Understanding Differences In Craftsmanship

[Schmoopy]

Hello everyone,

 

Although I am relatively new to the hobby, I can generally differentiate a well crafted nihonto from an average one.

 

However, I cannot seem to grasp the differences in craftsmanship of a spectacular sword, from a 'very good' sword. For example, what are the differences I should be looking for (aside from the prestige of the name) if I were to compare a Muramasa vs an exemplar juyo sword?

 

thanks in advance.

[Jean]

Nothing to compare with. juyo is a kanteisho concerning a blade craftsmanship, Muramasa, Masamune are swordsmiths, their swords can rank from hozon (a bad day) to Kokuho (national treasure). Forget the blade, study the blade.

[Schmoopy]

Nothing to compare with. juyo is a kanteisho concerning a blade craftsmanship, Muramasa, Masamune are swordsmiths, their swords can rank from hozon (a bad day) to Kokuho (national treasure). Forget the blade, study the blade.

Perhaps my example wasn't very good.

I am mainly wondering how you differentiate a good sword from an amazing sword.

[Jean]

Jason,

 

You have to see many good swords in hand and side by side to be able to compare them and recognize quality. No other way. When you see quality, you will recognize it.

[Kronos]

It's like looking at a chinese fake and a low level nihonto side by side (just a lot smaller differences). In this example everything about the nihonto would be better, crisp lines, a good and natural shape, more pleasing hada,hamon, hataraki etc (chinese fakes don't have a hamon so not a good comparison but you get the idea).

 

Then as you move up the quality ladder looking at swords side by side the better one will have a certain je ne sais quoi while the lesser example will look plain and ordinary in comparison even if it's an exceptional sword in it's own right (such as a juyo by Muramasa to borrow your example). I guess the hard part comes in when trying to compare blades from different schools/time periods/smiths. How you judge the best Kanemitsu with the best Hizen Tadayoshi I have not got to that part yet...

[Ken-Hawaii]

Jason, this question comes up fairly frequently in my sword club, & I've tried to explain it in many different ways.

 

To summarize: (1) you first need to be able to recognize specific features in  any blade (i.e., sugata, hada, hamon, etc.) - without that knowledge, anything may look good/great/amazing; (2) as both Jean & James said, having a known-good (papered/authenticated) blade to look at & memorize/learn is really the next step - at some point, just looking at a "bad" blade can make you feel ill (really!); & (3) go buy the Nihonto-Bi book that shows some really incredible Nihonto in full-size & full-color - those blades should become your new standard for amazing versus good.

 

I'm willing to wager that once you have those new standards embedded in your brain, you won't have to ask this question.

 

Ken

 

[Greg F]

Hello Jason, youve got some great answers above! One thing i find very helpful with my own learning how to tell the difference is to to read as many posts here as I can. Especially when there is a sword that raises debate or indepth discussion. Im not a big fan of computers but I feel NMB is so rewarding and enjoyable for me especially as my love for Nihonto grows. All the best.

 

Greg

[Schmoopy]

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback everyone.

[nagamaki - Franco]

http://www.militaria.co.za/nmb/topic/9006-kantei-for-quality/#p110339

 

also, if you read through literature like Yamanaka's Newsletters (revised), it describes and defines the differences between "excellent" and "poor" characteristics found on swords. Although some may find the wording and vocabulary in the Newsletters at times challenging, as one's knowledge grows eventually so will their understanding of nihonto. 

[Caleb Mok]

When i was in first year Architecture we were taught to differentiate between the "formal" and "contextual" attributes of a work e.g., from a formalist point of view: a certain handkerchief was "made of x-amount of woven cotton and dyed with a fabric dye of x composition, usually circulated for a few dollars"; from a contextual point of view: "if the handkerchief was certified used by Justin Bieber then it is very valuable"...

