A Kanji Discussion. Boys Day Sword. (Tomo ?) Nari.

[kusunokimasahige]

Last weekend I visited my old professor in the Japanese language who also is very interested in Nihonto and history and we had a discussion about the first character on the nakago of my boys day sword I posted images of in an earlier topic.

He told me that as far as he could tell the first character cannot be read Tomo because of the, in his idea radical 32 use.

He sees this one in it :

支

And not this one

友

 

I tend to agree with him. We had a lot of Kanji dictionaries out as well as name books and kun-on yomi readings but failed to come up with any viable nameand even checked pre-reform kanji dictionaries.
So the combination then would become 支成 Which struck us as very odd.
http://jisho.org/search/%22%E6%94%AF%22%20%23names

What do you guys think ?

 

 

[Markus]

It is actually the character for (友). Just an older way of writing it that resembles the character (支). See below mei of Ko-Bizen Tomonari (to whom I think this mei alludes to).

 

 

[kusunokimasahige]

Awesome !! Thank you so much Markus !!!