This is a bit of an OP oopsie!
I got an odd little “something’s out of whack” mental tickle between @rannulfr’s description and the original image, and a bit of searching proved I was right.
The description is of the Munechika Mikazuki - but the pic isn’t.
What felt out of whack was calling it a katana. A sword as old as Mikazuki would be a tachi (katanas hadn’t been “invented” yet) and as such it would be displayed, as worn, with edge DOWN, like so:
Fully hilted and scabbarded tachi always have slings and cords to hang them from a belt; this one’s got an elaborate “court dress” hilt…
…while this one has a “standard” hilt; the scabbard slings are unmistakable.
A katana, as in the OP image and the picture below, is worn through a waist-sash with edge UP, and is always displayed that way. Its scabbard never has sling-mounts, just a pierced knob for the cords wrapped around its scabbard.
Those cords are to secure it to the wearer’s sash, as in the left hand image below. Often they weren’t tied, to make it easier to remove the sword and carry it, or surrender it in situations where keeping a sword to hand wasn’t permitted. (IIRC, the wakizashi shortsword was never surrendered.)
This page uses the correct photos, but wrongly calls Mikazuki a katana; maybe the (Western?) writer didn’t know there was a difference and defaulted to a reader-familiar word.
This page is the Museum’s own, properly calls it a tachi, and (interesting, this) says that the sword was owned by Hideyoshi’s first wife, not the man himself. She was born an aristocrat, he was born a peasant.
For reference, the rule is simple and AFAIK without exceptions: a sword with sling fittings on its scabbard, or a bare blade displayed edge down, is a TACHI; a sword with no sling fittings, or a bare blade displayed edge up, is a KATANA; any internet image which shows one and says the other is wrong.
There’s another slight oddity about Mikazuki. Bare blades are displayed so that any inscription on the tang faces the viewer (away from the wearer) which means they’re almost always shown point-left, but Mikazuki is displayed point-left yet its inscription still faces the viewer and is (just) visible.
I’m guessing it was made before the custom or rule for inscription placement was adopted, or it was made for a left-handed user… :->
Incidentally, Mikazuki looks far better than “the day it was made” (read this article) because on that day the whole blade would have looked as rough as its tang still does.
Here’s another tachi tang:
And here’s the whole thing.
That’s why sword-polishers are so important.
Until Mikazuki became a don’t-use-just-own heirloom, it would have gone back to a polisher several times for maintenance and refurbishment. The polisher’s work might even have involved repair. Armour, helmet, another sword or even a bone can chip a blade’s edge and that needs great skill to put right.
You can just see how the darker metal of the hardened edge is fractionally smaller in the lower photo, where damage has been ground, sorry, polished away prior to restoring the point profile. Mr Hofhine’s final polish to reveal the edge patterning is also considerably better than the original.
Sword-polishers are very important indeed.
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