Bugei's stuff is made by Hanwei, yes, but they're not exactly part of the standard product line. What do you mean by features? If folded steel is one of them, then only one Bugei katana lacks that. Fittings-wise, I can see where the Bugei line would be seen as more subtle - but for Japanese swords, that's generally a more desireable quality. No Japanese sword is damascus, by the way - pretty big technical difference there. The Bugei blades are also a lot more durable than the regular Hanwei blades - their lightest blade is heavier than the high-end Hanwei general releases. They also perform in-house quality checks on all their Bugei-branded swords, providing much needed QC. Basically, they have most all of the features Japanese swords are
supposed to have.
Personally, I think the folding on Hanwei and Bugei blades is ugly. Way too blatant, utterly without function, and a distraction from much more important factors.
Last Legend has a katana lineup that's held comparable to Bugei's and Hanwei's - depending on who you talk to. Their prices are good on the monosteel swords, and are generally priced similarly to Paul Chen's stuff. J-armory.com has a selection of Furuyama blades, which are decent by most accounts, and folded if that's important to you.
If you're looking for something that's as close to the Japanese aesthetic as possible, none of the production swords on the market are quite "there." Japanese-made shinsakuto nowadays are largely objects of art. In that respect, modern production blades just suck. When you restrict yourself to functional properties only, they get a lot better.
So basically, that's the point I'm trying to make - if you buy a factory sword because it "replicates" certain aesthetic features of a nihonto, with the notion of getting a taste of a real
art sword adhering as closely as possible to historical precedent, you're wasting your money. Better to buy $790 worth of nihonto reference books, in my opinion. From a collector's standpoint, I fail to see how a production piece would have any place in a group of antiques like yours - it would lose value with time, it would have absolutely no historical or traditional worth, and you'd probably sell it for a loss once you got your hands on a shinsakuto, or better yet, an antique.
Unless you're planning to train with it, in which case, you really should look for functional features, rather than aesthetic ones.
Wow! That was pretty long!
