Darcy

My opinion is that you should not modify antique blades to suit your aesthetics. There are modern swords you can do that with. If it is shinshinto period, leave it be. Restore it and leave it. Now we have a thread here on the board encouraging this behavior. Why does it modify the sugata? When the hamon expands the mune goes into tension. The hamon pushes back on the extremes of the blade and this creates the curve. The mune and shinogi-ji are the part of the sword that resists this pressure. This pre-stressing helps the sword keep its shape. Now you go and cut out a bunch of the meat that was doing the resisting, so there is less there to resist. As a result the hamon is able to more overpower the mune and the sugata changes. The pressure in the ha is released somewhat as well and the blade is going to have new characteristics after the hi goes in.

I received some flak recently from the popcorn gallery about a statement I made previously about the horimono being the most essential element in an Ikkanshi Tadatsuna. A few interesting examples came up recently that confirmed what I've been saying (I mean, I do not pull this kind of statement out of my butt... I am told this kind of thing by people like Tanobe sensei and Kurokawa san and then it's verified in the marketplace, I don't tend to go around making things up though that claim is often made). Anyway Aoi has a fine Tadatsuna wakizashi on their site now: https://www.aoijapan.com/wakizashiawataguchi-ikkanshi-tadatsuna-hori-do-saku/ And this blade is actually short even for a wak, 46 cm... but it features good horimono by the smith along with his attestation that he made the horimono. Tadatsuna almost need to be looked at as buying a horimono with a sword as a frame. You don't want a junk sword but getting yourself bent out of shape on the sword or buying one that is long and nice without horimono misses the point. Aoi has sold blades like that in the 2.6-2.8M yen in the past, good long katana but lacking the horimono. This example entirely agrees with what I've said in my blog where I highlight which might be his master work which is only 63 cm... many longer examples exist but that one has the best horimono of them all. If you took the time to look through the Dai Token Ichi catalog you will find another Tadatsuna, and the way the dealer featured the listing, they didn't even bother to show the sugata of the blade. Rather, they made a point to highlight the horimono and nakago indicating that the smith made the horimono himself. So the sugata is basically relatively unimportant compared to these other elements when it comes to this smith, so much so that it's not even used in advertising this particular blade. Understanding these things, understanding what makes a certain smith special and precious, and then so what metrics apply to that smith, or that school, or that period in terms of separating the wheat from the chaff is extremely important for both dealers and for collectors. Otherwise as a collector you pat yourself on the back for buying a "cheap" example but the reason it was cheap is because the market is efficient: it is lacking the features that would make it more expensive and you may be ignorant of what those features are. Like a coin collector who knows the ins and outs, the rare years or weird kinds of marks that may appear on just a very few coins, they've studied all of the subject matter and know which elements are those that separate the most collectible from the least. And so those metrics have a direct bearing on the price. With Tsuda Sukehiro a shorthand can be found in the signature. Those signed Echizen no Kami Sukehiro, are superceded by those signed Tsuda Echizen no Kami Sukehiro, and those in turn superceded by those done with round grass script in the mei, those are called in dealer circles "maru Tsuda." These form a rule of thumb. A certain example from the first type can pass Juyo and a certain example of the last type may not pass Juyo, but people who try to make statistical conclusions from one item are falling into a fallacy of anecdotal evidence. The groups, taken as groups, are partitioned into generally better work as the mei evolves, the mei evolves along with Sukehiro's experience and development as a swordsmith. So this information is NOT why the blade becomes more valuable, but it happens in the case of this smith to be a handy indicator of when in his career it was made and so what the skill level of the maker was at the time. It just parallels his development. When a dealer comes and a customer doesn't understand the difference the dealer can conflate it all together and say well this one signed like this is a bargain because the average price of Sukehiro is higher... but the average price of Sukehiro is higher because in general a blade signed that way in the example the dealer is pushing is falling into a lesser category. Again, standout examples exist and that's why you should study and know what you see, but dealers who buy on the one hand with advanced metrics and then turn around and say "hogwash" when they sell are engaging in a form of ignorance arbitrage. They are buying in an informed market and selling in an uninformed market, and that allows there to be profit. Nobody should be telling you the horimono of a Tadatsuna is not an important part or less than the most significant part of the blade. A well preserved and excellently executed horimono is what we seek in this blade, along with the smith's attestation that he made it. This of course is the precise reason that makes that aspect of these works a target for fakery. Because the guys faking it tend to know how important it is, and even their attempt to fake it might go over the heads of people who are buying simply on length.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/the-samurai-Japanese-arms-and-armour-2 Disclaimer, I have a few things in this.

> Just so that the "experts" don't laugh at you for having green papers. It's because the papers are (a) disavowed (b) were not intended at the time of their writing to be as strict as current papers (c) purposefully abused to take advantage of collectors to the point that people went to prison. Being part of flushing the rest of the green papers out of the system, so they are not lying there as traps and time bombs to future collectors, is a good thing. Unless of course someone depends on a class of disavowed, exaggerated, or purposefully corrupt "authentication papers" to sell one's inventory. Again, none of this is confusing in the Japanese dealer community. The average quality of the papers is considered junk and people do not present items to each other with a green paper with some kind of implication that it has any bearing on what you're looking at. The only places that green papers get pumped heavily as being reliable is in the west. Usually in the context of "wants to sell you something."

I know of some of the pieces in the collections being used for this, and this would be a high level exhibition even in Japan. Some things that will be shown will be shown for the first time. I haven't been to the USA for 5 years but this exhibition makes me want to get on a plane. Good luck.

Understanding this... Tokuju papers usually have a period listed right in the setsumei, unlike Juyo. On this one it is very clearly set to middle Kamakura. Their mentioning of Heian is a transcription error or a copy and paste error or two different clerks writing it up. It happens a lot there so you need to be careful. With Ko-Bizen it is kind of a simple error to conflate them with Heian blades, because in the Heian period we classify most things as Ko-Bizen in Bizen. But it needs to be understood as kind of an umbrella under which we place the older Bizen works when we can't clearly define a group to assign them to. So in the Kamakura period if you are an "unaligned" swordsmith that we can't place where you belong, you will fall into the Ko-Bizen classification. In terms of Tochika there may be many generations or just one, there is not enough information to tell and different theories are out there. In these cases the NBTHK can and likes to write about specific pieces, in this case saying that this is a middle Kamakura Tochika while mentioning a theory that he was a son of Masatsune (there are several ways to interpret Masatsune as well in terms of generations and time period). Other times they have mentioned Tsuneto and they have also mentioned that there is a possibility that he is Hatakeda or early Hatakeda somehow. So you kind of can't go wrong by just saying that this one in particular is middle Kamakura and it is certainly authentic and high quality Tochika. But it's really wrong to just pop open Fujishiro and see there is one entry for Tochika and he puts him at the end of Heian so saying that because this is Tochika then it's Heian period. Even the strongest things we can say about dates when we get to middle Kamakura and earlier has to have a big fudge factor of decades to centuries because we literally move back from clearly documented history to poorly documented history to the time of legendary smiths. A lot of that gray area can be dealt with by saying Ko-Bizen or Ko-Kyo and then leaving it as a subject for further research. This it not purely a punt but just the knowledge that swords are still being discovered that can tell us more about what we want to know from the earliest times.

