Ken-Hawaii

Rob, all "practical katanas" are intended for either iaido training (advanced iaido, as these are shinken [live blades]) or tameshigiri (test cutting). They are NOT, & should never be considered as, Nihonto, which is what this forum discusses. If all you're looking to do is to chop down trees or cut tin cans, this probably isn't the right forum for you.... As others have already mentioned, although you're anxious to get a "real sword" in your hand for the first time, please be patient & go through the familiarization & learning that will pay you off handsomely when you do buy a blade. I don't know where you're located, Rob, but check to see if a Japanese sword society meets anywhere nearby. I learned more in the first meeting than I had in the three years beforehand when I was just reading. And those meetings are likely the best place to buy your first Nihonto, one that you'll be proud to own. Welcome to the forum!

Same here! Listed as an "Attack Site." Steeve, you may want to post your photos someplace a bit safer.

Then by my criteria, you have a katana because it could be used as such. My three o-wakizashi have always been considered as waks as much because of tsuka length as by nagasa length.

Fascinating thread, but as a sword-swinger myself, perhaps a more practical answer on whether the larger blade was intended as a katana is to see if two hands will even fit on the tsuka. I have several o-wakizashi in my collection, & none of them will allow me to use both hands comfortably (i.e., at least an inch or two between them). I'm 5'10" with not particularly large hands.

Yeah, I know about that one, Dan, but I want an image that shows all of the measurements we use in kantei. I guess I'll have to make one myself if no one comes up with a better one. :?

Our Japanese Sword Society just acquired about 10 new members yesterday, nearly all of whom were totally in the dark when we members started discussing measurements of the blade. I want to provide our newbies with a visual reference of these measurements (i.e., nagasa, kasane, mihaba, motohaba, etc.) & their interrelationships, but I'll be darned if I can find anything like that on-line. I even went through Rich Stein's wonderful Web-site, but can't find what I'm looking for. Does anyone have or know of such a diagram?

Guido, that's a great idea! I never would have thought about using foam rather than cedar, but it's a darn sight easier, & we have both foam & velcro. If you ever get out here to Hawaii, I owe you a pitcher of mai tais!! (Beer, too.) Carlo, good guess on the bare blades. I can't afford Benson more than once or twice a year for togishi services, & have just started working with another local togi. Those blades are indeed behind safety glass in a locked case & with a dry-rod.

Half our Nihonto collection is in koshirae, with most of the rest in shirasaya, but I have four blades (1 katana, 2 wakizashi, & 1 tanto) that came with neither. Those are the ones I have to figure out how to store/display. We'll probably alternate the blades in koshirae left-&-right to maximize the number we can store; no problem with shirasaya, of course. Our katanadansu has two full-width drawers, one 2/3-width, & one 1/3-width. So it makes sense that the top two will hold tachi & katana, the 2/3-width is for wakizashi, & the small drawer is for tsuba, spare menuki, etc. I managed to find a less-wide tansu that probably held clothes or small plates, & we're mounting that underneath the wider katanadansu to be more accessible, so we'll end up with a T-shape when we're done. The lower one will hold our knife & Polynesian weapon collections. I'm really amazed at how precisely the lower tansu was made! When I close a drawer, the air pressure actually pushes out two other drawers! Sure don't find that craftsmanship in furniture made today! Again, Thomas, many thanks for the photos & advice.

Thomas, thank you so much for those two photos! They are exactly what Linda & I have been looking for, & we can now create our own interior fittings. We happen to have some nice dry cedar slats that we can easily shape, & will now know not to crowd the swords together, & to keep them in shirasaya or koshirae.

I recently bought a nice katanadansu from Craig Harris - who obviously sells more than just books (thanks, Craig!) - but I'm scratching my head on how to mount our tachi, katana, & wakizashi inside the drawers. I've spent many hours looking on-line in hopes that someone has posted a photo of a fully laid-out drawer, but with no luck. Normally, I would leave the blades in shirasaya, but that takes up a ton of space, & there wouldn't be enough volume for even half of our collection. The drawers are empty, so we could build cross-supports to hold the blades vertically (ha up, of course), but then I wonder about the safety of someone reaching in without paying attention - cleaning blood off everything & collecting fingers seems so messy... . Right now, we have many blades stored on two large katanakake, but with all the humidity in our part of the world (I can easily heave a rock into the Pacific Ocean from my front door), I really want to get them into a chest that's made for them. Any ideas, especially including photos? Thanks!!

