nulldevice

This reminds me of the other Russian sword $100,000,000 tachi or whatever thread from years ago that made its rounds that has been mentioned already. I found it funny while trying to read the poorly translated "Test Report" that the blade is both 600mm long and 3855mm long. I want to see a 3855mm long tachi. This would dwarf even the Masayoshi Odachi!

We looked over a couple of nice blades of his at the SF show

After looking up a few threads on Horyu papers and meanings. What is the difference between a Horyu result and a To mei ga aru result? To mei ga aru at least papers so is it: "we're not 100% sure so we leave a footnote but will still paper the blade" and horyu is "we can't come to a conclusion at all?"

I'm excited to see this when you get it in hand and after a fresh polish in Japan!

It would be: Showa - 昭和 10 - 十 9 - 九 Year - 年 10 - 十 1 - 一 Month - 月 All together, Showa 19th year, 11th month (November 1944) Showa was an era of Japanese history corresponding to Emperor Hirohito (Showa) from 1926 (Showa 1) to 1989 (Showa 64) when he died.

The koto books follow the gokaden and typically go from early schools to later schools. The Shinto books are similar but the gokaden is substituted for provinces since we know Shinto blades saw a blending of many traditions. I have not yet indexed volumes 6 or 7 as I’ve been focusing on the sword volumes first.

The JSSUS website also has the books indexed in their Index of Japanese Sword Literature meaning you can search for a smith's name and if its is in the Nihonto Koza or Nihonto Zuikan, it will show up in the results.

I started by making a basic index for the Nihonto Koza with just the name and page number for the blades portion in each book. This serves as a good starting reference for looking up top blades by prolific smiths. im working on adding more details to it such as the full mei reading or mumei classsification, papering of blade (Kokuho, JuBi, etc.) and the measurements. It’s a manual process as I can’t get AI image recognition to correctly recognize the characters. but I started with just a name, book no., and page no. in a simple excel index which I have saved on my phone. As for the contents of the books, the blade descriptions very much follow the Juyo books and Google translate can get probably 60% of it for you and as I’ve learned the sword term kanji, the other sections become easier to understand. (Nakago, Boshi, hamon, kitae, etc.) the sections in the beginning of the books are something I’d like to learn better. It’s all instructional material on various schools and lineages of smiths and the information there is top notch and google translate again does an okay job but I can tell lots of important information is lost. I’m hoping one day tools like AI can give us better translations of these sections of the books.

That's awesome Sam! Maybe there is hope after all to get a Mountain West sword group organized!

I believe I was seeing the same when I enlarged the picture. The dark line in particular though appears to be something like sunagashi but IDK if its lighting or angle or something that would make it appear dark while the rest appear light and be to be the same color as the nioiguchi much like typical sunagashi you'd expect. This looks darker in general and additional angles would be nice to have.

I haven’t found a lot of AI model’s OCR capabilities sufficient enough to read Mei and provide much meaningful output with the rare exception of very crisply cut dates with high resolution photos. I’ve tested most of the popular models even trying to roughly translate juyo descriptions and many details are lost in translation. This may all change weeks or months from now.

Good luck! Kanemichi is close enough to Kanenobu I suppose

Did the 1st gen sign this way not using a reversed Mei? Every example I’ve seen in my limited research shows his reverse kanji signatures. This Mei is not reversed and this led me to look at 2nd gen Mei for comparison as the 3-4 1st gen Mei I found all had reverse kanji.

I'm not proficient enough to confidently say whether or not its a gimei. I've only looked at a few examples of the 1st/2nd gen mei with papers.

I'm not an expert but the 1st gen wrote with reversed kanji (samoji) mei, due to being left handed. IDK if that applies to all of the mei of the father, but his adopted son signed both ways according to Fujishiro. However in the references of the 2nd gen's signature, there seem to be more "punched triangles" (IDK the proper term) in the chisel marks on the mei at the termination of most of the strokes. Some references to the Right Mutsu Kaneyasu: https://www.nihontocraft.com/Cutting_Test_Katana_Osaka_Kaneyasu.htm https://www.samuraimuseum.jp/shop/product/antique-Japanese-sword-wakizashi-signed-by-kaneyasu-nbthk-tokubetsu-hozon-certificate/