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The gimei premium
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The gimei premium. Joins the economics of luxury counterfeiting to Japanese sword connoisseurship. Counterfeiters allocate effort where brand equity is highest — today's fakes concentrate in the top handbag brands, not the mid-market — because the payoff to a forged label scales with the premium the genuine name commands. A signature chiselled on a sword tang is precisely such a label, and centuries of dealers faced the same incentive: adding a great master's name to a lesser blade multiplied its price. The claim is that forged signatures (gimei) on old blades are counterfeit branding obeying this logic. It predicts that in modern certification outcomes for signed blades by pre-1600 (koto) smiths, the share judged gimei rises steeply and monotonically with the smith's traditional rating class — several times higher for the top-rated masters than for average smiths — and that the gradient persists within each school and period class, so it is brand value, not mere age, that drives forgery.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In modern certification outcomes for signed blades attributed to pre-1600 (koto) smiths, the share judged gimei rises monotonically with the smith's traditional rating class: top-rated (sai-jo saku) smiths show >=40% gimei among signed submissions while average-rated smiths show <=10%, a gradient of at least 4x that persists within each school and period class, so it is brand value and not mere age driving forgery.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: NBTHK and juyo certification tabulations by smith and rating class (Fujishiro grades). A flat gimei rate across rating classes, or an inverted gradient, kills it.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Both halves of the mechanism are stated in practitioner commentary citing NBTHK experts — 60-70% of signed market blades gimei, and the most-forged names being precisely the priciest smiths (Kotetsu, Masamune) — but this is dealer/enthusiast literature, not a published tabulation; the rating-tier gimei-rate gradient (>=4x by Fujishiro class) was not located anywhere formal. The claim's substance is trade knowledge awaiting quantification.
- Tokyo Nihonto authentication guide (citing NBTHK expert estimates) — Practitioner statement of the mechanism
Predictions
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