Fujishiro papers/Origami

[Uechi]

See lots of swords being sold from Japan with Fujishiro certification papers. I would like to know if they have any import compared to current certification organizations like NBTHK etc. or are they just so much toilet paper?

 

 

JDromm

[nagamaki - Franco]

Signed sword, fine. Mumei, origami can be exact, it can be close (school), can be just an educated opinion. If owner/buyer cannot determine accuracy of origami given the information, what difference does it make. Buy the sword, not the paper.

[Brian]

FWIW, I think Fujishiro papers are highly regarded, and I would personally regard them as highly as most other origami.

 

Brian

[Jean]

http://www.nihonto.ca/ratings.html

[Uechi]

Signed sword, fine. Mumei, origami can be exact, it can be close (school), can be just an educated opinion. If owner/buyer cannot determine accuracy of origami given the information, what difference does it make. Buy the sword, not the paper.

 

 

Understand that shinsa is an educated guess however a sword with papers will almost always sell for more money then one without papers given equal quality. If you don't care about ever having to sell a sword for a better purchase disregarding papers is fine. No doubt you can find high quality swords for less money if they aren't papered. For an expert in Nihonto there may be little difference. I don't have that level of knowledge so relying on people that have spent years studying swords in Japan and elsewhere is a big plus.

[cabowen]

Usually papers from a group, especially one that does not have any commercial interest in the results, are valued over opinions of one person.

[nagamaki - Franco]

Especially for beginners every sword of interest, papered or not, should be treated as an open book test.

[Darcy]

Fujishiro papers are generally held in high regard and both Matsuo and Okisato are considered highly as judges.

 

Usually papers from a group, especially one that does not have any commercial interest in the results, are valued over opinions of one person.

 

Well there are some problems with what you say there. The first is that you are pointing out a real conflict of interest in terms of a judge accepting money for their judgment but it has a real and even more powerful counter-argument. That is that any judge who will write anything that you wish them to say ends up with an opinion that people will ignore... like Inami Hakusui, who wrote a paper on anything and everything, nobody holds it in any kind of regard though he knew swords very well. Some of the Honami as well have weak regard due to the flexible opinions they generated. So the market kind of takes care of any judge who is for hire for his opinion, and the conflict of interest thing cures itself. Your statement itself though also falls into the same kind of conflict of interest, since it can be seen as promoting your own group to the detriment of others.

 

So the simple "well they're commercially motivated" attack that comes up is not really valid. You can't walk up to Tanobe sensei and ask him to do a sayagaki on anything. If it's no good, he won't do it, fee or no fee. Corruption does exist and will always exist, but it doesn't follow that because someone is rendering a service for a fee or profit that it is automatically more valuable than that of someone who is taking no fee, or no profit. Rather someone can attack someone who gives out opinions for no charge at all, not as someone who comes with a complete lack of conflict of interest, but instead as someone with complete lack of accountability because they really have nothing personally quantifiable at stake in terms of guarding their reputation.

 

My own opinion is only that it doesn't logically follow that more experts makes for a better opinion. Everyone knows for instance what the results of "design by committee" can result in. That is that the weaker elements of a group weigh down the stronger elements by having to compromise with the weaker experts and thereby diluting the results through collaboration.

 

You have two basic issues with the concept of "more experts is better":

 

1. seniority model: if everyone in the group is under pressure to accept the decisions of senior members, then the presence of additional experts is meaningless as they just confirm the opinion of those higher up the chain and so on to the chairman, with whom nobody will disagree

 

2. consensus model: as above, if you have weak members in this group, consensus then will give you a worse result with more experts than with less as the compromise becomes ever more generic and as a result less significant in its result.

 

More experts only makes a better opinion if the experts are specialized, and each individual expert has holes in his knowledge that the others can fill.

 

In the case though of an extremely illuminated individual, it is very hard to improve this person's opinion by adding experts "off the shelf" as it were. If you are a limited expert joining an illuminated expert to form a group of two, all you can do with such an illuminated expert is to fall into one of the two patterns above: defer to his opinion, in which case you are not improving anything by extending the group past one, or else watering down his judgment with your lack of expertise by forcing him to compromise with you.

 

The opinions of the elder Yoshikawa, Tanobe Michihiro, Honma Junji, Sato Kanzan, Honami Nisshu, Honami Kozon, the three Fujishiro, these to me hold a lot of weight and they do with a lot of people. I would rather for instance have Honma sensei's or Tanobe sensei's opinion than the current NBTHK (independent of Tanobe sensei), or either NTHK and I'm also not alone in that thought. Old Honami papers / kinzogan from the top masters are almost uniformly deferred to by the current committees as well.

 

Now, even if we were to take all of these highly regarded individuals and put them into a group and make them come to a consensus judgment on a sword, we would be running into the same problems as above.

 

In which case, I think for me anyway, it becomes preferable to take their opinions as individuals, and let them disagree where they will disagree and then make an informed opinion of my own by weighing out their arguments and opinions and then accepting either that it is going to be a grey area between them or leaning one way or another. That's generally the approach I take, and I do for sure appreciate then the judgements of highly regarded individuals vs. a committee.

 

I think when someone has no experience at all, they will feel much more secure with a committee judgment vs. an individual because they feel that there is an all or none risk with the individual, and that the committee will through numbers overrule the weak or incorrect judgments that are the outliers in their midst.

 

But that only works if you don't know if the expert you're consulting can be trusted and getting to that point of trust means accumulating some degree of expertese on your own.

 

So what *that* ultimately means is that when you have no ability to judge at all, even though the committee will in general give an equal or less valuable opinion than an illuminated judge, due to your own inability to judge among judges, you may be more secure with the committee judgment. And again, it comes down then to expertise, this time of the person who is seeking the opinion, rather than numbers.

 

Just my opinion on it without seeking out an argument.

[cabowen]

That all makes good sense in theory....but in practice, things are a bit different...

 

Clearly the field is much too broad for a single individual to be an expert on every facet- just ask Fujishiro Okisato san or Tanobe sensei if they are more knowledgeable in certain areas as compared to others. They have their strengths and weaknesses.

 

This is what good shinsa teams do- they assemble a team of experts so that the net result is additive. With one person, there is no feedback for correction; every individual has their blind spots; every individual has their biases. A team can bring to bear 5 or 6 times the experience of a single individual.

 

I don't know how many shinsa teams you have observed first hand and/or have intimate knowledge of their inner workings, but I know from participating first hand in 4 US shinsa and attending innumerable monthly shinsa in Japan (NTHK-NPO) that your academic characterizations of group theory as they apply to good shinsa teams are patently false. Watching a good shinsa team in action is very informative. When there is disagreement, generally each person argues their case, the decision is made in a logical, reasoned manner simply not possible with one person. 5 or 6 heads are really better than one in this case.

 

Of course this is not to say that I would value the opinion of a team over that of an individual who has specialized in a particular area when it comes to evaluating something specific. And certainly there have been shinsa teams in the past that were run as a rubber stamp for the lead judge but this is not how teams I am familiar with are run today.

 

Nearly all collectors in Japan that I know put little weight on any of the single individual papers whether or not there is any potential commercial conflict present. Since groups and group decision making are a critical and valued part of Japanese culture, this should be no surprise.