Thank you, Stekemest, for your kind comments. I was very fortunate to live in Stuttgart for several years in the mid 1980s and it was there that I first discovered flea-markets. I still have most of the fleas I attracted, or rather, that attracted me.
Having the obvious huge advantage of seeing this yari up close, instead of in a few poorly-lit photographs, I am pretty sure that the engraved plane of the blade has lost at least 2 mm from the original surface, if not more, and therefore about two-thirds to three-quarters of the engraved design. So what we are seeing now are only the remains of the deepest extent of now largely perished horimono. The engravings once ran three-fourths of the blade length and very faint traces of an engraved ken handle remain. I have a very tired tanto with a similarly largely lost ken sword engraving in the same style that a shinsa deemed mid-Muromachi, and this is where I got that impression.
The engravings are a detraction now, but I suspect they must have given a better impression before all of the lightly and moderately deep detail was ground away. The other two blade faces must have lost a similar depth of material, narrowing the engraved face of the blade by as much as 5 mm, so that the engraved remains of characters now appear too wide. Perhaps edge nicks would have demanded this degree of material loss? So, the nihonto collector ahead of me at the flea market was entirely correct in pronouncing this a very tired blade. When new, it must have been incredibly robust. The current weight with pole but not the scabbard is 1.8 kg.
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