 

IF you are interested in the FORMAL attributes of Nihonto, you might want to be familiar with these ~colors~.  I am very noob so the following is probably very wrong...but i've read enough info re the subject to know that the following is not available on the net and it ~is~ actually important so take it or leave it.  Now, the six colors:

 

1) WHITE: weld gaps.  When you glue two boards together, you don't need 100% of the surfaces glued for them to stay sticking...layers of steel prior to welding can be covered with oxides...when they are squish-welded together, some of those oxides are trapped between the layers.  They are then (probably) evenly distributed throughout the "seam" via squishing, and then reacts with the carbon in the steel boards or ash slurry to form carbon monoxide such that at these seams the gas enters the more-or-less liquid steel as bubbles so you'd get a ~spongy*~ but thoroughly stuck together weld--rather than a weld of solid, bubble-less stuff, but also having many tiny rocks i.e. FeO inclusions that that are not stuck together with the steel (i.e. you cannot weld metal to a glass; only metals to metals, glasses to glasses)  The layers of these spongy, less-dense welded-steel are often very thin/non-existent in better work, so these weld gaps often do not form solid bands like damascus steel, but they will look like short strokes, swirls, even dots, or are just not there because of zero "spongyness"

*It has been said that only molecules small enough e.g. C, N, H can fit inside the voids in the BCC/FCC iron matrix...but that clearly ignores the fact that atomic radii is not the same as atomic size...sources quote C and CO as having atomic radii of .92 and 1.16 angstroms resp. At welding temps the voids probably enlarge...how else do you explain basically perfect welds with no oxides without vacuum/inert gas environment?

2) LIGHT GREY: Soft pearlite.  Probably

3) DARK GREY: Soft bainite.  Probably (if you actually heated home-made knife with hamon just to see what happens to the hamon, you'd know it disappears, but if you go over it with hazuya, the ji will still frost more than the ha as it did before.  So the description of "tempered martensite" of bainite fits the description well)

4) BLACK: Hard martensite per "Craft of Japanse Sword etc."  Note: if a traditional i.e. not-modern sashikomi style polish is available for viewing, ALL of the Ha should in fact be this color i.e. much darker and reflective than the Ji...unless 50 years go by......

5) IRIDESCENT i.e. invisble: shiny martensite disco balls surrounded by not-shiny pearlite, like metallic paint.  Like how nacre is shiny because of structural interference and you can't really polish it to "flatten" its microscopic structure into a singular, non-iridescent color, the IRIDESCENT stuff in the hamon, utsuri*, yubashiri, matsukawa hada, jifu(?) etc. will only be visible when viewed at a certain angle with directional, specular lighting.  It is literally invisible unless directly illuminated at an angle; if you can see it, it's NOT iridescent (in an evenly lit "omni" light without generating any kind of "glare").

*yes i realise it was proven by some Japanse guy that the hamon and utsuri is not the same substance...both are nonetheless iridescent though.

6) frosted light grey: in Hadori and Modern-Sashikomi style polishing, the ha gets special treatment and is deliberately given more treatment aimed at making it more matte and light.  If this lightening effect extends from the ha, into the hamon, and then into the ji...this portion of the ji will look much whiter than EVERYTHING ELSE.  Had this lightening effect been not used i.e. traditional sashikomi, "frosted light grey" would have been the same as either LIGHT GREY or DARK GREY; if there are WHITE streaks *inside* the "frosted light grey", then this specific WHITE is indeed, when compared to the whole, the whitest thing.  It is extremely important to remember--because i swear so many people i know in real life but not on the web have made this mistake--that the "white pattern" that is whiter than everything else is NOT the hamon; the very border BETWEEN the "frosted light grey" and the "frosted dark grey" is the habuchi/nioi-guchi: what's "under" it i.e. extending from the habuchi towards the ha-saki terminus, is the actual hamon of nie/nioi and it is normally invisible. (sorry for reiterating the obvious to many of you)

7) frosted dark grey: what should have been BLACK, but appearing less so because it is superficially lightened.  Note: if the same stone goes over both hard and soft steel, the soft stuff is always lighter and more matte than the hard.