I think it's more to do with the former than the latter. I think you have misunderstood what the poster was getting at. It is an issue of ending up in these kinds of tweener blades that carry a high enough price that they are out of the range of most sword collectors that represent the bottom part of the market in terms of budget, and they do not carry the most important attributes of the smith that are appealing to collectors who can afford to buy the top examples. If you go out and you buy the worst possible Chogi for instance, congratulations, you have got yourself a very expensive sword, that 95% of people cannot afford and the remaining 5% will tell you "please find me a better one." That blade is in the danger zone. It means you have nowhere to turn if you want to sell it. You thought you were damn clever with your budget and it was your lucky day to buy this wonderful piece but when it comes time to sell, now you need to find someone who has the exact same high budget as you did to buy the blade in the first place, but also has no sensitivity to quality and so hasn't said he will pass on that example in order to find one that has the best characteristics of the smith. This kind of Chogi can be Juyo and can be 8 million yen. That is far in excess of what a normal person can buy. And, the vast majority of people who CAN enter the market at that range, their potential goes much higher than this and they will pass on that one and say find me a 20 million yen type https://www.tsuruginoya.com/items/f00293.html that exhibits all the features of the smith. The 8M one is in the danger zone. It is bought because it's thought to be thrifty but it is in the end not the kind of blade that people will fight over who are capable of buying a Chogi. The only reason to buy that Chogi is because you absolutely must have one and this is your threshold of pain. So it is this, or none, and you decided that it will be this. In which case you made 100% the right decision... but you did so because you were informed and understood. Not because you were driven by the thoughts of being rewarded for being thrifty and buying the equivalent blade as the 20M one for a lot cheaper. That's the wrong decision and that is how you hurt yourself. If you go and buy a suguba type Ichimonji with many problems, again it can be accurately judged or even signed, but a lot of buyers who are in that price category will also have the type of discretion to say I don't want that one, show me one that has flamboyant activity all up and down the blade and I will pay more. That is the danger zone. Or a blade that is by a low ranking school or low ranking smith but barely qualified for Juyo in a weaker session, someone may buy that blade because it's Juyo and because they made the mistake of buying the papers over the sword. Well they celebrate that they bought "a cheap Juyo" but that is not what they have done. They have bought a weaker example of a weaker school or weaker smith than what exists in the market. If it is expensive enough, again, they have crossed out the bottom of the market when the time comes to sell and they have crossed out the higher part of the market. That is the danger zone. There is nowhere for that blade to go, you cannot make the sword better to appeal to the upper part of the market. So, lacking finding such a value conscious and thrifty buyer as yourself, you have only one place to go and that is down, down, down until you hit the point where there are enough low budget buyers that they will pick your blade up based on what attributes it does have. That is how you end up escaping the danger zone which is by setting yourself on fire. That danger zone as mentioned with the Chogi example is going to vary based on the smith and the quality of the pieces in question. Chogi can go very high, I saw one at 40 million yen and even though "only Hozon" I saw one that the dealer quoted out as high as 25M yen because every time someone agreed to his price he thought about it a bit and then declined to sell it and the next guy who asked got a higher price. That is his prerogative because he has to decide at that point in time what he would rather have, the money or the sword, and in each case he thought about it and said to himself I think I'll keep this sword. These tweener pieces though what is in common is not the papers or the actual price but that they exist on the low part of the spectrum of expression of a particular smith's work. i.e. "the worst possible example". As you ascend higher in the scope of the smiths work you will enter into an acceptable gray zone and from there pass out. At what pricing level those are depends on the smith and the support in the market for him, and the quality of the work at hand. Going back to the reference example it is possible for a Nobuhide to be quoted out over 12M yen and I've seen seen it, blade was not even offered for sale but it was indicated that the price was over this part. This blade of course had the top class horimono possible for the smith and the entire blade was made beautifully. Subtract the horimono and the price on the same blade falls by 50-60%. If you get into the type of quality that cannot pass Juyo (again, it's not the paper that leads it it's the sword, and the papers follow the indications made by the sword and are not the cause), then you can end up with this class of "nice sword" type of Nobuhide that is in the 2-3M yen range. The market will support those, they are still good swords. The entire problem comes in when someone misguides a buyer and tells them that horimono or special features of a smith have nothing to do with the price and conflates everything together. Thus, such a buyer may see a Nobuhide on the market at 2.6M yen and see another at 6M yen and then year of this one I speak about in the 12M+ yen range that the owner will not even sell. Now he buys the Nobuhide @ 2.6 not because it's the right sword for him, or because it is great, but because he doesn't know the fundamental differences between the 12M+ one and the 2.6M one, he conflates the two and then thinks he's got himself an amazing deal for getting a Nobuhide so cheap. No, he got a Nobuhide of average make and quality sans horimono at the market price for that kind of sword. It is not a ripoff and it is not a steal, but he bought it on the perception of being thrifty by price comparing but not having access to all of the information that drives those prices. Precisely because ... people just don't have the information, or when someone asks in a place like this, someone like you launches an ad hominem and implies the information is bad based on the source (in itself a fallacy) and so invalid (in this case the wrong conclusion) and so that there is no difference between the two (false) and then leading this person to bad guidance that they should indeed recognize the 2.6M yen one as a bargain. It's not. It's just like anything else, floated at what the market will support for that kind of sword. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, because it's an art not a science but that's what's going on. Now that owner of the amazing will happily turn over any number of the 2.6M yen type of blade. They are, as they would say over there, "business swords", or as dealers would say over here, "merch." They will turn those over many, many times but they will hold that precious one for themselves or else to reward a special client (and so reward the relationship which is beneficial to themselves). But that thing is just not going to leave for no reason and at 2.6M yen like the commercial grade ones. The vast quantity of what is bought and sold on the market are these "merch" or "business swords" as they are obtainable and they are also what people think of as being high value for the dollar when they do not know that there is NO equivalence between a blade with all of the smith's special features and one considerably lacking in them or lacking one of the most key elements. Like the example of a suguba Ichimonji, it is of scholarly interest for what it is, especially if signed it can be of historical interest, but the buyer for that is a man who has a significant collection of Ichimonji and wishes to show all of the spectrum of their work. That kind of collector and their means is not someone that we encounter on a daily basis and that sword is for his collection. The average collector, even one of significant means, will want instead to pursue the archetype as closely as they can, and where sacrificing, will attempt to sacrifice in areas away from where the archetype is affected. One example of this is a blade being suriage because the rest of the work can be perfectly healthy and in perfect keeping with the school, but the nakago is gone. This is a tradeoff that reduces the value of a blade considerably vs. ubu but preserves almost all of the essential aspects of the school. This is why indeed this is the biggest part of the market because it allows most mortal people to buy them and doesn't push things into the million dollar range. And this all goes back to great horimono in a Nobuhide because that is part of the archetype and why a blade lacking that is valued less on the market in money terms, and also considered less precious by collectors. Absolute dollar value and preciousness do not necessarily go hand in hand, because you could have something like extremely precious wonderful Ko-Mino tosogu and have them outpriced by a Shinshinto sword quite easily. And preciousness will really depend on your point of view. This whole thing about assigning prices to papers is, again, wrong and I credit Bob Hughes for talking about this