So- yet another poor and neglected blade that got in my hands and yet another story. This time an Edo period o-tanto. Nothing very special, nothing of importance. Most of those “junk blades” come without any signature. Most of them get to me in totally atrocious shape- rusted, with marks of beating and such. As a rule of thumb before I know the blade (can identify at least basics like school and time) I am not even touching heavy stones, as they can drastically change blade appearance, to the point of destroying it (well- not much to destroy in most of those cases but you got the idea). First thing is cleaning up accumulated dirt, active rust. Usually mechanically, with steel wool/ piece of bone and fine stones (synthetic ones at that stage- using natural ones for that purpose would’ve been a terrible waste). Results are as above- a blade that is cleaned enough to be recognizable AND- what is more important- to be in state, in which further corrosion would not damage it. I do not really consider that stage polishing- it is more like CPR. Now- the very first rule of handling japanese swords is: under normal circumstances one should never ever clean rust from nakago. I will not get into all aesthetic and cultural reasoning behind it (interesting as they are) to not annoy you with my jibber-jabber, it is enough that fact is mentioned. The only acceptable exemption from this rule is when there is a layer of loose rust that untouched can lead to serious damage- and even then it is usually being removed by gentle rubbing with bone (preferably ivory, but dog’ tooth is also acceptable). To make long story short- as you can see on first photo this one certainly needed some of that. Now- after removing first flakes I noticed that something is just... different than usually. See- most of those nakagos have file marks (that help with identification- their angle and shape mean a lot). Here, I started to see gold...ish shine showing up from under the brown rust. Apparently, the blade was not a junk after all- it had not only maker’ signature, but also one that was encrusted with (most likely) copper. Of course, it is still not one of lost blades of Muramasa but- hey, a nice surprise for this ol’ junk gatherer.
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