Availability Of Raw Material

[Ken-Hawaii]

 

The hamon that Yasutsugu was able to put on these old blades was generally better than the hamon he was able to put on his blades. This is an indication then that he did not have access to the material that the old Yamashiro and Soshu smiths had. And it also pops the bubble again on Shinto and Shinshinto smiths faking old works to the point of people not being able to tell so well. Because the main problem comes back to the lack of the correct raw materials to get the job done,

This quote from Darcy in another thread has a conclusion that I've been thinking about for a long time. Why did later tosho NOT have access to the same raw materials as Kamakura & Nambokucho smiths? Sure, there was other material available, including Namban Tetsu, but if a smith really wanted to make the same quality blades, wasn't it possible for him to set up a forge, & create tamahagane the same way they did in the past? It's not like all of the iron sands had disappeared, so what stopped/is stopping tosho from simply creating the same quality of materials? This is probably something obvious, but if so, my brain seems to missing it!

 

Ken

 

[b.hennick]

Hi Ken:

Same iron sand, same charcoal, same smelter, same knowledge, same experience.... Too many variables to get perfect. If it were easy it would have been done many times over.

Regards,

Barry

[SAS]

I have read that in earlier times, local resources were used; later, scalability and consolidation of some processes meant that local variables were no longer extant, such as the various mineral elements. Still early here, hope that makes sense.

[Stephen]

Think lots of things come into play

below same trees the bright colors in 2013, 

every year after bout like the latter pic, so many variables, ground moisture, night and day temps, ect and on 

[seattle1]

Hello:

 Isn't the conflation of hamon and better older materials some sort of contradiction? Where is it demonstrated that older material inputs were better? If we admit to Albert Yamanaka's claim that no smith "made or forged swords with the intention of turning out a great work of 'art' " (Nihonto News-Letter, Vol. II, No. 4 (April, 1969), p.31, wasn't the goal to make better functioning swords within the contexts of their times? Finally I suspect that technological change, local access as well as cheaper imports of inputs as time went on, all played a role in cost reduction, a universal reason to change one's ways.

 Arnold F.

[Ken-Hawaii]

As I understand it, Arnold, Shinto & later tosho have been trying to replicate Kamakura blades for hundreds of years, in which case I have to think they were smart enough to use the same materials, if for no other reason than to eliminate the variables that Stephen refers to.

 

Stephen,

 

so many variables, ground moisture, night and day temps, ect and on

no problem with this concept, but then how did Kamakura & Nambokucho smiths make their consistently-great blades? They had the same variables, didn't they?

 

Ken

 

[SAS]

I think when appearance of certain activities in the steel becomes conflated with "better" and swords are no longer tools but become "artifacts" or "art", we lose sight of the origins of the objects, and the intention of craftsmen to make the best tool they can using the technologies they possess with the materials they have. Since I bought Nagayama's Connoisseur's Book of Japanese Swords, I have often wondered at his characterization of steels as "strong" or "weak". Obviously this had no real bearing on the material strength and bore mainly on appearance alone.

[SwordGuyJoe]

no problem with this concept, but then how did Kamakura & Nambokucho smiths make their consistently-great blades? They had the same variables, didn't they?

 

Ken

I have often thought that part of what makes old blades great or at least the impression of greatness, is the time itself. It's recognized that every era made their utilitarian blades that are more weapon than art. If that is the case, over the last 700 years, why spend the time and money to preserve them when you can collect something cheaper or use a cheaper weapon? It takes a lot of money and effort to do so, so doesn't it stand to reason that many kazuuichimono level works have fallen by the wayside? Would a samurai look at a sword the same way that we do? Would he look at it more as if he had a damaged blade that could be reworked/fixed/repaired and after time, he could get his sword back or would he move on and get a different one? Perhaps trade the steel to a smith/merchant to reduce the cost of a different sword? Either way, the swords that were preserved were the ones worthy of preservation or those that meant enough to a samurai or his family later on. Carry this "process of elimination" forward a few centuries, a few dozen wars, a few hundred battles, and then many - but not all - of the average to worse swords would be gone. Left to rust, rot, or recycle.

