Streets of Hope

So... How do we feel about Chinese scammers buying cheap SUS420 metal and passing it off for authentic Honshu steel?

The old spy cackles.

"Well, it might be my years as a Japanese-American citizen rubbing off - or maybe it's Bucky's bad influence - but I can appreciate a good grift when I see one. The same people have the gall to sell off several acres of Scottish land piecemeal, and to claim that their doing so makes their customers lords and ladies in the complete absence of any sort of peerage. They run bidding sites where gullible fools throw money away at factory-produced crap that's worth a fraction of their paid cost and top it off with a joke LLC for people wanting to commiserate over failed business ventures! It almost makes me nostalgic for some of my more egregious covers from back in the day - I used to sell ofuda cards to enemies of Faerie's domains in Japan and had a field day once the Portuguese came around."

He laughs. "You'll tell me a decent Buddhist monk wouldn't have sold ofuda, to which you'd be right - but passing for a lowly scam artist happens to cast the blame on the Urakawas' rivals and keeps the right hands clean. I've even sold cheap katanas to Japanese soldiers under Hirohito and I bankroll one of my grandsons' sidelines, which is to sell unreliable and supposedly magic weapons to Mall Goths and Los Angeles' lot of disconnected Japanophiles...

Can't hurt yourself or anyone else if your blade is designed to blunt itself the moment it's unsheathed, after all."