with me at length and he named it "ladder theory" and went over all the reasons he felt it was wrong. I have always been in 100% agreement with his feelings on this and renamed it as ladder fallacy to try to get more to the core of it not being a valid theory to follow. https://blog.yuhindo.com/ladder-theory/ Now herein are some major logical issues. The first is that you have dismissed generalities above and then you immediately enter into several generalities of your own. So, the question I pose here is: what do you actually believe? That generalities in general are wrong as you first claim or is that generalities are right but only when you use them? Generalities are just what they are: they are a guideline, nothing more. There is no way of attacking someone offering generalities, other than if the generality is completely off kilter. You seem to be reaching for that magic drawer of swords again but not only does it hold a large number of accurately papered Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune of insufficient quality to impress you, but now contains a substantial quantity of Shizu Kaneuji at $10k a pop. I beg you, please, open that drawer and shake it out to the bottom because I think almost everyone here would be happy to stand in line for the contents of this drawer. Now, it is entirely possible to get a Kaneuji that is all core steel and as a result is priced so low as $10k, but trying to generalize things to the point of saying that this is the market or even dealer price guideline for good Kaneuji or even mediocre Kaneuji by the rules of Kaneuji is really simple to prove if you want to prove it. Just get one and put it up for sale. You need to qualify your generalities you offer as truths otherwise rather than with the term "Hozon starts at", instead with "the worst possible example of XXX can be obtained at". This will decouple the proposed idea that Hozon is an inferior or entry cost blade, which it is not. Said Chogi example above was "only Hozon" and I have been offered a blade at 50 million yen a long time ago that was "only Hozon" and the fact that these were Hozon simply indicated that the blade was authentic. They underscore the bottom line of expectations as a guideline. They say nothing about the top end. So you cannot classify price ranges by papers. You can classify price ranges by smith and by blade quality though, because those are the causes of the price. At the end of the day the price is a factor of the quality of the blade and the reputation of the smith, and the attribution to a top level smith is a function of the style of the blade and the quality of the blade. It is inappropriate to classify a poorly made sword to a top level smith. Thus the prime mover in all things is the quality and the style of the blade at hand and those feed into all the other aspects which then at the end of the equation pumps out a price. Independent factors are history, provenance, etc. which make something desirable outside of the attributes inherent to the blade. It then comes back down to the drawer full of cheap Masamune and Kaneuji and how they obtain these attributions to top level smiths, which imply top level properties, which would normally imply as assessments to Juyo without major problems of condition factoring in. I still suggest that you have got yourself an absolutely willing market to take some problem Masamune and Kaneuji off of your hands, if you can buy the Masamunes at $60k then you have an easy 10% to make, I will pay you more than 10% profit, and if you buy all the $10k Kaneuji I am sure we can divvy them up on the board at $12k a pop. So possibly your self assessment as a member of the proletariat is because you are simply missing these wonderful business opportunities and instead pursuing muromachi mumei tanto at higher price ranges. So you are welcome to upgrade your class status as soon as you take advantage of the magic drawer. Absolutely there are blades that are Juyo that are in these price ranges, but again you are entering into the fallacy that because two blades are Juyo that they are equivalent, or that a blade that is Juyo is necessarily more expensive than one that is Hozon. That does not follow in either case, the only thing we can say is that making a blade Juyo offers an opinion that the blade is falling into a spectrum that has removed the lowest category of blades available by the school or maker, unless the bottom category for the school or maker is already Juyo. In which case it can occupy that bottom slot already. But a Juyo Sadamune and a Juyo Ko-Mihara are not equivalent by being Juyo and you cannot assign prices to either based on them being Juyo. You cannot say a Tokubetsu Juyo Mihara is more expensive than a Hozon Sadamune based on simply examining the papers. The attribution is far more important than the level of the paper, and the level of the paper only makes sense within the domain of the attribution of the item. So, a menuki attributed to Goto Yujo that is Juyo, the most important part of that assessment is the attribution to Yujo. Yujo is Juyo and Juyo is Yujo already, it's its own form of Juyo just to be attributed to him. That one also accompanies Juyo related properties is what makes it more expensive on the market, and that it passes Juyo is confirmation that it does possess those properties. But two informed buyers looking at the same unpapered Yujo already have it in their head about what those properties are and so ultimately the assessment as Juyo is meaningless to them. The passing of this kind of item to Hozon only serves to confirm what they believe and eliminate risk of an error. If one of those buyers is also one of the judges making the Hozon paper you can completely understand the secondary nature of the paper then. Once you have an uninformed buyer entering the equation now the papers take on a factor because the papers stand in for the uninformed buyer's incomplete knowledge. He can then hope or assume that the Juyo paper indicates what he believes and then there is room for discussion between him and the informed buyer. Juyo is itself still a category with a wide, wide range, since it only mentions something about the bottommost assessment and says nothing about the top. For example there is at least one Juyo Bunkazai blade (Kaneuji oddly enough) that is also Juyo Token but not Tokubetsu Juyo Token. If a buyer attempts to say that such a blade should be less expensive than a Tokuju example just based on the papers they are mistaken. Even if you take away the Jubun status, you are still left with a signed Kaneuji at Juyo. Nobody who knows anything can come to a conclusion that the correct assessment is that any particular Tokuju example should be more expensive based on it being Tokuju vs. a Juyo one. It doesn't even apply in the domain of a smith let alone between two smiths. In terms of access to "cheap" Juyo, I believe I sold a Juyo at the lowest price being $14k or maybe $12k. I recently declined to buy a Juyo blade at $10k. The fact that they are Juyo does not mean that they fall into any particular band. At $10k, you can look at the cost of papers, polish, habaki, shirasaya and you can in fact determine that the value of the blade alone now is zero since all of those other properties are commodities with known values. The closer you get to that absolute case of zero value for the blade, the closer you get to the real bottom line. Surely there are instances of swords that have negative value but in practice with a Juyo class blade it should not fall below zero. This illustrates why Juyo is not a useful data point in and of itself to discuss valuation of anything. Because the absolute bottom line conclusion is a sword with zero or negative value, you are actually not saying anything of any relevance whatsoever. For me, if I price something, I am pricing based on the sword. I am pricing based on my understanding of where the sword lies within the spectrum of work of the smith and its desirability. It can be Juyo "at Tokuju Price" which is as mentioned, a fallacy. Such a person is welcome to buy a Tokuju blade by a lesser smith and of lesser quality and less interesting style than the Juyo example under consideration and we can applaud them for their savvy expenditure of money based on the color of the paper rather than the example of the work at hand. I've tried to say to people before that those kinds of examples are "already Tokuju" regardless of where the paper falls in to better get the point across. When a seller has told me he wouldn't sell me a rusty blade because "it might pass Juyo as Yukimitsu" I simply responded with, "charge me your Juyo Yukimitsu price" then because I knew what I was looking at and what it was and I didn't really think it would end up as Yukimitsu (it did not) and it did end up as exactly what I thought it was. I am not worried about it not being papered or anything else if I know what it is. That is my money to risk of course and if I am wrong I take the hit. If I judge something like that thing to be able to qualify as Tokubetsu Juyo it's because I think the attributes of the sword are in keeping with that. The NBTHK may disagree with me and I may be wrong. In which case I can say try again but in the case they refuse several times I have to admit that we have a disagreement and the chance that I am right and they are wrong is smaller than them being right and me being wrong. So I've taken to giving people a guarantee that I back with my own money to indicate that this is my feeling and this is where the thing will go. So this way they don't have to use my feeling, if they do not trust their feeling, the