A Wonderful Find
By Philip M. Scudieri

I received a phone call from one of my students awhile back concerning a katana he saw at an old rural country auction house. He claimed he may have found something special. Well it was about a 120-mile round trip so I was hoping it was worth it. I went with John and his brother Al to the auction that night to see what he had found and if it was worth bidding on. Pulling up between some old pick-up trucks and tractors I was wondering what I would find.

I looked at the piece along with several interested buyers. The saya, “scabbard,” was a gendaito, “military,” style but made with a deep dark wood. I wasn’t sure what the wood was but, combined with the beautiful gold furniture, I was getting a sense of excitement. As I pulled the blade about 3 inches out of the saya, I could tell the hamon, “temper line,” was outstanding. It was very wavy and going over the shinogi, “ridge in the middle of the blade.” I then removed the menuki, “pin in the handle.” Using a standard method of removing the tsuka, “handle,” I held the blade straight up with my left hand and placed my left thumb tip under the tsuba, “hand guard.” With my right hand, I struck my left wrist with a hammer fist just below my left thumb and the tsuka popped free as it had not done in many, many years. I was trying to contain myself as I looked at the two kanji on the nakago, “tang.” One of several fellows around me who had been bidding on Nazi buttons, badges, and other such trinkets asked me about the piece. I said right off that the hardware and saya style looked like World War II and that’s all I knew. They all said that I was probably not telling the truth. I was telling the truth for the most part, as it did have that style of saya and tsuka. However, I did not want to drive the price up.

“Why do you think I know anything more about the sword than you?” I asked. “Well you’re the only fella ‛round these parts that knew how to take off the handle,” replied a large man closest to me. “That’s ok, you will tell us about it when you win it,” he finished. John and I just smiled. In my gut I was hoping I was right.

Tensely I sat there as the bidding began. Auctions can really be exciting. Up the price went. Most of the bidders there were bidding on duck decoys, plates, cups, glasses, and Nazi trinkets, but they knew something was different. As the price went up, John would turn around and look at me, and I kept giving him the thumbs up. It was getting awful hot in there. At last the bidding was over and John got the katana. The group of bidders interested in the piece came over and said, “Ok, what’s the story?” I said from what I could tell it was made by a man called Ga San and it was hundreds and hundreds of years old. The hamon was ayasugi-hada, a surface-grain pattern of curved lines with a wave-like effect, also known as Gassan-hada. They asked what was it worth? I said at least 10 times what we paid for it, which was quite a large amount. They all exclaimed that they were excited because they had never bid on anything like that before.

As it turned out the blade was a Ga San, in excellent condition, and worth more than 10 times the amount we paid. This alone is a great story. However, about 2 weeks later John tracked down an elderly lady whose estate the piece had come from and asked if she knew anything about it. She said that her father was a doctor in Japan after the war. When he was leaving the village he was stationed in, he gave all his medical supplies and a quantity of dental equipment to the village. They, in turn, presented him with “the village katana” which had hung in the local temple for hundreds of years. That is what I call a wonderful find!