 

There are thousands of documented smiths in the koto and Shinto eras, where as today we have about 300. There are masters today that make excellent art swords, but others that make pedestrian works, and swords made for iai. Many practitioners' swords break, bend, etc. that makes them no longer worth preserving - not that that was the reason they were made. Those that were/are made by masters will last the span of time and show that some modern smiths were very good. The catch is that since there are no more wars or battles to make swords for, the most average of swords will likely survive, therefore watering down the average of quality for the era. If you take simple math to say of the 300 smiths, 10% are truly special. That's is the mukansa/nlt group. Then say of those 30 smiths, each will make 10-20 masterpieces (relatively speaking - I'm not trying to imply that gendai/shinsakuto is as good as all koto swords), some smiths making more, some far less. That leaves 300-600 truly special/juyo level swords from this one snapshot in time. Some of these will be lost either to negligence, fire, etc. of course.

 

If (yes I noticed how many "if's" and "?'s" That I'm throwing out), that same logic is applied to koto time, your base of swordsmiths is exponentially larger, some "mukansa" level some just an average smith that had an exceptional day, so many more swords by count would survive as they were worthy of restoration and saved from future battles, where much (most IMO) of the below average swords will not survive, since much like an iai sword today, it wasn't meant to. The other point that doesn't escape me is how recent swords are all available for us to see in books, the internet, shows, etc. Look at a bundle of kazuuchimono and a bundle of Showato and people will all get the impression that koto and Shinto swords are better, even the worst quality of them. I don't disagree with this statement. I am merely trying to make the point that perhaps, part of what makes swords of the distant past so great is that the past is so distant. They have the benefit of much of their worst swords being lost to time and improving the remaining "average" quality.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Damn good point, Joe, & one I hadn't considered.    Winnowing does tend to improve the breed!

 

Ken

 

[John A Stuart]

Another factor is during certain periods certain commodities were unavailable in some areas due to conflicts in trade relations or outright warfare. Some sources may have been depleted after time. John

[Kronos]

Joe raises a good point in that time has almost certainly separated the wheat from the chaff so to speak, Then we're still left with the dilemma that if you take the 300 swordsmiths working today, say between 1980 and 2010, then take all the swordsmiths working in just Bizen province between 1278 and 1311 (to fit era's) and double it to include a possibility of the worst smiths that are not recorded and made consistent garbage you end up with 176ish (so doubled it's 352). Not a massive difference.

 

Included on this list of Kamakura smiths though are the likes of many ichimonji/fukouka/yoshioka smiths that while many are mumei now flood the juyo and tokuju along with Osafune smiths like Norimitsu, Sanenaga and don't forget Junkei Nagamitsu among others was still working.  There's also the Hatakeda smiths such as sanemori; Omiya and so on.

 

So I'm yet to see a single shinsakuto that could compete with a large percentage of these Bizen smiths and utterly pale in comparison to the listed ones. So what did these smiths have that cannot be replicated today? If modern smiths knew they'd certainly be making equivalent swords. It's a difficult question and raw materials could be the answer; so then if this is the case surely there'd be just as good iron sand somewhere outside of Japan which hasn't been depleted that could be used to make tamahagane and replicate earlier works?

[Ken-Hawaii]

I really doubt that the iron sand in any given location is depleted, James. Five percent of earth's entire crust is iron, so it's always going to be washing down from its sources, and depositing itself in low points, eddies, & turns of rivers & streams. And with the massive floods in, say, Okayama, I'm betting that there would always be more, no matter how many tosho were gathering it up. I think only the laziest of them ran out.

 

I do doubt that they would want to stray very far from their own area, however, as the trace minerals found in all iron deposits would vary, changing the quality of the tamahagane.

 

Ken

 

[SAS]

I suspect that in early days the smaller scale of the bloomeries producing tamahagane would yield a different material than the limited run yet mass-produced tamahagane produced taday. This seems like a good PhD thesis for someone to compare tamahagane recovered from archeological sites versus currently produced material, and run spectrographic analysis on them. (Hey, wait a minute, I think that may have been done....anyone remember reading about that?)

[Kronos]

That's what I mean by depleted, as in the used all the stuff with the best mineral content for a given outcome so what was left couldn't produce the same results as in previous generations.

[SwordGuyJoe]

I'm merely speaking to averages and that the average for old swords is skewed. Is the best of koto better than the best gendai smiths? Sure. Is the worst of nambokucho better than war era showato? Absolutely! But I believe that the average of shinsakuto and gendaito is not as far off as assumed today, since we don't actually know what "average" looks like, just average of what remains.