guarantee is that an arbitrary judge will feel that way and they can rely on that assessment above mine and I will take the responsibility of being wrong. So far I am right about 80% of the time when I do this. So it's not perfect but it is better than a coin flip and it's being offered only on certain blades which means it is far, far better than a coin flip on any given blade chosen at random. That's what people should hope to hit or improve on if they can mentally assess something and know where it will land. The Chogi that passed Tokuju for me in the last session is a blade that I chased after for 8 years trying to buy. With no papers. I had no problem paying whatever price the seller wanted to sell to me at. I had no doubts about what it was or where it was going, all of that I knew would be confirmed. There is no way to say that blade should be cheaper without papers, or cheaper at Hozon vs. Tokubetsu Hozon or Tokubetsu Juyo. It is what it is. A perfect diamond is still a perfect diamond and when the papers for that diamond come out they are confirmation beyond doubt. In that sense it can elevate the value of the diamond to the general market because that provides information that is lacking to the general market and so removes risk. But it does not do anything to two perfectly informed buyers and sellers who can assess the diamond directly without the need of the papers as crutch. If they are both perfectly informed then one is being disingenuous to assert to the other that the price of the diamond should be less before a paper or after a paper because it's the information that's the critical part. The other way to make that assertion is then to not be perfectly informed in which case you can be sincere about it. To say I believe this to be true, however, I mistrust my judgement or that the judges will agree with me, in which case the risk expands the spectrum of possible prices and the papers have to arrive to bring the bottom end of the spectrum back up or else implode it by confirming the worst possible case. "Can you get burned" is not a useful statement of any sort. It's like saying "can you die in a car accident" and the answer is yes, you can. Any statement like that, like "can I go to outer space?" the answer to that is yes I can. I could get lucky and get picked at random because I submitted to join a commercial space flight or I could really try hard to become an astronaut. If the question is "Can I get bitten by a mosquito" the answer is the same: yes. Can you find a Masamune in a garage sale? Yes. What matters though is that you have to consider what is the likelihood of these things happening and why are they happening if the frequency of them happening is high. The fact that something is possible doesn't mean it is probable, and in fact this kind of phrase, "it is possible that..." is one of the famous propaganda techniques. It is possible that I will spontaneously combust before I finish writing this and it is possible that aliens are among us. Possibility does not tell you anything about probability other than that it is non zero. But in practice 0.000000000001 is close enough to zero that it is zero in the practical sense. If you keep entering the market and keep getting burned, whether that is the sword market, the stock market, or the crypto market, it indicates a failure to understand the basic principles involved. It indicates that you should try to understand them better. It means that if you keep doing the same thing over and over again and it results in bad results, than you need to change what you are doing. If you are burned in swords then you need to reassess how you are entering the sword market. I was a collector in various other fields and I applied what I learned from those fields to sword collecting because some things pass easily from domain to domain. For instance, I was a hobby jeweler and I would buy gemstones on ebay for my projects. I would say oh look at this lovely spinel. Well spinel is not quite as good as ruby but it's a nice, red, glittering stone. Just... not as desirable but it's still good. Well, the cut on this one is not so good but the price is really good so it's got high value. This major flaw in the table, well from this angle I think it's ok... and so on. Finding an excuse for the item at every level and I would buy myself a $400 spinel. I still have that $400 spinel. I cannot ever sell it. The reason why is that there are ten billion other problematic spinels just like it on eBay and they are being loaded onto eBay in vast quantities by companies of ill repute (possibly man made) and certainly if your choice is to find something filled with problems then you have a lot of things to choose from. Now I bought that $400 spinel thinking well, low risk, doesn't cost much, no problem right? Wrong. The problem is in the mentality that this is actually reducing risk. It's not. If I look at the collection in terms of total amount spent, I could say have bought one paraiba tourmaline or a fancy colored diamond or something quite special. Or, I could spread all that money over these $400 flawed spinels. I chose the latter. I still have them. No way to sell them. No way to go to the effort, if I tried to sell them all maybe I'd get the notice of people enough to get 25% sold and I'd be going to the effort of selling 100% of them and the only argument I could ever make with my little teardrop in the ocean of spinels was on price. So, the only way out of the danger zone is by setting yourself on fire. With a $400 gemstone it means probably selling it at $25 or something. People just won't care enough and the commercial bulk dealers can just keep dumping quantity onto the market, everything is automated, they have no cost and no care in the listing and the items are of questionable quality but nobody knows the difference. In the end it's not worth it to even try. I will instead give them to my nieces. Now if instead I did buy that paraiba tourmaline I have to just sell that one. That's my total effort. The same amount of money is at risk but by spreading it over junk I increased the chance of complete wipeout. I certainly increased the effort level. If I got something held precious by everyone in the community, not just the bottom part, I no longer have the problem of trying to catch someone's attention by offering up my absolute mediocrity into a sea of mediocrity. The question becomes, who is willing to afford it. And, within the spectrum of paraiba tourmaline... did I buy the *** worst possible example ***. So did I again price myself above the bottom of the market, but not get something significant enough to catch the interest of those who can afford everything? I could get myself into the danger zone. I didn't go down that path but I understood that path from these cheap gemstones that are essentially valueless and commodities. From this sense I look at the collector who has collected 100 tsuba of $300 value and I think of what a mess that is and how do you even sell that off. You put them all on a table and people will come by and cherry pick the top half and the bottom half you will be left with for years to forever. That is like my flawed spinels. So in this sense it is far, far better to take the $30,000 one spent on 100 tsuba, it's the same amount of money, that you can redirect into a Natsuo if you are lucky and patient you will get one. Nobody will ever refrain from telling you that Natsuo is no good. Natsuo may not appeal to the tastes of all buyers but everyone will vouch for the talent involved. You have insulated yourself by going into a blue chip item. And when time comes to sell, you can choose how fast or how slow you want to be out, and at what price. If you bought the right one you can be out at double your money or more. This market evolves, as more participants enter and the number of Natsuo cannot increase but can only decrease, the numbers are all on your side. Can you get burned on a Natsuo? Yes you can get burned on anything but it's about what the probabilities are not on whether or not it is possible, like aliens being possible but not probable to be around us. There are Natsuo out there I passed over at a price that now I wish I could go back and get, and those same ones have entered the retail market at more than double the price at which I had the opportunity. And, Natsuo unlike a stock is not going to ever go to zero. There is of course no guarantee you will get everything back but based on your timeframe you are better off sticking to great artworks if you are an art collector. In the end, it's an art market. I have my own money in the stock market and the art market and I learned with my spinels and penny stocks that quality is a quality that is important. Where to begin with this.... the fallacy of false equivalence or the straw man picked at random... I think that what you did here was to grab a dealer at random, put a noose around their neck, string them up, and then stick a yari through them and then claim this is some kind of argument. It's a straw man, one that is unfair to him in particular, as he is a reliable and kind guy who absolutely does his best for all of his clients. I count the man as a friend and so do many in the community and I haven't ever heard anyone say anything bad about him, but really this is a weird statement to break out at this point. Amongst your failed arguments this one ranks highly. There is this ongoing theme of false equivalence in things that you say, like where two Juyo need to be assessed against each other with the most critical aspect being that they are both Juyo. Or in this case, that since these swords are both