We do get lot a lot of weird mails in our mailbox and from time to time, there are people who are offering us ‘real antique Japanese swords’. Whenever I see that line in the subject, I already know enough. Normally , I just hit the delete button but this time I decided to see what kind of antique baby they had to offer us … “Dear Sir, I live in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan province, Indonesia. I have original Samurai sword from my fore father who got from Japanese soldier with specification

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)

The winter is coming and it's getting harder to go outside and take some nice pictures when new swords are coming in... This morning started very nicely and we had a about 15 min. of good sunlight to take the new sample out and make some pics. It looks like the incoming flood of samples doesn't stop. The one that arrived today was a 9260 spring steel katana. We never had any katanas in our shop that were forged with that kind of steel and it's hard to find a forge who is using it (You don't want

What a day….it seems like I just woke up but it’s 0.30am here and no I didn’t sleep for a whole day :D . We wrote about it this new samurai sword in a previous post and since we were not very patient at that time, we already did a small cutting test with pine branches. Anyway, today was the big day for our new baby here ! So we took the tatami we prepared 2 day’s ago to see how well it could perform on these kind of targets. The first target, only 1 tatami was really no match for this

So...we continue with more pictures. This is the folded tachi sword of the Huanuo Forge. A Japanese tachi is a sword which was generally larger than a katana. Usually, the blade of a tachi has a deeper curvature near the tsuba ( koshizori in Japanese) than a katana and the tang follow the curve of the blade. The Japanese tachi mount has the typical loops on the scabbard so it can be hung from a belt with the cutting edge down, where a katana is stuck into the waist belt. Another difference

It was a beautiful day yesterday and we decided to take our camera & some swords and try something new. When new swords are coming in, taking pictures is one of the first thing we need to do here. Because selling swords without pictures…it shouldn’t work at all. Usually we shoot inside with artificial light. Now that’s a hard job because it’s really difficult to get te right light in order to make good quality pics. I’m sure a real professional can do the job very easy but they’re

That’s a question we do get on a very regular base. “They both look the same so where is the difference?”. And sometimes it’s hard to tell if you only get to see some pictures. Here at our shop we try to provide you as many detailed pictures as possible and believe me it takes some time to set up the whole thing and edit them. There are some things you can look at and see very clearly where is the difference. The overall look may be the same but in most of the cases you will see why a