[Shugyosha]

Hi Joe,

 

So here I am sitting out on this tree limb and I'm about to get to sawing at it...

 

Whilst I absolutely agree with your reasoning, I'm not sure that this is the way to look at it.

 

Is it not the case that the best works by koto smiths are better (or regarded as better) than the best works of shinto smiths notwithstanding that there might have been a greater thinning out koto works over time? Essentially what I'm getting at is that, however many shinto swords are eliminated from the equation, if the best five (or however many) koto works are put up against the best five shinto works of all time, the koto works will win despite the fact that there are more shinto works extant.

 

As regards Ken's original question, (and I don't know the answer) but here's a bit of supposition:

• The best quality iron sand will be used up first (gold mines in certain provinces were pretty much mined out by the 18th century), so it was possible to use up all of a commodity in a particular locallity); 
• The more easily accessible sand will be used up before the stuff that is hardest to get to; 
• Smiths working with a material that they know inside out and which is of a consistent quality will achieve consistently higher workmanship; 
• Groups of smiths were forced to move around during war time or as a result of natural disasters are more likely to have to work with materials of a quality that they are not used to;
• When peace broke out in the Edo period raw materials were available from  a variety of sources and so the iron available might have come from a mixture of sources or at least was less likely to be from a single source; 
• Many of the swords produced in the shinto period were more akin to art swords rather than swords made as weapons that were coincidentally beautiful and also were not made for use against armoured oponents so the need for the best quality steel possible was reduced.

I'm sure someone will shoot all of this down shortly, but it has been fun trying to hypothesise.

 

Best,

John

[seattle1]

Hello:

 Lots of interesting strands!  To throw in another monkey wrench consider what a sword made during the Kamakura era might have looked like during its time when polishing techniques are said to be much less revealing of the visual beauty of the jigane and jihada in comparison with polishing methods of the last hundred years or so. I suspect they may have been more admired in their own times for there functional qualities than for their aesthetic ones. Is it possible that an old blade that is untired and in very close to original state might look so good today when contemporarily polished in comparison with more recently made blades just because it has been exposed to the advantages of current polish knowledge? When we make intertemporal comparisons the judgments of good, better, best could get quite distorted.

 Arnold F.

[Jussi Ekholm]

NBTHK Token Bijutsu 664 - Article by Naruki Issei (I hope I got his name correctly) - Comparison of satetsu from various parts of country and the results in homemade steel (that is about the loose translation). 10 examples were made and the result explained and studied. My Japanese is not good enough to read it and give an explanation of it. But I believe it explains how different starting material results in some features being different. For examples some test examples were darker in color, some produced chikei, kinsuji could easily be seen on some etc.

 

Very interesting stuff but unfortunately too advanced for me.

[ROKUJURO]

This is an interesting topic.

I have some experience in producing iron from iron ore in a bloomery furnace as it was used in the early iron age in Europe, The TATARA works in a similar way, and the material produced is quite close, as one can see in the research paper of TATSUO INOUE on the subject. So I may be able to offer some information about the characteristics and properties of TAMAHAGANE in general.

Firstly, the iron (TAMAHAGANE) produced is very pure and contains almost no alloying element with the exception of carbon. All other elements contained are impurities with a percentage of less than 0,01%. However, TAMAHAGANE is not consistent in its composition, but the contents, especially in carbon, vary to an extent. This makes the selection of the raw metal so important.

Black iron sand (SATETSU), the best of which is mined in the CHUGOKU mountains, contains a number of other elements, e.g. titanium, silica, aluminium, calcium a.s.o. in considerable amounts. But one has to know that by the bloomery method the iron oxide is reduced to metallic iron without passing the molten state. This prevents other elements being solved in the liquid iron. So there are no different iron alloys being produced by the TATARA process (wherever this took place) with the exception of very small amounts of impurities which we can consider as not having an impact on the mechanical properties of the steel produced, but perhaps could influence the inner crystalline system, resulting in different features on the finished blades. .

This allows the assumption that differences between KOTO and SHINTO sword blades are mostly related to the ways the steel was forged and heat-treated by the respective smiths. 

P.S.
By the way, iron sand is not only found in Japan, but it can equally be obtained from the shores of the Baltic Sea by the magnet method. There is no reason why it should not occur in other places as well. 
 