Ichimonji in your example that somehow they are equivalent and it is unfair to criticize the cheaper one and you are with your chosen pillory of a Ginza dealer implying in true propaganda style that the 2M yen Ichimonji must be superior to the 3-6M yen one which is padded up based on the Ginza dealer's expenses. In reality the swords are priced based on the sword. It's a point that continually slips as you get into these things about Juyo or two things being Ichimonji. If you have a gold coin for sale, and I have a gold coin for sale, my gold coin is not going to be priced higher than yours based on me being in Ginza. Your profit will actually be larger than mine if you can sell yours and you do not have my expenses. But, I don't get more for it than you do. The market decides what we get for it. I have had people tell me in the past, go find me an Ichimonji, I want one in great state of preservation, flamboyant hamon, wide mihaba, ikubi kissaki, and strong utsuri and nice jigane. Mumei is ok. But don't worry about it being Juyo. That statement again comes down to this fundamental misunderstanding that the paper is going to drive the price on such a piece. The attributes they have described are in keeping with assessing such a blade to Tokubetsu Juyo. They are obvious on its face to anyone who understands what they are looking at. The statement to "don't worry about it being Juyo" is a way of saying "I want it really cheap" because they have misunderstood the factors that drive the price. I responded to this with, "I won't worry about it being Juyo because it will be Kokuho." The guy of course did not like my joke very much and he chose to never speak to me again but I digress. This fundamental misunderstanding and false equivalence between two Ichimonji because they are Ichimonji or two Juyo because they are Juyo or two Juyo Ichimonji because they are both Juyo Ichimonji glosses over almost all of the attributes that make something desirable. In the end the guy who has an Ichimonji for sale is going to price it to the market, as long as he is rational, self interested, and has access to information. So will you. If you go and find one of these magic drawer Masamune at $60k that finally impress you, you can buy that and what will you sell it for? Are you going to take a 10% commission? Sell it to the next guy at $66k? No you will not. I assume you are a rational person with access to information. That you do not buy these Masamune that have reliable papers ... makes me question some of this but if I were to completely assume that, would you do this? The answer is: NO. Any more than you would buy a lottery ticket that wins $100 million dollars and then sell it for a 10% markup over the price that you paid to buy the lottery ticket. You would float that lottery ticket at the market price. You wouldn't sell a gold coin that you found on the street laying there, to the next person, for free if you are running a gold coin business. You might do it as a gift, but you would not give it away if you're running your business on that model to randos who walk in the door because you like the cut of their jib. You might cut a discount for your best customer but you are still self interested and motivated to take care of your own interests and selling to your best customer at a discount gives you an increased chance of selling more to them down the road. That is relationship management 101. But you don't sell your gold coin to a random for free because you found it for free. So the magic drawer filled with reliable Masamune that you will not touch, this has a huge market far above the price that you mentioned. You are not taking advantage of that market which means you are not self interested, and I would observe what you do and say you are as self interested as any normal human being among us is. So that just leaves behind not having the capital to buy them (just connect me with them and I'll pay you 10% so I can use my capital) or that they don't exist. Because the market is there and instead you are marketing Muromachi Sue-Hosho at higher prices than what you claim you can acquire Kamakura or Nanbokucho Shizu Kaneuji. In which case it just looks like an inability to pick your inventory items to me. Or ... whatever someone can drive their own conclusion. The point being: you are not giving any free lunches on your Sue-Hosho and you won't on a Masamune either. Nor would anyone. They will float for what the market will take. With that point made ad nauseum I can look back at your 2M yen Ichimonji and say the most likely reason for that price is not because that dealer is nice, or stupid, or has lower costs... it is only because this is what the market will bear for that particular sword. Regardless of it being Ichimonji it implies a strong chance of inferior qualities associated with that blade. Or else the rational, self interested, smart and knowledgeable person running a sword business would float it where the market will support it. Regardless of their expenses and their costs. If it is an ass kicking Ichimonji with flames bursting off of it it will receive an ass kicking Ichimonji with flames bursting off it price. If it is a neutered sad depressed specimen of something that used to be wonderful a long time ago and is genuine, but has one foot in the grave now, that's the price it will take. If someone cannot tell the two apart, it comes back to the issue of silver and gold coins having the same intrinsic value to someone without knowledge because they are both shiny metal. Nobody should be conflating the two. The constant conflation based on one attribute such as the name of the school between all such blades attributed to that school, or between all examples at a level of paper, only indicates an inability to assess any difference between the individual items especially when the papers are taken away though they can be dramatically different. So given all variables, probably a 6M yen Ichimonji is a better sword than a 2M yen Ichimonji. The person who wants to tell you they are the same is the vendor of the 2M yen Ichimonji. Also he would sell it for 6M if he could but he can't, that's why it's 2M yen and that's why he's telling you that they are the same sword you're just coughing up money for Ginza rent because it won't sell based on what it is. In all it's a useless example of anything and is just mud in the water. I really do suggest grabbing those Kaneuji though and the Masamune, you're sitting on a real gold mine not a silver mine.

I'll also say, I don't win when I tell someone that the pricing scheme and preciousness of a Nobuhide is different based on the presence or lack of presence of fine horimono. I don't have either to sell anyone. I would love to sell those with the great horimono. 20 years I have never had one. I will never have one. The reason for that is that they are simply too expensive in the Japanese market to procure, document, and then sell. They are already priced where Japanese buyers will support the market and foreigners will not. Foreigners will go for the 75 cm one with no horimono in the belief that they are getting one discounted and not factoring in the horimono. Very few will instead get the 63 cm one with the best horimono and pay the premium price for it. I don't get anything by telling people that there is hazard in buying a $10,000 Masamune with green papers. That buyer is not going to come to me or someone like me for a legitimate one because they won't be in the market for a legitimate one. The guy who is going to buy that one off of Yahoo auctions will not be buying a Tokubetsu Juyo Kanemitsu or Shizu or anything like this from me. I don't save myself anything by trying to inform people on this. I get rocks thrown at me for doing so by the cottage industry in selling dreams to those who want to believe that these have the legitimacy that people want to believe that they do. Every time I say it, I am worried and I have to always say that sometimes yes a green papered anything will end up being OK but the odds are against you and by mathematics they will only get worse every time a diamond is pulled from the mud and promoted to Tokubetsu Hozon, it just leaves behind a greater and thicker concentration of mud. I get nothing but smears for trying to at least tell people and warn them to not get burned by these things. I'm not a seller of shinto in mass quantities and I have nothing but praise for a great work of Nobuhide or Tadatsuna or Sadakazu with one of these great horimono. If I can get them I will but generally I can't for the reasons stated. All I am doing is actually supporting the market for those who *do* have them and can sell them and provide them by vouching for their importance and I don't completely dismiss one without, but when you do buy one without you are missing a great deal of the point of why a Nobuhide or Tadatsuna is held in high esteem. If you're going to buy a muscle car you should get one with a high powered engine or you miss the point of having a muscle car. If you buy a bottle of champagne that's been open for a week you miss the point of buying a bottle of champagne if you buy a Kobe beef steak you miss the point to get it well done. Even if you like it well done with ketchup on it, it's missing the point and in fact you need some education if you think that's how to have it. There may still be some merit in all of these things, which is what sustains the value that they have, but they are not to be conflated with each other or held as equivalent. I get nothing from pointing that out. People get things by telling others that silver and gold are both shiny metal so they are the same.

