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Quote:

Originally Posted by Excessum (Post 688268)

You think this is nice? It was cut out by a friggin machine!

Feast your eyes at this baby:

Or take a look at ギャラリーサムライへ

Or just punch in "Tsuba" in google image search... you will be amazed =)

WOW!!!:D
i think i might die if i look at the others.>_<
or go blind.
my mom wont buy me a sword.>.>
she thinks i would kill someone.:D *she might be right*

The Address is 北海道小樽市花園町東4丁目二番地 for a person named 星靖.
4-2 Higashi Hanazono-Cho Otaru-City Hokkaido
Yasudhi Hosi

This address is no longer available. Here is the nearest address.

http://maps.google.co.jp/maps?f=q&so...,0.026393&z=15

It is a name and Hokkaido address. (There is an extra character in there for "tea" which I removed.)

北海道小樽市花園町四丁目二番地　　星　清

Kiyoshi Hoshi is the name.

Thanks RadioKid, I wonder if we can see it on google street view? :p

靖 is Yasushi
清 is Kiyoshi

It's not a shin-gunto, or anything of the like (I've owned several). The only thing resembling a WW2 Shin-gunto sword is the handguard, and the lanyard ring at the end of the hilt. Shin-gunto swords never came with wooden scabbards.

In the first picture the temper line is obvious, and I can make out that the steel is laminated. Shin-gunto swords were not laminated, nor were they tempered, the blades were stamped out of the same material as railroad rails.

Next, I doubt anyone would to go the trouble of attaching an address tag to a WW2 Army-issue sword. A typical Japanese kitchen knife would be more valuable.

Here are a few easy ways to spot a shin-gunto sword. First is the materials. Shin-gunto swords come with steel scabbards (painted green), with the end stamped flat. The hilt will be made of cast aluminum (usually, some were made of copper, and a handful were made of patterned wood), with an embossed pattern resembling traditional cord wrapping, and there will be locking catch which must be pressed before the blade can be drawn. Most Shin-gunto swords will have an armorer's mark on the blade just above the brass collar, and usually the blade will have a blood groove which travels it's full length.

The blade is the important part, the fittings have relatively little value. During the war some soldiers had fair-to-good quality blades mounted in Shin-gunto type fittings, which, though cheap and unattractive, did a very good job of protecting the blade inside.

You should remove the hilt and see what the tang looks like underneath. Removing the hilt is easy. Make sure first that you have the sword in it's scabbard, then drive out the peg in the hilt. Hold the sword by the hilt tightly with one hand, the scabbard pointed straight up. With your free hand, strike your other hand (the one gripping the hilt tightly) with a downward motion. This should free up the hilt, and allow you to remove it from the tang. Most blades will have a signature or other mark engraved on the tang.

Do not remove the hilt without first putting the blade in it's scabbard, and make sure the edge is facing away from you.

Provided that the rust isn't more than a discoloration, that there are no chips on the edge, and that no one has tried sharpening the blade, it could be of decent value.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sangetsu (Post 688309)

Tsk, tsk, tsk... i think you are fogetting the fact that there were several models of shin gunto made. What you described here is the regular type 94. While the late type 95 and most of the type 98 swords would come with a wooden scabbard and brass, or steel ornamentation. I have also had my arms on a (ok, i've never owned one, I have to admit) couple of shin guntos's. One of them was a Type 95 and you can immediately tell the difference between those two. Type 95, unlike the 94, features a blood groove and stenciled text/numbers on the blade, tsuka, tsuba and habaki are made out of copper, the kissaki is at a different angle and other minor differences and they were issued to the officers in army reserves (unlike type 94, that were given to officers that were in active service).
Type 98, were a over-simplified version of the 94. They introduced a wooden scabbard and on the later models tsuka was also made from wood, however, saya still sports metallic kojiri and koiguchi, as well as a metallic base of the mounting space. The fact that the blade is oiled, does not mean it was oiled straight out of the factory (though I am unaware about the protection for the blades they applied for these swords, if any).
Well, the bottom line is that it could, theoretically, be a kai gunto... I don't know much about them though and I really don't see any other alternatives... The pre-WW2 army swords did not look like a katana and were made with much more detail... so unless it is some bizzare custom-made sword, I am sticking with the opinion that it's a Type 98 shin gunto.

The blade on the OP's has a strong tooran temper mark along it's entire length. Shin-gunto swords came with no such temper mark (as they weren't tempered in water, but oil), or they had a false sugu temper mark which was applied with a hard buffer

When I say "lamination", I don't mean "oiled". Laminated steel is that which is made by folding the steel many times during the forging process. Once completed, the metal has a faint wood-grain finish (called "hada" in Japanese).

I don't care much about the fittings, because they say much less than what the blade itself says. Old swords have often had their fittings changed many times over the years for fashion's sake, or for the sake of practicality.

And, as I said before, there is an address tag attached to the sword. These tages were attached to swords when they were stored for safe keeping. No one would bother to put such a tag on a shin-gunto sword.