Certainly no argument there, David. Of course I do prefer Nihonto with NBTHK/NTHK papers because I'm fairly certain that the shinsa know a lot more than I do :D . But I am curious about the number of Minamoto Kiyomaro blades that are out there, mostly because I was surprised & dismayed that so successful a smith committed seppuku because he felt he was no longer capable of making the quality of blades he had become known for. Illness or no, that certainly says something about his strength of character, & once I have his blade in hand, I'm certainly going to want to know more about the man, as well as the blade. BTW, my wife & I don't buy Nihonto for resale, but rather for how they make us feel. Sounds a little "sappy," but, oh, well .

Aloha, all: I realize this thread has been quiet for over two years, but I suddenly have a real need to know if anyone has an idea how many swords Minamoto Kiyomaro created in the eight years he was active. I am ready to acquire one of his katana...with NBTHK origami. Not inexpensive by any means, but within my budget. It would certainly be the centerpiece of my Nihonto collection!

There's definitely not much niku in that kissaki, Andrew, but overall it should be a nice study blade if the price is right. Just don't use it for tameshigiri, okay?

Excellent example, Dan!

Bob, the small divot nearest the boshi is a chip. The second one honestly looks like some type of flaw, rather than a chip - perhaps a fukure that spread due to the first chip. But who knows? Really too bad.

Well, guys, there are some more sophisticated ways to "cheat" on creating a good photo of your blades, & thank goodness one of them is really cheap - zero! First, take a series of good closeups of your blade, being really careful to have at least 10-15% overlap on the shots. Then, browse over to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... s/ivm/ICE/ & download Microsoft's free Image Composite Editor (ICE). Just drag-&-drop all of the images into the editor, & it magically creates a really accurate composite image of the blade. There are a couple of tricks I've found that help ICE keep things in order. First, lay a yardstick down parallel to the blade while you're shooting; this not only helps ICE, but also helps you to make sure that everything is in order. The other trick is to use a background that has a pattern of some sort - I usually use a bamboo mat - which again helps ICE. The nice thing about this technique is that you can "mix & match" your very best shots (within reason on things like contrast & reflections), so although the composite may look a bit like a ransom note, it will maximize all the details of your blade, which is exactly what I need to create an accurate AutoCAD vector drawing. Okay, I just tried to Attach an AutoCAD DWG file, an EPS, & a JPG of a Nihonto just digitized, but the system isn't letting any of them go through. I though the JPG would be okay, but since the ACCURATE version is 1844 pixels wide, the system doesn't let anything larger than 1200 pixels go through. Brian, is there anything you can do to increase this parameter? Even with the complex hamon on this Masachika katana, it took me 18 minutes from the time I loaded the photo into AutoCAD until I was done. But with the forum system's limitations, I'm not sure how to get the info out to everyone. Ideas??

Umm, no can do, Ray. I just tried opening AutoCAD 2010 .dwg & .dxf files with my Visio 2007, & get nothing but garbage. I also saved them in AutoCAD 2008 formats, & get the same thing. Let me contact Microsoft about that.

Ray, I have no problem posting my AutoCAD drawing...but in which format? As you know, once a graphic departs from vector format, it loses all of the information that made it lossless. I frankly don't know what to do about that, so the database project comes to a screeching halt until we can figure out an answer. I really hate it when reality messes up a great idea!!!

Lee, of course AutoCAD can't do anything that isn't present in the photograph of the blade. But I doubt that the overall shape of the blade will change all that much, short of suriage, machi-okuri, or something drastic like a reshaped boshi. But one of the criteria is that the owner KNOWS who made the blade, the approximate year, & the school. Otherwise, I'd be trying to do kantei "on the fly," which isn't what I want to be doing for this project. Ray, I absolutely agree that this post is your idea - it's just using AutoCAD is a darn sight easier than using Visio for this type of work. I can accurately digitize the outline of a blade is about 5-10 minutes, although a complex hamon takes quite a bit longer. Linking arcs together, smoothing them, etc., is just too time-consuming! But if you want to digitize a bunch of blades & send them to me in a vector format (probably DXF), that's less work for me.

