I wanted to add this to my Rinji Seishiki Gunto thread, but I could not do so because that thread was already closed.

Anyway, in post 3 of that thread I wrote about the public drive to collect old family swords for conversion into Gunto to make up for the shortages of Gunto production. I thought it might be of interest to sword people to know what the threshold conditions were for entering old swords in this program, as they also provide clues to other questions such as the short models supposedly for flyers or old family swords as guntos.

Attached below is the public flyer distributed by the military sword appraisal committee and the paragraph boxed in red defines the conditions under which they bought swords from the public. This was part of the home front support activity that later got acknowledged by the China Incident Commemorative Medal.

I will provide a translation of the boxed section—-

(Qualifications necessary in the sword submitted for consideration)
"Swords suitable as Gunto, coming with a minimum blade length of 54.5 centimeters (21.5") will be bought up at fair prices. However, please understand that those valued at more than 500 Yen and naturally those that reveal themselves to be of national treasure class or of particular historical value in the preliminary acceptance Shinsa screening will need to be excluded, and we ask that they be kept in your custody to be preserved on behalf of the nation. Please be sure to clearly tag with name and address the blades you submit"


Thus swords for this program could be roughly 20% shorter than standard, as that was still preferable to not having any sword at all. At the same time, they had the sense not to send precious treasures out into the battlefield by only accepting blades up to 6 times the value of a rinji seishiki blade and rejecting anything more expensive.

The flyer is titled "About serving your nation with Guntos" and would have been delivered in the newspapers or passed around as a neighborhood round robin.

Click to enlarge the picture