140 Blade lengths (with relevant historic laws)

[Brian]

I've seen a few. Mostly slender blades in Meiji export mounts. I have one here. Blades were always bad quality. Not saying shobu zukuri are bad quality..just that the export versions often used that shape.

 

Brian

[Jean]

Thanks Brian. I have never seen a koto tanto or shinto/shinshinto tanto in this pattern. Shobu zukuri blades are fantastic, very much in use during Muromachi, real choppers. I had a fantastic Mino one with horimono, so no kurikara on one side and bonji on the other.

[runagmc]

Good question Jean. I know I've seen many shobu-zukuri looking tanto, but they may have been mostly moroha-zukuri... I'll look through some of my pics and see if I can find some true shobu-zukuri with mune...

[Brian]

Half of it is shobu zukuri... :lol:

 

http://www.sanmei.com/contents/media/G1 ... PUP_E.html

 

Brian

[Surfson]

Another interesting feature of the data is that while there is a standard size for daito, there appears to be much less standardization for wakizashi. The amplitude of the trough to peak blade numbers in Hoanh's analysis illustrates this clearly. While the peak is only twice the base for wakizashi, it is approximately ten times for daito. Put another way, if you look at Gabriel's first graph, you can see the plateau for daito with many blades around 70cm, while there is no clear plateau for wakizashi. It thus appears that style or customs didn't dictate that you carry a fixed length wakizashi. I suspect that the very slight inflection shown at near the maximum allowed length for wakizashi reflects swords that were constructed to come just up to the limit. I also suspect that these were disproportionately carried by merchants, since it maximized the length of the sword they could carry. Very interesting. Cheers, Bob

[Gabriel L]

Another interesting feature of the data is that while there is a standard size for daito, there appears to be much less standardization for wakizashi.…

 

While it is manifestly true that wakizashi are less standardized (although it is notable that they are certainly influenced by the legal limits for ko-wakizashi and wakizashi), there was still a standard length for wakizashi determined by the daisho stipulations for official court visits.

 

What is also interesting, but I have not yet posted, is that separating the ubu and suriage wakizashi it looks as if suriage wakizashi were likely intended to respect this standard length.

 

Below is the relevant graph, but please note it is outdated as I made it when the sample was "only" 300 blades.

 

 

Note the clustering of suriage wakizashi, especially around the 46.5–49 cm range and to a lesser extent the 51.5–53.5 cm range. Again, the court shotō length was set to 48.5–51.5 cm (or more accurately, 1.66–1.67 shaku), quite close to the observed group.