I'd never heard of Hoope's dissertation, Dan, & an advanced Google search didn't find it, either. With no blade illustrations, I'm not sure how it would help the database, so if I run across it, great; otherwise I'll have to start from scratch. A couple of questions to define what we're looking for: (1) Should we stick with katanas only, or include wakizashis? (2) As the overall objective is to assist with kantei (right??), what information should be included? I've Attached a PDF file that I use to kantei my own blades, but because I won't have the actual blade in hand, I won't have any of the 3D parameters (thickness, mune type, hi depth, etc.). Which of these should be included in the database, & how will they be used for kantei? (3) Do we want a simple Excel spreadsheet with images, or a real SQL database? Which parameters will we be calling up to help with kantei? Answers to those will at least get me started. Final Sword Documentation.pdf

Thanks for that info, Ray. I happen to be one of the team that created the original AutoCAD, so of course I choose that over Visio (which I also use). That's an interesting way to grab a raster image in Visio, by the way. It's a lot easier & more precise to do that in AutoCAD because all I have to do is measure the exact length of the blade, & then tell AutoCAD to scale up the inserted raster image to that length. Tracing the outline of the blade & hamon is done using what are called polylines, & I can then smooth those several different ways to get an almost perfect fit. And of course the best reason to create a vector drawing in either AutoCAD or Visio is that it can be zoomed into (magnified) as far as needed without losing any accuracy. Huntershooter, using AutoCAD or Visio to find the centerline for sori determination isn't quite a slam-dunk because the curve of the mune isn't exactly smooth by mathematical standards, so there's still a subjective factor in determining the point of maximum deflection. It's easy to locate that point via parallel lines, but when I draw the centerline based on that, it turns out that the sori doesn't match in many cases. For example, a known Koto Bizen I have shows the centerline well into the torii-zori area, while examining it visually it's obvious that it's really koshi-zori. :? Gabriel, that really is a very useful analysis & drawing of the kissaki. Did you use a vector program to create those cross-sections? I like your idea about developing some quantitative measurements for kantei, & am more than willing to help. My wife & I only have about 15 Nihonto in our collection, half of which are wakizashi, so I would need a bunch of really good photos of blades from known eras & schools along with precise lengths of each blade to begin developing a database. I would then create an AutoCAD drawing in which everything can be accurately measured. About the only thing I won't do again is try to digitze the mei - that's just way too much work! Anyway, let me know if all of you think this is a good idea, & we can brainstorm the best way to share the data.

A couple of questions, Ray, from another long-time engineer. I assume you used AutoCAD, right? And did you generate the outline shape from an inserted raster image? I've digitized a couple of my blades the same way, but I'm still looking for a better method to get all the details of the hamon & boshi without doing a laborious & tedious manual trace. I have raster-to-vector conversion software, but am wondering if you've found an easier way.

Ray, neither infrared nor black (ultraviolet) light will show anything about the blade's details. We simply can't see either light range, in the first place. Infrared is heat, & ultraviolet doesn't show anything that doesn't fluoresce or phosphoresce. A bright point-source is the best light to view your blade's details.

Actually, the very first thing to do is to sign your messages with your real name. I kinda' doubt that "Twofish" shows up on your driver's license.... You haven't mentioned whether the katana you want to buy will be (1) hung on a wall, (2) used in some martial art, (3) used to cut down innocent trees & bushes, or (4) studied & appreciated. In the first case, pretty much any forge can put out a decent high-carbon-steel blade, sometimes even with a real hamon. In the second case, you're going to want to buy an iaito, rather than a shinken, & you're probably on the wrong forum, too. In the third case, see my answer to #1. If by some chance, you're really interested in buying a Nihonto, browse over to the For Sale Or Trade area of this forum (viewforum.php?f=4) & take a look at what our members have for sale. Larry (viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7784) has at least a couple of decent blades for sale in your price range. But I agree with the other posts that you should first buy, read, & understand several Nihonto reference books so that you'll have at least some idea WHY you're buying a specific blade, WHAT you have once it's in your hands, WHEN & WHERE it was made, & WHO made it. Holding a piece of Japanese history & culture in your hands is a wonderful feeling...if you know enough to be able to appreciate it. Good luck, & welcome to the forum.

It's not quite 90 out here in Hawaii, Andy, but 87 is pretty darn close. My wife has studied kendo for many years, & wears her bogu three times a week to train. Kendo bogu (armor) consists of the men (helmet), do (stomach protector), tare (groin protector), & kote (gloves), along of course with the shinai (bamboo sword), bokken (wooden long sword), & kodachi (wooden dagger). This link http://www.e-bogu.com/In_Stock_Kendo_Bogu_s/28.htm shows all the parts, & how they are positioned when worn.