IanB

Kyle, You will receive a computerised letter in the next few days saying they have a 'banned weapon'. Don't panic, it is routine. Your job is then to raise an 'issue' as required by the Amendment Order 2008. Just sent them a letter stating that you are a genuine collector of antique Japanese swords together with copies of all the documents relating to the purchase, including the original advertisement (I know they may have been incorporated with the package but they seem to ignore these). If you have photos of the sword in the original advertisement, so much the better, send these as well. You will then have 'raised an issue' as the law quaintly puts it. Your letter should should spell this out, saying words to the effect - 'This sword falls under the ‘defence’ provided by the Criminal Justice Act 1988(Offensive Weapons)(Amendment) Order 2008, by virtue of the fact that it an antique made around XXXX. I enclose a description of the sword supplied by the vendor, XXXXXXXXX. I also include details of the payment for calculating duty'. This should be sufficient to raise an issue. It is then the resonsibility of HM Customs to prove it is not an antique. The next thing to watch is that they only charge you 5% VAT. I have had an occasion where they accepted it as antique and then slapped 17.5% on it. Another polite letter pointing this out will do the trick, but it takes months to get your money back Ian Bottomley

Jabara is also used on armour, generally to add to the rich appearance of the tailored portions, but on more more recent productions, to cover the join between different types of printed leathers in place of the traditional fusegumi. I always assumed jabara was produced as an entity but when I ordered some recently to wrap a hilt, it arrived as two separate hanks of thread, one S twist and one Z twist. You have to sew the two together, matching the twists to produce the correct chevron effect, before you can even think of wrapping the hilt. Since it was a fairly long hilt, you can imagine how long that took. Ian Bottomley

Don't like to be critical, but the kuwagata of your helmet are in the wrong way around. They should be transposed left to right. Ian Bottomley

Malcolm, Now that you have a copy of Koop, you need to practice finding the kanji. He uses stroke count first followed by how the kanji can be divided into separate parts. If you get Nelson you will find he uses radicals as the initial search criteria. It seems rather confusing at first but I find these two approaches a boon. If I can see a radical I use Nelson and when (if) I find the character look it up in Koop to determine its reading and / or special meaning in the signature. If no radical is obvious I dive into Koop with a stroke count, often having to look at count sections on either side of the number I arrived at until I find the kanji. In over 50 years of using the book I cannot really recall it having let me down - a fantastic achievement considering how old it is. They were real scholars. Ian

Malcolm, Although it is very long in the tooth, A.J. Koop & H. Inada; Japanese Names and How to Read Them, Routledge &Kegan Paul, London 1923, takes a lot of beating. Not only does it have a character dictionary, it also contains masses of informationon dates, titles, towns families and the like. It has been reprinted a few times and copies can be found. I use it in conjunction with Nelson's Japanese English Character Dictionary, Tuttle, Tokyo 1991, and find the two together give me most of the informantion I want. ian Bottomley

I had one like this, on a sword carried in WWII so I suspect not terribly rare. It is done by soldering lengths of brass wire onto the iron base. I was under the impression it represented pine needles clustered on the surface of the pond. Ian Bottomley

Lee, The Royal Armouries has about a dozen yari given to Queen Victoria with raden covered shafts and they too are shedding pieces of MOP. The conservation staff spent weeks sticking them back to give us a few examples for display. The rest are stored horizontally in lengths of plastic guttering so that any more pieces that drop out are at least kept with the shaft they have come from. I think the idea of a new shaft is the ideal solution. As for the mounts, some of my yari are in the same state and seem to have had paper or some fibrous material jammed under the mounts to keep them in position. Ian Bottomley

Kyle, I love the tale about having taken it to the Royal Armouries. Had they done so they would have been told, in the nicest possible way, that it was a Chinese copy. It is possible I did see this wretched item. A guy rang to say his grandfather had died and he had found about a dozen Japanese swords in the attic and that they had been collected about 50 years earlier. On his arrival, clutching a bin bag full of swords, it was amusing to see they were all modern Chinese junk. The guy seemed rather put out that I wouldn't give him a document to say they were all genuine. Ian Bottomley

Ron, Welcome to the Message Board. Don't worry about importing swords. Now that the legislation has settled in, it is no real problem providing you let the Customs have copies of the paperwork from the vendor. As long as they have something to put in their files they are happy. Also, take note on how they deal with VAT. Having accepted a sword as antique they occasionally apply 17.5% VAT when it should be 5%. Again a polite letter will get you a refund. Ian Bottomley

Steve, Ah the image of the original paper has appeared. Typical of what was issued to officers. Ian

Steve, I don't see any surrender documents, just the details set out by a vendor in 1995. Judging by what was said to the original buyer, it is a bit short to be an uchigatana at 18". It was also stained and chipped at that date. Do you know what state the blade is in now? I note you live, as I do, in Yorkshire. Send me an email and we can get together. Ian Bottomley

All, In prints, Benkei is often shown with a bag on his back stuffed with all manner of weapons including an axe. Like the kumade of the Heian period they cannot have been common, otherwise a lot more would have survived. As for the names of European staff weapons, the different types were given all sorts of names in different countries and by different authors - it is a minefield. The Royal Armouries has a forest of them with every possible combination of spikes and points that merge almost seamlessly from one into another. It is rather like defining colours - is it a bluish green or a greenish blue? For those interested, the best source on the subject I know of is Ewart Oakeshott's 'European Weapons and Armour' Lutterworth Press, London 1980. Interesting that these staff weapons were met with the same indifference by the Japanese as were European swords. There is a curious little yari in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection (on loan to the Royal Armouries) that has a secondary and separate piece with a cresent shape balanced by a downturned hook on the opposite side, fitted below the regular head. This is obviously imitating a halberd. It is quite small and probably made for a child. In Sladen & Lorimer's 'More Queer Things About Japan', Treherne & Co Ltd, London 1905 there are excerpts from an early 19th century 'Life of Napoleon' in one illustration of which the Japanese artist shows Napoleon on St Helena guarded by British soldiers wearing armour carrying glaives.

