon tsuba for $3.25 !

So here's the conundrum:

If there were so many genuine tsuba available at such a low cost from the late 1880s to at least the late 1960s, then who was making all these cast tsuba, who were they selling to, and where was the profit to be had? 

So it doesn't seem to make sense that cast iron tsuba production would suddenly spring into action in Japan (or anywhere for that matter) when the genuine tsuba themselves were available for just pennies or at most a few dollars. 

Just some questions floating around in my head... hope I'm not boring everyone with these 

Jean that's a fair point, and does make it seem like a pretty laborious task.

Mind you, wouldn't that be offset by the production of many tsuba in one go, without having to fold and hammer out each individual iron plate, plus the time saved in not having to "rough out" the tsuba's design before putting on the finishing touches? 

If production output is the goal, then casting still seems like the better option, even with the longer heating process.

But again, that's only if bulk production was the goal.

And by the way, just from a personal point of view, I really don't care what the answer ends up being. I just want to know, with some degree of certainty, what the answer actually is.

There's still loose ends on both sides of the question so I'd prefer to keep an open mind until all the "doors are closed" so to speak.

OK Jean, I hear what you're saying.

I really am trying to wrap my head around all the info...

Quick summary of what we know so far:

1- Certain types of cast iron, along with the correct heat treatment, can produce soft malleable cast iron that can be worked by hand after casting. 

2- We know that the Japanese had the knowledge of the necessary technical processes for producing malleable cast iron, dating back to at least the early 1700s.

3- Tatara furnaces can reach the necessary temperatures to melt the malleable cast iron.

4- Lissenden has described the Tatara's production output in detail, which includes wrought iron.

     He then also outlines (with some suppositions - see quote below) the processes required to convert the wrought iron portion of the Tatara's product into malleable cast iron ingots.

Here's the quote:

"...leads one to presume that the tsuba makers would have obtained their iron from industrial manufacturers in ingot form. This would probably have already been decarburised commercially by a 'fining' process in order to convert the cast iron into its malleable cast iron form"

So is it this supposition by Lissenden where the whole idea has its weakest link?

...specifically the "industrilazed decarburization" to produce the ingots in the first place?

As Grev said, 100% Nanban.

I'd also like to add that Nanban is a style whose influences come predominantly from Chinese and some European (Portuguese and Dutch) motifs.

It was really popular for a while in Edo Japan, and there were schools producing Nanban-style tsuba in multiple locations throughout Japan.

The question of "where" yours was made gets trickier...

I'm leaning towards made in Japan because of the flat seppa-dai and the degree of carvings and hand chiseling.

On the other hand,

that "boxy-shaped" cartouche-shaped seppa-dai is more of Chinese-style. 

Also, I read that Chinese favoured two directional cross-hatching to do their gold overlays, whereas the Japanese preferred to use 3 directions of cross-hatching.

I can't tell from the images, but you can certainly have a look at yours up close to find out  

So that's why it's hard to say for sure, because your tsuba has evidence for either origin.

Maybe it was made in Japan with the intent of selling to either a Japanese or overseas buyer... something for everyone?