Caring For your Katana: A brief guide to cleaning your blade
Whether you’re a collector of swords, or a budo practitioner, proper maintenance of your swords is paramount to keeping them in good shape. It would be a shame to have that new katana, which cost you $1000, to become useless because of rust or a cracking handle. Fortunately proper sword care is not difficult, and it needn’t take hours of your time.
If you use your sword, you should clean the blade after every use. Every time you touch the blade of your samurai sword, your fingers leave behind salts and oils that can promote rust. If you are a collector, you should clean your katana ever 3 weeks, or anytime you handle the blade of the sword. Cleaning your blade will only take you a few minutes, but the time spent will add years to the life of your blade.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Before we talk about how to clean your blade, let’s talk about some things you shouldn’t do. 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