John, Jean, Technically a halberd is a staff weapon with an axe blade on one side, a downwards pointing fluke opposite and a central spike. At first the axe part had a straight sloping edge, but later more decorative ones developed a curved edge. The nearest thing to a naginata in Europe was the glaive, which has a long, single -edged knife-like blade, again on a shaft about 6 or 7 foot long. What we normally think of as hand held battle axes were quite rare in Europe, being an Indo - Persian weapon. Victorian illustrators usually depicted the axes with, usually, two curved edged blades in the hands of knights because they looked spectacular. In reality, almost all these are Indian or Pesian. Ian

Carlo, See my article on Japanese crossbows in 'Royal Armouries Yearbook' Vol 3 p.159. The Armouries were very fortunate in buying one for the collection during the early 1990's. As far as I could discover it is one of only four known. There are two in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya (see Military Accessories of a Daimyo House p.58) and a third in the Metropolitan Museum, New York that was previously in the collection of George Cameron Stone and illustrated in his Glossary on page 611. All four are associated with the Tokugawa, that in Leeds having gold lacquered Tokugawa kamon on the stock. Both the New York example and that in the Royal Armouries have their bows made of baleen. The New York example, signed '...Kunitaka' made of a single slat, that in Leeds with a double slat to increase the power. The Nagoya ones look like baleen bows, but are lacquered and bound with rattan making it difficult to determine. These two bows have removable upper 'barrels' so that they could shoot either arrows or pellets. The Leeds one has a built in quiver under the stock for 4 arrows of which three survive. My guess is that they were for personal protection indoors or just amusing novelties. Ian Bottomley

Steve, There is an illustration of a Japanese axe, called O-no, in Stone's Glossary... on p. 475. He states it was used by yamabushi and is about 6' long. Curiously it is fitted with a scabbard or rather edge cover of semi-circular shape. No doubt individuals did carry large axes in battle but I suspect they were one-offs. Ian B.

Brian, It is the object to be punched that has to be hot. The punch itself has to be cold so that it is hard relative to the metal it is punching the hole through. In a former existance I once spent a day at a steel works and watched the ends of cast billets, about 2' x 2' being cut off by a circular saw of steel. Because the billets were bright red-hot, the saw simply sliced through them. Ian Bottomley

One doesn't want to be a party pooper but isn't the idea of an ashigaru armour having a gusoku bitsu rather pretentious? I can see the jingasa might be Sengoku Jidai - but the bamboo armour? There is no reason to doubt it was found as stated but it is stretching credibility to think that the lord the ashigaru was fighting for couldn't afford proper armour and had his troops kitted out in something that is even less sophisticated than Taisho period kendo gear. I suppose it might have had the opposition rolling on the floor laughing their socks off but otherwise it would have been rather less than a satisfactory against swords, spears and bullets. Bit of tongue-in-cheek attribution here I think. Ian Bottomley

John, Thank you for posting the new images. I had only ever seen rather poor pictures of these items in Stone's Glossary ... I agree there must have been a lot more trade than we think. A while ago I was writing about Japanese fletchings and it seems many species of sub-arctic raptors were denuded of their tail feathers for the purpose. I remember seeing a wonderful set of exotic fletchings in Sendai Museum, ready cut and trimmed and fastened onto decorative paper. Presumably that is how they were presented for sale. Ian

John, Thank you for posting the images. What we seem to have here is something knocked up in an emergency. If you look carefully, the wooden slats have what looks like a set of kusazuri attached. From the shape of the front one, it would seem it has come from some kind of o-yoroi. The jingasa is standard low ranking troops issue. An interesting assembly. Very similar cuirasses were used by the Tinglit (sp?) and other peoples in the sub-arctic regions. These were of flat wood splints, arranged vertically, and laced together with hide strips. Ian Bottomley

Piers, Ah, now I think I might have it. Ian

Piers, Of course I know what it is: Ian

Dick, Depending on where you live, I'm sure one of the ToKen Society members would look at the blade for you. Send me an email. Ian Bottomley (Chairman Northern ToKen Society)

Carlo, That style of helmet is known in English as a barbute from its Italian name (most or all having being made there). Exactly why they get this name is not known, the commonest reason quoted being that it revealed the beard. A typical unlikely story. This example would have been made in the early 15th century and has been re-used during the 16th or early 17th century by the Venetians who added the gilded copper decoration. It would have had velvet or similar rich cloth glued to the surface during the refurbishment but this has obviously rotted away. Ian B

Javi, Thank you so much. You have really helped. I suspect the word 'barrote' might actually be 'barbote' , the upright of the second b being missing. This I assume would be the face mask associated with the helmet. Ian

Carlo, Thank you for that. I have a couple of exhibition catalogues from Sendai Museum that contains several of these letters. Sadly they tend not to mention gifts. It is the surviving armours and inventories of European armouries that has proved most vauluable. Stephen and Javi, I have scanned in the most important parts of the manuscript. The first is the instruction to move an armour and other things. I can read: ' Things to be delivered from the Guarda Joyas ? of China ?' I am sure I can read the number seven in the second line. I would like it to say seven armours but that is wishful thinking. The second scan is part of the description of the armour. Again I can read:'A black morion of the same ?, a ( this word penache is almost certainly a crest) of gilded leather and in the centre a ?? of a cross ? pf black fur and ?? black and white' The cross makes sense since the armour is decorated with the Shimazu kamon. They have load wrong way around, but you will see which is which. Ian