nulldevice

Looks like Munechika at first glance? 宗近 Hard to tell as it’s quite worn down

I have one of Darcy's visualizations saved that plots paper level with length and time of manufacture. It goes hand in hand with what @Rayhan and @Hoshi have posted above. I love this type of graph and I wish we had Darcy around to keep giving his insights on such matters.

Translating Japanese texts about nihonto is still very rudimentary. I’ve been pouring a lot of work into trying to use OpenAI and Claude to properly detect the characters on the page, and then give a semi-decent translation. I was messing with some Zufu papers yesterday and for some reason it was struggling to recognize the numbers in the measurements section and was auto converting them to shaku, sun, bu and then converting them back to CM and was completely wrong. No amount of messing with the prompt could fix that so I figure I just need an even higher res photo (I was using 1500x1800) and see if that helps. AI is great at things like whipping up a quick script to do data manipulations and all of that, it’s still a bit off from being able to translate Japanese sword document. I am working a lot on this as a side project however. This image is a great example of where AI, or any optical character recognition, will struggle. We can tell pretty easy that this is 21.8cm, however: AI, OCR, google lens, etc. have given me the following: 111.8cm 3.8cm 3.9cm 22.8cm 1.2.8cm 318cm Some of those make sense as an easy mistake for AI to make, others dont make sense at all where the LLM came up with the answer it did. The other thing is that the Zufu papers, many Taikans, and many other resources write numbers without using the 十 character. IDK why this is and I do not speak Japanese. Maybe this is normal for certain contexts but when I google "How do I write 22 in Japanese" you'll get 二十二 as an answer. Maybe this is throwing off the engine as well and maybe I can tweak/train the LLM prompts to try and account for this and get better results.

I believe this is the other sword @Bruce Pennington was talking about made by the same smith, star stamped, and numbered 122. @Pav It would be great to see the rest of the blade and compare to this one.

No real sword expert who is trying to sell you a blade would conceal the swordsmith that made a blade that they are selling. Are you talking about an antique Japanese sword you are interested in buying?

That's a huge red flag if someone won't tell you the smith that made a sword you are interested. I'd 100% never trust that seller.

Simply put katana, tachi, and tanto command the most money and are the most collectible items typically. Even though they’re smaller than wakizashi, many top smiths only made tanto and many national treasures are tanto. the same can’t be said for wakizashi. Hence the difference in price. It’s not about the amount steel but the original intent and artistic/functional execution of the smith. tanto usually are ubu and retain their mei and we don’t have to imagine much if the tanto is healthy. It’s all still there.

筑後久留米住藤原武國 Chikugo Kurume ju Fujiwara Takekuni

I had a similar thought. The utsuri seemed to pop too much in the photos and looked painted on to me.

These swords are never real. There is always a story about a wartime bring back that has been just recently uncovered and now is available on the market in Japan without any modern papers. If a real Masamune were to show up in Japan, it would be sent to the NBTHK and paper, and it would make waves in the sword community. The seller removes themselves from all responsibility in the ad:

I’ve bought books from Aoi at a really good deal. 2x cheaper than anywhere in the US. he shipped fast and was super communicative.

My personal taste would prefer this over the Kotetsu. Or if I had that much money for swords I’d probably go to DTI and pick up a Juyo from each of the major sword making schools and still have some left over! No doubt this collection was top notch and I wish I could’ve made it out to NY to see them on display.

Did anyone ever find out what that Kanemitsu went for? I heard estimates from $500k-1.5M If I recall correctly, there were 2 $400-500k offerings at DTI last year. They were long gone before I showed up later in the day to even see if they were on display.

A Komonjo listing with a false sayagaki to Ko-Bizen Masatsune. The boshi looks like one done in a kaen or hakikake style with lots of nie particles. Something you won't find on Ko-Bizen blades.

I ran it by my wife, she said no