SURIAGE (perhaps missing the best part...)

[saipan59]

The reading of this seems to be IZUMO NO KUNI JUu CHUuSON KINZAEMON [?] .

But those keywords are not leading me to anything.

The last kanji is unknown to us (and perhaps not complete because of the SURIAGE).

Thanks for any help!

 

Pete

 

[PNSSHOGUN]

https://nihontoclub....ns&mei=Izumo+no+kami

 

[saipan59]

10 minutes ago, PNSSHOGUN said:

https://nihontoclub....ns&mei=Izumo+no+kami

 

Thanks - that's a good suggestion. But *assuming* that the last visible kanji is the first half of the name, my wife doesn't think that anything matches. I suggested that it might be a 'fancy form' of ARI (i.e. ARIMITSU), but she thinks probably not... 

She also has doubts about the middle part of KINZAEMON - it's not quite clear enough.

 

Pete

[PNSSHOGUN]

You could widen it to Izumo, the best way to narrow it down is looking at the blade to determine era, and school.

[Jussi Ekholm]

I might be way above my head here but I do think it is interesting signature.

 

I wanted to get home first before trying to tackle it as I have all my available references in here. However unfortunately I cannot find a clue towards this smith. I would see the signature potentially as

 

出雲国住中村金左衛門X - Izumo no kuni jū Nakamura Kinzaemon X (X could be potentially be a form of Kuni?) In this I would think Nakamura Kinzaemon would be the personal name of the smith. However unfortunately I cannot find such smith anywhere and Kinzaemon seems to be extremely rare in swordsmith names, and for family names Nakamura seems to be pretty much family lineage in Satsuma province. However there are few later Izumo smiths who seem to have signatures in style Izumo (place name) jū (personal name).

[saipan59]

1 hour ago, Jussi Ekholm said:

I might be way above my head here but I do think it is interesting signature.

 

I wanted to get home first before trying to tackle it as I have all my available references in here. However unfortunately I cannot find a clue towards this smith. I would see the signature potentially as

 

出雲国住中村金左衛門X - Izumo no kuni jū Nakamura Kinzaemon X (X could be potentially be a form of Kuni?) In this I would think Nakamura Kinzaemon would be the personal name of the smith. However unfortunately I cannot find such smith anywhere and Kinzaemon seems to be extremely rare in swordsmith names, and for family names Nakamura seems to be pretty much family lineage in Satsuma province. However there are few later Izumo smiths who seem to have signatures in style Izumo (place name) jū (personal name).

Hi Jussi,

Thanks for your comments! I agree with everything you said. I have not been an active collector for some years, and I no longer have my reference books, so I rely on Google... My wife (native Japanese, with a family background in literature and art) feels that 'X' is probably not KUNI. The bottom of that kanji may be missing, which would help clarify it. She read NAKAMURA as the more archaic CHUuSON, but perhaps in the Nihonto world NAKAMURA is more likely. As you know the actual reading of names and such is sometimes not certain, because it would require asking the person from that time. For example, I still have a blade by an obscure smith, GEN32 in Hawley's book, which Hawley read as GENJOu (an ONYOMI style of reading), but it could actually be HIROKIYO, or something else. Nobody can say for sure. I have chosen to call it HIROKIYO.

 

About 30+ years ago, I am proud to say that I was the author of the "ToShoW" smith database program, which was well-known to the experienced Western collectors at that time, when there were no "online resources" and most of the reference books were in Japanese. ToShoW allowed doing searches for arbitrary strings such as "Izumo no kami" or "kinzaemon" -- that was a very valuable feature at that time, since every book was only indexed by the 'art name'. But if you couldn't read the art name, then you were stuck... The early version of Stan's Nihontoclub.com swordsmith database was based on my ToShoW data, but of course now it has gone far beyond.

 

Pete

[SteveM]

Hello Pete, 

My first guess was 尉, as in 金左衛門尉 (Kinzaemon-no-jō), which would have been a very common naming convention/construction in late Muromachi-Edo times. Some of the vertical strokes on the inside of that final kanji are poking through the horizontal strokes, which shouldn't happen normally with 尉, but there are variants of 尉 which have idiosyncratic constructions, so some deviance should be tolerated. My gut feeling is that the deviance is probably too great in this case, but I throw it out there as a very far possibility

(I do think its Nakamura, by the way, and not Chūson. "Nakamura" has been used for a very long time in Japan).

 

At any rate, it looks like your smith is one who slipped through the cracks. Otherwise, the mei, even the partial one, would show up in a search. And, as a partial mei, the one you have is quite substantial, and should be sufficient to pinpoint who this is. Since nothing is turning up, it leads me to believe he is unrecorded, or the mei is a fake one intended to give the appearance of authenticity.

 

 

[Nobody]

I am not sure but there might be other reading.

出雲國住中村余左衛門X

 

金左衛門 might be 余左衛門 (Yozaemon).

And actually, I see 間 or 聞 instead of 門 in the mei. That is strange.

 

I also think that 中村 should be read as Nakamura.

[saipan59]

Thank You everyone for your insights and helpful comments!

 

Pete