Lol funny. It's kind of the street hucker's go-to move when they're holding out the Rolex in the back alley. Today's your lucky day we have gold for the price of silver here so why go anywhere else? I'd suggest though that you're answering a question with a direct ad hominem and not contributing anything toward bringing the idea to its knees if you disagree with it as you seem to. I would pose the question to you: In the case of an artist famous for his horimono, given two works A and B which are otherwise identical, though B has the addition of a first class horimono by said artist, why would they be held up as equivalently precious examples of his handicraft? If an artist is famous for a particular technique, an excellent example of that technique that makes him famous, will always carry a premium both in value and in interest among knowledgeable collectors. Juyo and Tokubetsu Juyo track this idea. But a huckster exists by promoting the idea that all of this is equivalent because that's what creates arbitrage opportunities for the huckster. This is why the green paper idea won't die in the west. Because there is a community that profits on this kind of confusion. Japanese dealers dismiss these concepts because they are practical and pragmatic and won't try to promote to an informed buyer that green papers are reliable. They similarly will not mix up concepts like Sue-Hosho with Hosho or so on. But if you can conflate these ideas in someone's mind that's what lets you profit. So you tell the buyer that silver is equivalent to gold, and today they are lucky because you're selling silver which is really gold at the price of silver, and they will be smart then to buy the silver. Now silver on its own has its own merits: it's not useless and it's not valueless. But if you promote the idea of conflating the two, then you take advantage of the conflation of ideas by getting the buyer to buy on the idea that they're placing smart money by buying at a discount. So these green papered junkers in Japan that go through the dealing community precisely as this, as junk, are those that get scooped up by western dealers and promoted as papered authentic and reliable masterworks. Those that want to shoot the idea down usually turn to this kind of ad hominem above as their go-to form of persuasion and to continue telling the story that Santa Claus is real. There is always apetite among people to believe this because they want to believe that they will beat the market. This is again, never to say that there are no works among green papered blades that are without merit or won't be promoted to a modern paper. But the idea that it's reliable and problem free and that you should always hope and be positive when you see these things is what the huckster desires to promote in order to keep the market for them alive. It's all about whatever idea you want to carve into the buyer's mind, and those that are concentrating on value, you want to show them that this is the doorway to value. The mint condition 1965 Ferrari Daytona with all original and matching serials then is the same as one that has been slapped together out of spare parts bins, and so the smart buyer should go for the spare part bin item. Or the antique firearm that has modern milled replacement parts is just the same as the one that is all original... or the cracked porcelain is almost as valuable as the same one that is in perfect condition. Or this rare coin with a bit of wear is the same as the one that looks like it came from the mint. Even fractional changes in those things cause great devaluation and increase disinterest among collectors. It doesn't make them bad or valueless but it makes them less precious. If you want a Tadatsuna or a Nobuhide with top flight qualities and you add excellent original horimono to that package, the value and the interest will always go up. That is *specifically the reason* why con artists and hucksters have through history added fake horimono to those works. Exactly because people are more interested in them with the horimono. Exactly because the value is higher with the horimono. This is exactly why good advice tells people to be careful of fake horimono. This is exactly why the smiths added "hori dou saku" to their works, to prove and attest that they themselves made the horimono. Proposing that this is a bad idea without merit because you don't like someone is disingenuous and in fact it's harmful and misleading to people and at the very, very minimum if you want to float that kind of transparently silly claim you should always add a slight bit of support to what you have to say. Otherwise there's only two alternatives, one of which is hucksterism which purposefully misleads people and the other of which is a failure to understand the topic and so spreads disinformation by way of ignorance. These smiths are not just swordsmiths: they are horimono artists and to dismiss the horimono as unimportant, is just one of those two ideas above. Similarly you cannot praise a work with excellent horimono and poor manufacture, but I don't think those really exist because they won't go to the considerable extra effort to make a "one way ticket" of carving a horimono that will kill the blade if one mistake is made. Also you may let Gassan Sadatoshi know that his works featuring excellent horimono are of no particular added interest in the community nor should he charge much more for them than one without, which he does, because you have stated that everything is the same. I'll add at the end of this as well that there are some collectors who do make a living by scrounging through the junk drawers and occasionally find gold. When they hit gold then it proves to them that the method is reliable. I have looked at some of these collections, in which the vast majority was fake and had something less than a 1 in 20 hit rate of authenticity and it's disheartening. Some of it is purposeful, because they are fed this stream of garbage by a junk dealer and every now and then the dealer inserts a nugget of gold. That hit is what sustains the collector because they both love the thrill and risk involved in discovery and that positive hit is confirmation. When they get confirmed by the NBTHK they hold it out as a victory and proof of the method because this great agency has told them that they decided correctly. On the other 19 out of 20 that are pure losses, they wave their hands and say, "What does the NBTHK know? How can they make so many mistakes?" They never see that the two ideas are mutually exclusive that they cannot both dismiss the expertise of the judges while simultaneously basking in their confirmation that one time out of 20 that they hit. Such a collection is a huge misplaced expenditure of money. The one hit does not make up for the 19 mistakes. So this is not about collecting or about art or anything of the sort, it's about the fun of the roulette wheel or fun of blackjack or fun of prospecting for gold. It's gambling and gambling has its own merits and benefits but usually the house wins. You can do the same with penny stocks, you can buy them all day long for years and 1 time out of so often you will hit and win huge, get your 10 or 20 or 100 bagger. But the vast majority of penny stocks just expire as dead companies and no value. You can wave your finger at the person who bought the boring blue chip expensive stocks all along and promote the idea of gambling or that penny stocks are a wise investment choice. At the end of the day the person with the boring porfolio always did well. They didn't beat the one gambler out of 100 that sold their house and dumped it all into GME one year ago, but they didn't take the risk either of losing everything so as a whole, that group, made great decisions and gets to sleep at night and doesn't have to micro manage their assets. Anyone who invested for a long time knows the pain that one bad call on a high risk stock that goes to zero neutralizes 10 good decisions on boring, solid, reliable investment decisions. There is a parallel in art and collectibles always. The Honus Wagner card that raised eyebrows for being the first over one million dollars is now 4 million or so. It's a blue chip among baseball cards. You would have been better off speculating if you made all the right decisions on day one about rookie cards as they came out, but mostly people don't do that. But if you bought the best one, you never did badly and you also got to relax in the idea that you have the best one. Such is a Nobuhide of first class manufacture plus first class horimono. It's the blue chip among the smith's works and anything that detracts from *any* aspect of the smiths' repertoire causes a degree of disinterest and that degree of disinterest reflects directly in the value. And so the worn out coin that a dealer tells you is as good as mint one, or the shiny rolex on the street