Kiyomaro

[mywei]

I'm sure some of you folks have seen the Kiyomaro daito that has just come up on Aoi.

 

Anyone got a spare $300k handy?

 

[Wim V]

Yep, seen it also.  I believe it has already been listed at the Aoi website in February 2016.  At that time the sword was discussed here:

http://www.militaria.co.za/nmb/topic/18817-kiyomaro-value/?hl=kiyomaro 

 

Wim

[Darcy]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

[Curran]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

Juyo shinsa a _bit_ harder than it usta be.

Or NBTHK passed it as something else less favorable?

[Katsujinken]

Last year's thread is very interesting – thanks for sharing!

 

So the question becomes: what's this doing back on the market so soon? And why is it still TH?

[Vermithrax16]

Wow, just wow on a lot of levels.

[tom]

Hi all,

first, i have see a few Kiyomaro Blades, and this is a normal Standart of Kiyomaro. There are a few better Blades from Kiyomaro on sale now in Japan, with more as the double Price.

So last year he has ask 27 Million yen, and now 29.5 Million yen, for the same Blade. Thats always a good and cheap Price for that what it is on quallity for a Kiyomaro Katana.

 

Darcy says the rest, and thats correct.

 

Tom

[mywei]

Juyo shinsa a _bit_ harder than it usta be.

Or NBTHK passed it as something else less favorable?

 

I guess it goes to show how difficult it is for a shinshinto to pass Juyo. Or would this blade more likely to have passed Juyo in the past?

[tom]

I forget, it gets better quallity Blades for less Money from Chikuzen no kami Kurihara Nobuhide.

 

Tom

[Darcy]

[Darcy]

[Gakusee]

It is a nice enough, long and signed sword by a smith shrouded in some mystery. I understand the rarity as well, given his short life. Notwithstanding all of the above, I do not think it is worth several Heian and Kamakura masterpieces taken together - which are both rarer and better. Nevertheless I am following this topic with bated curiosity as speculating about why it did not go Juyo, or why it is being flipped so quickly is interesting.

[Darcy]

about why it did not go Juyo, or why it is being flipped so quickly is interesting

 

No speculation is required.

 

Once upon a time someone who had more wisdom than you when you were young probably told you a saying about things that seemed too good to be true and what your expectations should be. This folk wisdom is actually an interpretation of Occam's Razor.

 

The other way of getting to the right answer is like looking at a murder scene and then deducing what must have happened from the blood splatters. All the evidence is there if you look at the listing and look at NMB's records.

 

The third way of getting to the right answer is through study. 

 

In historian's work, there are single source accounts of events which are then repeated by other sources. When this happens they are considered as possible but not 100% reliable. When you however have multiple independent sources reporting the same thing, they confirm each other and you can consider it to be historical fact. 

 

Similarly when several independent logical methods point at the same set of possibilities, the answer is most likely in their overlapping conclusions.

[Red Sun]

So......................................

 

Gimei  (?)(!)

[Red Sun]

Or more accurately made by Kiyondo?

 

However so much on this forum go's over my head I am probably wide of the mark   

[Katsujinken]

Dai saku seems reasonable, especially given what we know about the aftermath of Kiyomaro's suicide, but does that explain why it's not Juyo? And is dai saku not something the NBTHK would note in the lower papers? What are the 'customs' surrounding dai saku at NBTHK?

 

:-/

[Gakusee]

Well, now that Darcy has put them side by side - there are some very slight differences, yet they are there. For example almost all of the genuine signatures are perfectly vertical and split by the nakago shinogi line (some radicals to the left and some to the right of the nakago shinogi) - yet Tsuruta san's does not fit perfectly like the others. Also the yasurime lines are ever so slightly steeper. I am not good at kanji to detect some subtle radical /kanji handwriting differences but probably there might be some - e.g., the bottom kanji seems too spaced out versus the denser Juyo examples. Also, given the TH certificate date of 2008, then indeed if it were to go Juyo in the last nine years, it probably would have. The problem is that sometimes we see certificates, see a reputable dealer and decide to leave our reason or logic behind and rely on these externalities. Yet- we should always be alert and sceptical until thoroughly convinced it is what it claims on the tin.

The adage about too good to be true would not have alerted me this time as I said from the outset - even if it were zaimei, in my view it would be way overpriced and not worth that much. Let alone if the blade is gimei.

[Darcy]

https://www.aoijapan.com/img/sword/2017/17115paper-2.jpg

 

嘉永七年＿（晩年作）

 

BTW, note that the example with kiritsuke mei is:

 

1. the only one with kiritsuke mei

2. the only one that breaks the splitting-the-shinogi habit and is Juyo ... and is still more on the shinogi in the last character than the example

 

So it is a double oddball itself. Please note the year on it, and please note the year cited in the older paper on this Kiyomaro and then find out why that year is important.

 

Also note that higher papers means higher scrutiny and higher threshold for "reasonable doubt."

 

So tell me what that oddball is, and what this is.

[Vermithrax16]

Fascinating thread!

[Darcy]

Kaei 7 is 1854, the year Kiyomaro committed suicide (in November). Sho-gatsu is the first month and is on the blade accepted at Juyo. So you have an 9 month gap showing no work leading up to his death. There are two dated like this and I can't find anything dated after this. If someone has an example dated later in this year it would be nice to see it. I don't have the Kiyomaro Taikan and something may be in it.

