Curious about the new Japanese Swords we talked about ?
It’s been some time since (well actually since last week Thursday I believe ) my last post about tying a sageo, but too many thing going on at the moment and no time left anymore to keep up with the writing here.
We have some reviews of the 9260 steel Konron swords coming up. At this time, we only have them available in Dutch and you can find this very nice review (Goedkope en functionele katana) with pictures and cutting video’s (don’t we all like that…) on our Dutch blog.
They’re working on the English translation so just have a little more patience. There are more reviews coming soon so keep an eye on this blog if you’re interested in this kind of material. Read more
Tying a sageo on the saya of your Katana isn’t that hard, a tutorial
Upon general request, we decided to make a tutorial on how to tie a sageo around the saya of your samurai sword. Now note that this is an ‘presentation’ knot and you won’t see it very often when martial artists are actually using their katana.
The sageo is that ‘piece of rope’ you can generally find on your saya (scabbard) and throughout it’s history , it served many different purposes :
- The original and most known way of using the sageo was to tangle it around the belt (obi) and saya so that the saya stayed where it was put in the belt without moving around when ‘drawing’ the sword
- Tying up the sleeves of the kimono before starting to ‘draw’ with the sword
- Tying up prisoners
- Actually I believe it was used to do all kind of ‘tying-up-things’ Read more
Tamahagane, the original steel used by the Japanese swordsmiths
Steel is iron that contains carbon, so the more carbon a steel has , the harder it is. Most of the Japanese sword smiths are working with the traditional steel that is better known as tamahagane. In Japan there’s only 1 official smelter left. This Japanese style smelter is called a tatara. The tatara relies on the propensity of very hot iron to combine with carbon in its vicinity to produce steel.
In the tatara, it is the burning charcoal that supplies the carbon. These typical Japanese smelter is made of clay, about 5 feet wide, 48 inches tall and 15 feet long, where it’s walls are 10 inches thick.
One operating cycle of the tatara takes 5 days. One day to build the walls (clay and sand), 3 day’s to smelt and 1 day to remove the iron out of the tatara. In this 5 days process , they need about 13 tons of charcoal and 8 tons of satetsu (black sand) to produce 2 tons of iron and steel, which is called Kera. Read more
The Japanese sword (Nihonto) - part 2
Since fighting and wars continued throughout
