Morikage

[Prewar70]

This sword is so perfect to my eyes. I would think it's been submitted to Juyo and perhaps has not passed being in Japan. It's dimensions are ideal to me, wide, and beautiful texture, hamon, color and nakago. Curious what others think.

 

https://www.toukenkomachi.com/index_en_tachi&katana_A060719.html

[Peter Bleed]

 I can't see this blade making juyo in this day and age. but it is a nice sword.

In the words of the frontier bard, "Goin' out on the Buffalo range depends upon the pay."

Can you afford it?

Peter

[Gakusee]

Balanced view.

 

Positive:

- very good sword by one of the top masters of the Omiya school,who has many Juyo swords and even JuBi and JuBu

- typical Nanbokucho kissaki and wide and masculine

- very good sunagashi and kinsuji

- top togishi polished it

- comes with TH koshirae which is not overly flashy, not easy for koshirae to get TH

 

Negative;

- a bit short (the Juyo Morikage tend to be over 68cm or zaimei if shorter)- this was shortened by 12-20cm

- “only” Omiya: the school is considered second tier (but they attributed it to a top master in that school, so thought highly enough of it)

- already priced as a Juyo sword. You could buy some decent Juyo for less than that

 

For the advanced student:

- the TH blade paper is recent. This could be a positive in that it might not have been tried many times for Juyo

- but could also mean the blade went out of and came back in the country and was papered from scratch to obtain a different judgement, eg some more highly rated Soden smith or something

- to evaluate that one needs to look at the torokusho number

- Omiya is a safe bet here - it is a very good blade but probably just not at that level to be a Chogi or Kencho or whatever.

 

I also like it but doubt it will go Juyo (could be marginal due to suriage) and would negotiate hard to get a better deal on the price.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Great summary, Michael. 

[Curran]

  On 2/29/2020 at 9:23 PM, Gakusee said:

- “only” Omiya: the school is considered second tier (but they attributed it to a top master in that school, so thought highly enough of it

 

Good write up by Michael.

 

I own two swords:  one is an elegant Omiya Morokage.

For a 'second tier' school, I enjoy Omiya very much.

 

[lonely panet]

That koshirae is wonderful

[Alex A]

I dont see anything outstanding about this blade, only the name.

 

Nothing in this blade you could not find in a blade a quarter the price or less.

 

Horses for courses.

[Gakusee]

Hi Alex - your statement is somewhat harsh....I am not of the mind to defend the blade or it’s price at all but just discuss some basic principles.

 

For an attribution of that name to be given to a mumei blade, that simply means that the quality is sufficiently high and the features sufficiently distinctive as to confer the given judgement.

 

Otherwise, they could have said mumei Omiya is something along the lines.

 

As DB likes to say (I am shamelessly plagiarising here): attribution is the first testament to quality.

 

So if this were an outstanding blade (with more uniform nie, more lustrous hada, richer yakiba etc) it could have been attributed to Kanemitsu, for example. So, it is not outstanding and it has not been attributed to Kanemitsu, Chogi, Kencho etc.

 

You are also forgetting that this comes in a package. Packaged blades+koshirae are/should be more expensive than just blades, especially if the koshirae has value and is papered.

[Jussi Ekholm]

I noticed the sword immidiately after it was posted online as it ticks several boxes for me (even though it is way out of my range). I think Michael gave an excellent analysis on it above.

 

My personal thing with this is the wide shape that the sword has. Yes it is short at 66,9 cm but that is quite common (shortish length) for really wide swords. It is rare to find Nanbokuchō swords with 3,3 cm+ motohaba. As the stats show the sword width going from 3,4 to 2,7 cm. For a person like me something like few mm in motohaba width are extremely important (even though it most likely is foolish). So far I have tracked down 43 mumei katana with attribution to Ōmiya Morikage and this one seems to be the second widest in general form. There is even more impressive one Jūyō 16 that is 71,0 cm and goes from 3,4 to 3,0 cm. And like Michael said above there is a huge gap between Morikage attribution and Ōmiya attribution in general.

 

I am not totally understanding the koshirae. Given I am not a koshirae collector it has me really puzzled. As you can see the omote side of it is not like in regular koshirae that you carry edge downwards. Yet it does have a full set of ashi and it seems like regular tachi koshirae. I've seen some handachi koshirae that have various type of ashi. It might sound crazy but something as minor as starting side of tsukamaki is bugging me a lot...

[Alex A]

  On 3/3/2020 at 1:56 PM, Gakusee said:

So if this were an outstanding blade (with more uniform nie, more lustrous hada, richer yakiba etc) 

 

 

Hi Michael, was not my intention to sound harsh. You kind of some up my thoughts in the above sentence, hence my point.

 

The blade has a nice shape, though let down for me by other points, hamon etc

 

I was only referring to the blade, the koshirae is ok.

 

 

 

 

 

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