Hello, this item is a Japanese katana mounted for military field service, probably during the Second World War. The approximately 28-inch curved blade is fitted with an officer-style hilt, including a pierced brass tsuba, brown silk or cotton wrapping over ray-skin panels, military-pattern metal fittings, and a suspension ring at the pommel. The wooden scabbard has a stitched leather combat cover and suspension fitting, a practical arrangement used to protect military swords during field service. Japanese officers sometimes remounted older family blades in contemporary military fittings, so the customer’s account that the blade predates its Second World War mountings is plausible. The reported attribution to the eleventh-generation Aizu Kanesada is significant because this smith worked in Iwashiro Province during the late Edo and Meiji periods, but the attribution cannot be accepted from the present photographs because the tang, complete inscription, file marks, and blade activity have not been shown.

The sword appears substantially complete, with an intact hilt, bright blade, and original-looking leather-covered scabbard showing expected wear, staining, dryness, and losses around the suspension area and upper seam. The available images do not clearly document the hamon, forging pattern, point geometry, blade defects, arsenal or inspection marks, matching assembly numbers, or the condition and inscription of the tang. These details are essential because a documented and authenticated blade by the eleventh-generation Kanesada could command several times the value of an unidentified ancestral or wartime blade in similar mounts. The family account of acquisition in Japan during 1945 to 1946 adds useful history, but it requires supporting documents to qualify as established provenance. The valuation therefore treats this as a genuine Japanese officer’s field-mounted sword containing a potentially older signed blade, while withholding the substantial premium that formal authentication of the Kanesada signature could justify.

Fair Market Value: $1,800–$3,500 USD