News — History
Item attribution and production processes of cups and bottles
Today a customer asked me about telling items apart when there's no explicit attribution to a unit. Specifically, the question was about items with horses on them with no unit name - how do you know if this was an item for a transport unit or a cavalry unit? They both use horses as a theme in their decoration. What to do?
This got me to think about what I've learned about the process of production for these cups after having looked at and handled thousands of these. As I mentioned in my last post, porcelain items were actually the most...
Periodization of sake cups and sake bottles
How do we know how old a cup is? One of the interesting things about this hobby is that these cups are mostly tied to history - personal, unit, or political. There are cups that are tied to individual histories - someone did this or that. There are ones that are tied to particular units - the Manchukuo Railroad units, the Taiwan regiments, individual warships, etc. Then there are the ones that are dated to events - Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, WW1, WW2, etc.
Among these, only the last kind are very easily datable. Usually it says right on the...