 

In either the The-New-Generation-of-something-of-Japanese-Smiths-yadda-yadda or Modern-something-yadda-yadda (i call them the blue and red one because they recycle much of the info for each book) A polisher was interviewed and said many new collectors like a "rough" hada because it seems interesting, but is devoid of nie and poorly welded.  I would interpret that it has a lot of WHITE.  On the other hand, he said Kokuho-level koto have tight welds making them look like Shinsakuto.  So "workmanship" would see to suggest ~as little 1)WHITE as possible~ while simultaneously being ~as much 4)BLACK and 5)IRIDESCENT as possible.  Norishige was hailed for having so much iridescence everywhere that it is difficult to differentiate exactly where ji ends and ha starts; profuse ji-nie is usually celebrated, and whatever forms they take--streaks, dots, LARGE dots, large DARK dots, dots with iridescence surrounding it/etc--it seems the more the better.  A "clear" jihada probably means a good contrast between 2) and 3), because shingane in my viewing experience is always either 2) or 3) but not both.  It is a good thing to note that "Rai Hada", though bad, will ~still~ be of higher quality i.e. probably having better 2)'s and 3)'s than shingane.  Utsuri is celebrated: they take form as a large masses of iridescence above the hamon, and can be judged as ~how~ strongly iridescent.  Like the hamon, which, generally speaking, should also be as bright as possible based on scientific principles (i'm not going to go into it) but complexity is also at play: things like juko-choji, consistent and long sanjoba's, koshiba and jifu/kage/etc. utsuri is hailed as difficult and being able to master controlling it is evidence that...the rest of the not-so-smart can't so haha-i-am-better-than-you! and therefore those who can are better just because...withOUT compromising functionality e.g. kikusui hamon is not universally praised, but it definitely is more "complex".  In all these examples, superior "craftsmanship" can be explained in formalist, it's-either-there-or-not, terms......

 

Insofar that a "functional metal artwork" actually CAN fulfill its intended function without breaking, we are NOT really interested in its utilitarian cheapness/greatness, but rather, its aesthetic/artistic cheapness/greatness i.e. we collect weapons that are also art, not just weapons...made-in-China swords, among others, are little-if-anything-recognised-by-a-significant-$market$ more than mere weapons. Even though it was said that the Soshu swords were compared to the atomic bomb in that they suddenly appeared and quickly outclassed everything else...it is difficult, if not impossible, to test the "deadliness" of a "generic-Amakuni" vs "generic-Akihiro tachi" vs a "generic-sanbonsugi tachi" because, simply, ~nobody does that~.  Well, doesn't help that Akihiro tachi doesn't exist (?) either. (I'm pretty sure Amakuni doesn't...if it does, then i'm pretty sure the Kusanagi doesn't.  If EVEN *IT* does, then i'm pretty sure Susanoo's sword doesn't exist...unless you have the Mangekyo Sharingan)

 

It is VERY important IMHO that anyone wanting to pursue Nihonto as a hobby/study to remember that Nihonto is primarily a CONTEXTUAL art; furthermore, IMHO it is very important that anyone wanting to pursue human existence as a deliberate activity to remember that living is primarily CONTEXTUAL.  Similar to racism, where peoples are deemed trash--without evening looking at them--simply because they are contextually Asian/Black/White/etc, (alphabetical order) in Nihonto there are things like "a polish by a non-traditionally trained polish is ALWAYS detrimental"--you don't even need to look at it...to discuss the formalistic, so-called "merits" i.e. the lack of, of such a polish because it's like apples and oranges: you may have the best orange in the world, but we want apples.  From time to time one will read, "In respect to the brightness of hamon, Nagamitsu is equal to Mitsutada.  But in the clearness of the Ji, Mitsutada is superior".  For most of us, IMHO it's intuitive that a bright hamon looks better than a weak one; when i saw one to which my reaction was, "Holy cow i can see it all the way from here!" It was a humbling experience that filled me with a very enjoyable sense of gratefulness.  But that may ~not~ be your experience.  Well if not, then i think you're screwed. Because it seems to me that's what many of us seem to be after.  So to answer the question "if I were to compare a Muramasa vs an exemplar juyo sword", IMHO the answer is simply "what would the NBTHK say?"  If one's kantei scores are SO HIGH and one's knowledge so comprehensive and one's library so full of books re. crucial info that many of us will never, EVAR get access to, such that one can confidently say "if i were a NBTHK judge i would say it is..." and if the Toko Taikan never, ever gets amended ever again, it is really only then that IMHO any meaningful answers re craftsmanship can be disseminated.  Until one is EXTREMELY knowledgable, IMHO one just simply ~cannot~ engage Nihonto from the purely formalist angle of "craftsmanship" although i totally see why one would want to.

 

Just my opinion; yes i know that because i am a noob the above is bound to be flat out incorrect.  You can correct me, but i will never respond!

-Caleb