Katana for comment
 

I had bought this sword about 10 years ago when I was in Japan. I expressed interest in a katana and one of the guys I knew back then took me to an antique dealer and I ended up buy this(the only one I could offord and was nice). It does come with a piece of old paper that the dealer said was the certificate for it. He also said the sword was made by the second best swordsmith and an emperial swordsmith which I think he meant of the Mieji era. Other than that I know nothing about it, have never gotten around to taken it to be appraised or properly cleaned/sharpened. Still very sharp and well balanced, no I don't know how many body balde this is .
comments/info is welcomed

Any pics ?

internet is slow , took awhile to upload

No comments?? I did not know no one was into Katanas here...

WWII Seki smith Yoshiomi 武山 数雄

Rich stops by now and then ..

http://home.earthlink.net/~steinrl/nihonto.htm

I have several nihonto, but am functionally useless when it comes to translating kanji.

Koto on the other hand has translated the mei... the osujikai file marks through me a little, though my hands-on exposure is limited enough that it means relatively little when a feature on a nihonto catches my eye as "odd"...

Nice blade either way. I'm guessing the shirasaya is contemporary... or at least not original to the katana.

Kono thanks for the translation, Yoshiomi does sound familiar, I think that is what I was told the maker was.
The shirisaya is much newer than the sword, maybe at most 15 years old. Mybe next time I am home I'll take some pictures of the certificate and then we'll know more.
A quastion to anyone who'd know this. Does any one know of a person who'd be able to properly clean the resharpen this baby? In southern United States??

Are you willing to wait the better part of a year? Anyway, given the cost of polishing, I would suggest first researching the value of this smith's work to make sure it would be worth the investment of a professional polish... Here's one that sold in December, signed Yoshiomi and in koshirae:

http://militariawwii.com/ww2-japanes...-signed-beauty

This singular example could be a statistical outlier, but from my own (albeit limited) experience, for each nihonto I have owned that is worth the cost of a polish, I have owned at least one that was not.

FWIW, I have had success with Noxon 7. It is a polishing agent, but an individual known to me - who has bought and sold more nihonto than I will ever see - swears by the stuff as the only metal polish that he considers to be safe for nihonto. Gentle-to-moderate pressure* with a soft cloth... I've been able to remove a fair amount of oxidation similar to what appears on your example, and it will enhance the visibility of the hamon assuming there is one.

Either way, a nice gendaito... :)

Nice bit of info on here, about the Noxon 7, do you have pics with the results?

As luck would have it, I just happened to post a "before" pic of a Shinshinto katana here in the forum:

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=11616

I'll make it a point to take an "after" pic of the reverse over the week when time permits and post it. :)

I've been searching around the net, trying to find more information about the Seki smith Yoshiomi. All of the ones I have found resemble more to the pic in this post, and none to what I have. Plus all other Seki swords have the stamp which mine does not. Just wondering, what is the deal, could it be that there was another Yoshiomi, or someone else with a similar name who made this, or is it common that the same maker marks different swords differently?

I have three oshigata of Yoshiomi, all Seki smiths, but the signatures look somewhat different. Many Seki factories employed mei carvers, so a blade by a particular smith could have very different looking signatures depending on which mei carver signed it.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ttstein/index.htm

Rich S