The only problem I had with the original photo -- after rotating the image -- was trying to read through the rust covering the first kanji ... but I could discern the イ "radical" and the 中 and 国 kanji ... so it was just a matter of seeing which old province names had the イ radical, and amongst those, which had 中 "chu" as the second part of the name, then see if the "shape" of that kanji matched yours. The rest was just some detective work.
Hope someone can confirm which of the Tameie [say: tahmay- eeyay] smiths likely produced your wakizashi.
Cheers!
--Guy
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