corner that they're going to tell you is just the same and also tells time the same way. They are not equivalent even if they appear to be equivalent to the uneducated eye. In the end, these claims you make of equivalence between a work with top class horimono and one without, or say of a drawer full of reliably papered Masamune at Tokubetsu Hozon that do not impress you, these are very, very, very simple claims to substantiate without having to rely on sophistry. You simply can produce the examples in question. Please find and sell a work of Nobuhide with high class horimono for 2.5 million yen, or to hold your nose at the unimpressive Masamune at $60k, buy those and put them on the market at these prices for those of us who want them, to buy them. I will buy them from you, any day of the week. I am waiting here with my money in hand, holding it out, and waiting for my great horimono Nobuhide and my unimpressive Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune. Please endure the assault on your senses by such needless unimportance as a great horimono by a great horimono artist or a Soshu work so unimpressive as both to qualify legitimately as Masamune and yet not possess the qualities of being able to pass Juyo. I will buy from you, I am absolutely serious. I will buy a great sword from the ghost of Hitler if he will provide it to me, I will buy from the sensei of Facebook if he has a great sword to sell. I will buy from you or anyone, I do not care because I am absolutely a pragmatist and I don't conflate the work or its greatness with my personal feelings about the person providing it. I would also advise my customers to buy from my arch enemies who hold the only thing important in their lives to hold a 15 year old grudge to try to attack me personally. I will say go straight to them and buy the masterpieces if you can get them. And so will I. As recently as two weeks ago I told a customer on this board to withold payment due to me for an existing purchase, because another dealer presented to them a very nice item for acquisition that will fit in his collection. Others can testify as well that I have recommended blades for sale by other people. All I care about is greatness. Not conflating green papers with reliable things, and not telling someone that there is no significant difference in appreciation of works of a great horimono artist regardless of the presence of said horimono. Some of these ideas, if you proposed them in the company of top flight dealers in Japan, that the horimono is not an important component of these smith's works that are famous for horimono, or that Masamune are a dime a dozen with Tokubetsu Hozon papers laying around in quantity, nobody would challenge you on it. They would just look at you and if you were viewing such a work with great horimono they would just quietly put it away and bring you one with none. Afterwards they would tell jokes among friends. The same way that they do when a beginner complains about a kitae ware on a Heian blade and they put it away and bring them a Shinsakuto. They are pragmatic. They will not rattle your cage or disabuse you of these notions unless they care about you. And they primarily want to sell. Unless you are blessed with a great relationship with some of those guys you will just be allowed to believe what you want to believe. Anyway I want you to just bring these to market. Find it if it really exists. Post it here for sale and I'm ready to buy either these Masamune and I will take my chance on your tastes being equivalent to mine or not. I will buy all Nobuhide I can get with great horimono by the smith provided they are authentic in the 2.5-2.8 million yen range that you can find the katana without. I will also accept Mitsutada or Go. I'm flexible. Just don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining with these conflated ideas. Mumei Sue-Bizen is not the same as Kamakura Bizen though they are both Bizen, Tokubetsu Kicho is not the same as Tokubetsu Juyo though they both say Tokubetsu and Nobuhide without horimono is not the same as one with though they are both by the same maker.

When the NBTHK accepts something they issue a notice that tells you it was accepted and what level it is. That is a placeholder until the papers are published. Until the paper is shown, or that receipt is shown, the only text I see on this site is that "Hozon paper will be issued later." So, let's not be blaming the NBTHK when this dealer has made mistakes on their site from copy/pasting old listings to quick start a new listing (I reuse my research articles too), and there is a possibility of miscommunication. Without seeing either proof of passing or the paper itself, I'd withhold judgment and wait and see. They clearly put in a picture of an NBTHK envelope at the bottom of the listing that has nothing to do with this listing since the paper is not issued yet (and, not issued yet may be because it's not even been applied for yet, they could have gotten the sword, banged it out at warp speed like they usually do and threw it in the papering queue assuming it would pass). Do note that if you buy a sword as a dealer and wait for the papers to be issued, or at least the proof, you go through a four or five month cycle in which you can't sell the sword. In this case there is no doubt the sword is genuine so I would speculate that they just processed it and queued it and assumed the papers will come. But who knows.

Also that "Masamune" from my site, I posted it to the board in this thread as reference: Nice sword but Shinto.

Where do we start to camp out for the $60k Masamune? Can the line start after me? This line about there being $60k Hozon, Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune that will lose their status, I think is begging to see some tangible examples. As for handling many of them, I don't know where you are going that you can poke around in a drawer full of inappropriately papered Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune. Here is why you cannot price such a thing at $60k: 1. if it has so many issues and is so full of doubt, it is not worth $60k and nobody is likely to buy it 2. if it is not with that doubt, it will not be priced at $60k or if it were, that would last for a few picoseconds until someone picks it up and resells it at a price the market supports Consider a simple gold coin. If it is a real one ounce gold coin and you put it on ebay at $200 it will be gone in that same picosecond, to be sold for the price that gold fetches in the market every day and the lucky person will have themselves a profit. If it looks like it is made of copper rather than gold (i.e. so full of doubt) then nobody will pay $200 for it. We see this of course every day with the green papered Masamune that are constantly on Yahoo auctions. The sellers are not stupid, so they float them at zero so the speculators will bid to whatever the price of speculation will drive them. Or, they will price them at the price the market will pay for a Masamune. To price them at 20% of the price of a real Masamune is literally "neither here nor there." It is low enough to cause suspicion and it is high enough to cause suspicion. It is so low that the speculators will take pause. It is so high that the speculators will take pause. It is so low that the legitimate collectors will take pause. It is so high that the legitimate collectors will take pause. The market is not necessarily rational but it sure is very efficient. If you are encountering "many" of these by your own words, and were not impressed, you are implying that the NBTHK is cranking out Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune with great frequency. It's like saying you went into someone's house and saw "many" cockroaches. If you saw one only, it implies the existence of a good number you can't see. If you saw a good number, then there are many. If you saw many then there are a very large number. If there is a very large number, or even if there are many, then others of us will also be encountering them in person or online. Japanese well understand that green papers are garbage and yet there is still some kind of a speculation market on Yahoo auctions for green papered "Masamune". A modern Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune one can buy for $60k regardless of the impression level a foreigner may have for the blade, will not matter because of market efficiency. These items will be snatched up and find their way to major auctioneers or to Yahoo auctions at the bare minimum. If nobody has seen any except for one person who claims to have seen many, then there is some difficulty in explaining this phenomenon if we are to take it at face value. Because honestly there are enough low end dealers that would be able to lay their hands on those and turn them over for big prices on Yahoo auctions that they would