Thanks for explaining that, James. It does make sense to me given that each Japanese stone does seem to have it's own uniqueness; Far and away, more than any other waterstone I know of, the Japanese stones due to irregular shape, skin, surface appearance, etc seem to be most often visually identifiable on an individual basis.
Given their uniqueness, I was incorrectly arguing a parallelism between the Japanese Stones and their identification (kanji) and the identifying stamps, if intact, (paper labels) on a vintage Thuringian like an Escher or Hohenzollern. I use my stones as well, rather than having them as high valued paper weights; however, that said, my point was IF I was to buy a $500+ Escher with intact labels, I would use that stone, but it would be foolish for me to scrub off or carelessly allow the labels to be destroyed since clearly so much of the value of those stones (since there is no nearly the variance in Thuringian appearance as there is with Japanese stones) is placed on the labels for identification and authentication. There's an almost incomparable difference between the value of an intact labeled Escher and a non-labeled Thuringian the owner claims is an Escher.
Chris L