Tag Translation Help

[Geoff Ward]

I have had this tag which came with a Japanese dirk I got from a good friend.I was hoping to get some help with the translation.I believe it is the registration for a Traditionally forged blade. But would love to know a little more about the content.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards Geoff

[ghp95134]

It's a registration for sword or gun; stamped for Ibaraki Prefecture and card #4-071. The weapon is classified as a "tanken" dagger. Length is 6 sun, 9.5 bu [8.29135 in. / 21.060029 cm]; has 1 mekugi-ana; mumei/ un-signed. Registered Showa 26, October 19 [1951].

In Japan, all swords and daggers must undergo an inspection, usually held at a local school on Saturday (in my case). Those that do not pass will not receive a registration card and will be confiscated (if you are a resident in Japan), or returned to you at the airport when you depart.

--Guy

[Geoff Ward]

Thank you Guy!! Your talents are Greatly Appreciated!! Although Nick was kind enough to provide me with the Japanese archives for help Identifying this particular pattern of dagger,My Western mind just could not wade through all the information.. but it has provided me with many unusual and interesting items to ponder.I had no idea there were so many variations of Japanese Dirks! I wonder if the European influences had a part in this (Especially the Germans) who had a vast array of edged weapons for almost every branch of the military as well as Civil organizations?

[Geoff Ward]

A few pics of the Dirk I have referenced.

[Nick Komiya]

Researching things like this is the same as police work in the old days, having to go through thousands of mug shots. It's pure muscle work, a no-brainer.

At that level of research you need, it makes no difference whether you read Japanese or not, because it is just opening every file one after another hour after hour, day after day, and running through all the pictures you come across and cataloging them. If you do not have the patience to do that, no one else will do it for you free. And if you pay for such service, the cost will be more than what you paid for the dagger. Unfortunately that's where you are.

And that is also the only way one can write a reliable book about Japanese daggers. I imagine that those books collectors refer to as their holy bibles were written without doing this tedious legwork. You would have found your dagger in such a book, if the book had been done correctly. How much can you trust a book that skipped this most basic phase of research? I have absolutely no faith in such picture books written by people, who do not have the researcher's discipline in them.

In the militaria world, buying and reading as many books as possible before you buy artifacts is considered the high road. But people do not seem to realize that this "gullible" mentality has become an ideal breeding ground for another form of fraud, that of selling accumulated hearsay and speculation as fact. Everyone can become an author these days and people now shell out hundreds of dollars for thick reference books padded up with color photos that come with partly fake information. I will be blunt, those authors are no different from dealers selling fakes.

Actually the book market is a very comfortable place for fraudsters, because you normally don't get to return books for a refund, when you find it to be trash.

That is why I write and give all this work out for free, to show you a minimum standard of research discipline authors should have in demanding recompense for their work. Who would want to pay for anything less than what I provide for free?

If you are also a seasoned collector of German militaria, just think of how much money you wasted on Bender and other titles of the 70s and 80s that have now become laughably poor in content. It's not that the books had become outdated, the truth is that they were never even up to par with the 1945 level of information, long available in the archives.

The only ones worth having now are the ones based on factual research in the archives, drawing directly from source documents like the Heeresverordnungsblatt, Heeresmitteilungen, etc. In the German arena, the game level only started to rise since my friend Ludwig Baer wrote "die Geschichte des Deutschen Stahlhelms", but it still took a long time for that spirit to take root, producing endless crappy books defrauding us of our money in between. I actually started the "evolution" series with helmets in honor of Ludwig's accomplishments.

There was no need for books to evolve this slowly once access was possible to declassified archive documents. It just took so long because we let all those clowns entertain us until qualified people finally got on stage.

By writing the best that can be written now, I'm just trying to say, let's learn from what we went through with German militaria and cut out the years of being apes, and tap into the "monolith of knowledge" now. Otherwise the history of folly will just repeat, and the kind of stuff I write now will only come out 20 to 30 years later.

I am forcing the game to be raised now while I can still write, and that is also why I cover a wide range of subjects, so people in each field can drive up the courage to approach the monolith, instead of tapping stones together and making us laugh.

Also there is nothing wrong with coffee table picture books, so long as they stick to nice pictures, and just don't try to pass themselves off as anything more by writing about what is outside their competence.

Authors, who cannot deal with the archive material I deal with, it is time you rest your pen and just do picture books, I hereby pronounce your evolutionary extinction as military historians.

Now I said it all.

Why do I keep hearing the opening notes from the 2010 Space Odyssey and who is it that keeps throwing his pen into the sky?

[Geoff Ward]

THANK YOU NICK!!! Finally, An answer for many questions! Unfortunately there is a HUGE amount of fraud coming down the pipe even from the "Big Boys" anyone who Deliberately defrauds someone is a piece of S***.and yes,they are out there.This is the reason I moved to Japanese militaria.I am not a wealthy man,so any extra money I have comes with a great sacrifice in other areas.There are currently people who are exposing these Fraudsters for what they are. Nick,you have always been a grounding person,and that is why I respect you.Most of my "Coffee table books" are in the closet.Thank you for all you do here. G.

[Geoff Ward]

Still "Wading"

[Alan M]

A fabulous conditioned dagger Geoff

[Nick Komiya]

Geoff, I will give you some hints.

Don't try to go through the whole document on internet, as that slows things down. When you see that it contains illustration pages, just download them as pdf and save them with a file name preceded by the year.

This means you have to download the whole document, not only the pictures not to lose context, as year and date and the name of the document are on the first page.

If you can already tell that the document you are looking at is army, navy, police, fire brigade, etc save the files in those separate folders.

After you finish going through the files and saving all documents you need, you will see that the files are all lined up in chronological order in the folders you put them in. But if you find 20 files for 1885, for instance, you need to add months into the file name and put them within a 1885 folder to get them into proper chronological order.

Then you can start going through them, as you can scroll through downloaded pdf much faster.

If you want to save time, skip the files of only a couple of pages long, as dagger designs are generally only changed along with uniform designs, and announcing such changes always requires spreadsheets showing material, etc, followed by the illustrations which will be 20 or more pages altogether. These documents not only launch a new series, but they will also cancel the previous edict, showing number, date and title, so you can check whether you had missed anything in between.