simply appear there. Yet they don't. The idea that rather instead they are laying around in drawers inactive in the market, at low prices that would be blown through on an auction site, is far fetched. Everyone would speculate on such pieces and believe them to be easy Juyo. We have seen already on Sotheby's a Tokubetsu Hozon Norishige fetch more than this likely with this kind of speculation. Should such a "Masamune-prime" exist, it would have as well to have so many attestations and historical reasons to be a Masamune that it could go to Tokubetsu Hozon and yet, be so, so very wrong that it cannot approach the standards for Juyo, that again, it would be something that would fail to have any value. As you increase the level of the smith involved you increase the stakes dramatically. The higher you stake that claim on day one, the less room you give yourself to maneuver later. If the NBTHK were in the habit of tossing around Hozon for fake Masamune like used kleenex, the damage it causes to the organization as a whole is substantial. You are entering fraud lawsuit areas that you don't enter when you mix up Bungo Bingo Bongo. There is no point to stick your neck out at Hozon and Tokubetsu Hozon for Masamune when there is a great chance you will get your head cut off at Juyo. This is instead where you stick your neck out as den Yukimitsu and then give yourself another chance to reconsider at Juyo with more people and more attention. There are so very few reasons to paper something to Tokubetsu Hozon as Masamune that cannot go higher, you can count them on one hand. Those are that the condition is so very poor there is no chance, but the blade is legitimate. In which case, someone with knowledge should still find areas in it to be impressed, but to simply feel sad that the blade is worn away; or that the blade is retempered, and in which case the blade is going to have to have status as a famous old piece or else it will lack the exact dimension necessary in which to pass as Masamune (the best quality nie); or that the attribution is so very, very unreliable that the work cannot even classify as one of the better Soshu smiths for which there may be major to minor overlap with Masamune (in which case it does not have the standing to get to Hozon as Masamune, but it will simply be denied if under kinzogan or papered to whatever it is thought to be regardless of stacks of old paper). There is only a major disaster for all parties involved in generating drawers full of Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune that cannot impress a foreigner and do not have the capability to pass Juyo. Furthermore, there just lacks a reason for this to happen other than offering up that the people doing building such a situation are completely without credibility. I point you to an alternative to explain the phenomenon you have noted, if indeed it is real as nobody else has testified to it. That is in this same thread you have maligned the reputation of Honami Kochu and held his papers to be without merit, failing to impress you and so easily faked that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. A drawer full of $60k Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune that are not impressive in the least has such a simple easy explanation attached to it and Occam's razor applies. I've written elsewhere the slow pace at which consideration for Masamune is given. I have not, myself, encountered these large quantities of inexpensive and unimpressive yet faithfully papered Masamune in all of my experience in Japan nor has anyone offered up any links to them in Yahoo auctions in the last 25 years that I recall. I am aware of very, very tired Masamune that are correctly executed and still pass Juyo. There are those that pass Juyo with notes in the setsumei about how the attribution has doubts and even with that the market price on such things are quite high. It is very easy to write "to kinzogan mei ga aru" on papers, or to do den Yukimitsu at Tokubetsu Hozon so you can change that to Masamune and explain in detail at Juyo because it is still, outside of the Masamune attribution, a sword with Juyo features that can stand as such on its own. And if it doesn't, then no reason to do this outside of not knowing your material. I have had in my hands famous pieces from the Kyoho Meibutsucho, and Juyo and Tokuju, Juyo Bunkazai Masamune, and those with no papers and no reputation but still exhibiting enough attributes that I would say Masamune and try to pay a lot for them. I have been able to buy three legitimate ones in my life and I had opportunities to buy unpapered ones at high prices... in such cases I turned one down out of being gutless and saw it after this go all the way to Tokubetsu Juyo. I wish to say I could have handled a Kokuho one, but I have not, I have only had one Kokuho in my hands and it was not a Masamune. But many times with Juyo Bunkazai up to Sadamune and Masamune and so forth from daimyo families and Hideyoshi's personal item that went to Ieyasu and various shoguns beloved pieces. But, I have not encountered a drawer full of Tokubetsu Hozon Masamune that failed to impress me to date. If they are legitimately papered, the line starts after me please at $60k and I will take my chances with any particular foreigner not being impressed. Lastly the proof of NBTHK papers it to look up the serial numbers. Also, the proof of an old Honami Kochu paper can often be verified by looking at the records of collections from whence it came. The best proof though is the eyeball test. Knowing what you are looking at substantiates the paper more than the paper should be used to substantiate the thing you are looking at. If you are routinely looking at junk swords of the highest attribution possible without the capability of passing Juyo you are probably in some kind of strange, uncharted waters that are dangerous to be in.

Those were some pretty good answers. But then some kind of degenerated into the classic overthinking that can happen with kantei. Sucks when you were right or close then convince yourself that it's something else. Sometimes the gut feeling is the best one because it's being processed at a lower part of your brain, you feel that it looks like something and then you start going over too many checklists in your head and as mentioned, overthink. I never sold this sword, just worked on the photos. I had a chance to see it when Chris bought it from someone else. The Sadamune answers are very interesting to me because to me the hamon looks a lot like Takagi Sadamune. Also the Go and Tametsugu answers are interesting, because of the boshi... Go generally will not have an o-kissaki. So going to Tametsugu from there is not too bad. Less known is Tachibana Yoshizane ... another son/student of Go but nothing survived and so is a "really bad answer" for kantei. But when I look at a blade like this makes me think about a smith like that with lost work. Hata Nagayoshi, on the hada and nie is an interesting call but there are no mumei assigned to him, just 3 Norishige-like tanto with signatures. Esshu Kuniyuki makes this kind of standing out hada too. The Sa Sadayoshi call though if you look at the other Sadayoshi, is very good and relevant. There are a lot of O-kissaki blades with bright nie and vivid hada in the group of Samonji students and they are all very highly ranked. Here is another and you can see the similarities in hamon structure and blade shape. And if you have seen something like the following you can go right into the Sa group. I would have said Takagi Sadamune as my answer if I didn't know what it was already. But when you look at the other examples the rationale is very clear as to the attribution.

I have a client who's reported a sword he's bought from me gone missing. I don't know the facts yet of what happened, just what was told to me. I recommended to call the police and they have been notified and asked to investigate and are apparently looking into it. This is in Virginia. So to avoid any speculation at this point, I just wanted to make a sword missing report in case anyone encounters it. When there is something tangible to share or if it turns up I'll update this. It's the Tsunbo Nagatsuna https://yuhindo.com/tsunbo-nagatsuna-katana/ from my site. The papers are missing, the sword, an evaluation sheet, and one of the custom care kits.

I don't usually handle submissions, unless it's something special that I'm interested in seeing how it works out (i.e. you found a Kiyomaro) or it's something I sold and the owner is looking to upgrade. I do those for no charge. Otherwise I point people to Bob Benson or someone else specializing in it, as it's a lot of paperwork and have to constantly be touching base with the customer and with the handler in Japan... so usually someone doing agent work like that needs to do it in bulk in order to justify the time.