 

This example that I singled out is the closest one to the candidate blade. 

 

The older papers on the Tokubetsu Hozon blade go at length to state that it is made in Kaei 7 though it is not dated, and then furthermore add that it is a "nightfall year blade", blade made at the end of one's life.

 

The story of Kiyomaro dying with open orders that he didn't fill, point to him being not productive in the end and we know Kiyondo labored after his death to finish the orders. How much did Kiyondo take on his shoulders leading up to Kiyomaro's death?

 

The presence of that mumei Kiyomaro that came out of this same dealer seems to indicate to me that there were other blades with weak signatures or no signatures at all that came out of the shop. Cary Condell had a fantastic but mumei blade attributed to Kiyondo. Kiyondo's best is better than Kiyomaro's weakest. 

 

There are a few different scenarios but when they overlap with the other practical analysis I think a conclusion is inevitable.

 

For the record I think the body of the work in the blade is indisputably Kiyomaro and this is why it got to the level it did. If there are questions about such a piece there are two easy ways of resolving them: get a sayagaki or paper it to Juyo. 

[Keiji]

I agree with Darcy and Michael.

 

I saw this sword the last year in the shop, yes it is a beautiful sword, but for the my "young eyes", it's not incredible (compared for this price..). 

If I remember correctly it have some little ware (maybe you can see in the photos).

[Darcy]

 

If I remember correctly it have some little ware (maybe you can see in the photos).

 

Every now and then I get a client who complains that his Kamakura sword has a kitae ware on it. It is always a distressing thing because factory made iPhones and robot made cars have adjusted people's expectations for what "things" should be like.

 

So I usually take some time in Japan to blow off steam at the expectation that an 800 year old tool which was used to murder people and smash against armor and got rusty a half dozen times and rubbed down for months on rocks to remove the rust and chips, sadly, shows a kitae ware now.

 

By all rights these things should only be piles of iron oxide.

 

They are hand made. If you get a flawless one you won the lottery. It was probably never or rarely used and carefully babied. 

 

The last time I blew off steam on it, a high level Japanese dealer said, "A kitae ware? That's how you know it's nihonto."

[Stephen]

Few yen less this would be mine if i was a player 

 

https://www.aoijapan.com/katana-bizen-osafune-ju-yokoyama-sukekane

[Vermithrax16]

Few yen less this would be mine if i was a player 

 

https://www.aoijapan.com/katana-bizen-osafune-ju-yokoyama-sukekane

That's amazing!

[Toryu2020]

Well now my interest is piqued,

 

Does anyone know of a Daimei or Daisaku work signed Kiyomaro, but attributed to Kiyondo? I was unaware the he did anything like that.

 

and now that I have poured over many oshigata, the thing that strikes me is the shape of the Jiri - Kiyomaro seems to have been very consistant in his later years and this one does not seem to fit. Appears rather more pointed to my eye but perhaps now I'm staring too hard...

-t

[Vermithrax16]

I tried to hit this point in my post about how many swords made it to recent era; we just don't know. Did a smith always do everything the same way? Did he have students that made great works that he allowed signed? We can only judge by what's here, like a fossil record, but that is a small % of what was.

[Brian]

Few yen less this would be mine if i was a player 

 

https://www.aoijapan.com/katana-bizen-osafune-ju-yokoyama-sukekane

Is it just me that finds it sad that the koshirae had Tokubetsu Kicho papers and still someone thought it better to substitute the tsuba and sell the kozuka/kogana separately, thereby completely invalidating the papers?

I understand people split up koshirae to make money or whatever...but when they have papers???!

 

[Keiji]

I understand Darcy, but this is not from Kamakura jidai.

 

If i buy a very expensive blade from shinshinto period i'd expect a sword in perfect conditions.

[Guido]

Is it just me that finds it sad that the koshirae had Tokubetsu Kicho papers and still someone thought it better to substitute the tsuba and sell the kozuka/kogana separately, thereby completely invalidating the papers?

 

I did. Twice.

 

First of all, tokubetsu kichō is almost like having no papers at all – it has been discussed here many times. But anyway, I’m talking about a a katana, and b a daishō that had tsuba which were obviously not original to the koshirae. In both cases the motif didn’t match the other fittings (which in itself isn’t that unusual), and the nakago-ana were way too big for the nakago – the tsuba kind of rattled around – and the seppadai of the katana tsuba wasn’t even covered by the (original) seppa. However, since the overall quality was very good, the koshirae still got papers. So, what I did was getting new tsuba that kind of restored the look and feel of how the koshirae were supposed to look originally (or at least close to it); I re-submitted, and the daishō got hozon (before: tokubetsu kichō), the katana even tokubetsu hozon papers (before: hozon).

 

Having said that, the koshirae in the link was sadly vandalized - the kōgai removed, and the current tsuba is obviously a cheap substitute. That makes me sad. Sometimes even mad, like in the case of a sword with koshirae I sold to a well-known dealer, and the next owner swapped the tsuba – which was part of an issaku-kanangu ensemble – for a non-descript one, and sold it to yet another dealer, who showed it to me a few years later. I almost cried. At least the blade went jūyō, for which I didn’t submit it because I urgently needed cash for another purchase. But such is life.

 

I guess what I want to say is “it depends”.

[Stephen]

 

 

I guess what I want to say is “it depends”.

Sir at my age   thats a dirty word!