[SAS]

By the way, iron sand is not only found in Japan, but it can equally be obtained from the shores of the Baltic Sea by the magnet method. There is no reason why it should not occur in other places as well. 

 

 

 

As it does here as well; I am looking forward to having a go at producing steel in my own tatara in due course. Like in Japan, it will have to be covered as it rains cats and dogs here.

 

[SAS]

Sorry my editing skills are not up to par; last phrase attributed to Rokujuro is mine.

[John A Stuart]

Forgetting activity, when you observe swords from different groups it is quite obvious something about the metallurgy of the steel is different. Black steel, white steel, blue steel. Even by the same smith earlier steels show one colour while later swords had a different colour. This can only be as a result of a different source for the steel. There are even records of smiths moving to a different province and you see how this move initiated change in their steel. John

[Ken-Hawaii]

 

So there are no different iron alloys being produced by the TATARA process

Jean, this is patently wrong. There have been many studies done that show metals (both tamahagane & blades) are considerably different in composition. In fact, homogeneity doesn't seem to exist. I'm not an expert on the bloomery process, but it's evidently different than the tatara process. Also, what makes you think that iron sands are "pure?" Iron alloys with a tremendous number of other elements, both naturally & through normal alloying methods.

 

Last, like John, I have seen a number of blades that are entirely different colors, from black to a rather astonishing pink, & these can only be achieved through different metallic compositions.

 

Ken

 

[ROKUJURO]

Ken,

I did not write that SATETSU is pure, but TAMAHAGANE. SATETSU contains a lot of other elements, as you can read.

Alloying iron/steel with other elements like manganese, chromium, nickel a.s.o. requires a liquid state of the matrix (iron), but in the TATARA as well as in the bloomery furnace, iron does not melt, except in some place where the blower tube goes into the furnace. In these places, even cast iron with the respective high carbon content can occur. Of course, there is also the risk of having small amounts of accompanying element in these lumps of iron, but as I heard they are discarded and re-used in an OROSHIGANE furnace to produce high carbon content steel. Analyses of blades I have seen state the pureness of the steel with the exception of very small amounts of impurities (plus of course the varying amount of carbon). In fact, we do not know (and most researchers do not believe) if these impurities cause different mechanical properties.

Alloyed steel cannot be quenched in water; this would cause the metal to crack. This is the reason for the industrially made WW II GUNTO being quenched in oil. 'Pure' steel with a composition of mainly iron and carbon as encountered in traditionally forged blades has to be quenched in water to get a hard cutting edge. 

The colour of the finished blades is - as far as I know - caused by different polishing methods, especially with the use of KANAHADA: It is possible to create a darkish or a bluish tinge. It is not the colour of the steel itself.   

[SAS]

There are too many mischaracterizations to address individually in the last post; needless to say, steel itself is primarily iron with only trace elements added, such as varying amounts of carbon (usually less than 1%) and other elements. Color of the steel does not rely on polishing but is inherent in the material. Even though the tatara method does not result in complete melting, there is sufficient fusion to result in varying trace elements to be incorporated based on material inputs. These cannot be visually identified by the smith; the smith sorts materials based on their characteristics before and after being heated and quenched, then broken. Higher carbon materials break under those conditions, while low and medium carbon materials are more resilient. There is a lot more to say but I am sure Ken can contribute a LOT.  

[ROKUJURO]

Steve,

trace elements/impurities and alloy elements are not the same.

Please read about direct reduction in a bloomery furnace. For an alloy you need to reduce the other minerals besides iron to their metallic state before they can go into solution. This requires higher temperatures than that of the iron oxide reduction, which is about 1.250°C. Melting point of iron is 1.538.°C.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Jean, I'm not sure where you are getting your data, but I respectfully disagree with you that alloy elements cannot also be trace elements...I'll leave out the impurities part. If you think iron sand is 100.000% iron, you're wrong. And I'm also sorry to utterly disagree that steel color is a function of polishing technique! You really need to look at a LOT more blades!!

 

But we're getting sidetracked from my original question, which is whether later tosho had access to the same raw materials as earlier smiths. I'm not sure exactly how iron sands were gathered by tosho/deshi, but with 5% of just about all minerals being iron, there sure should be a lot of it available along any waterway from its being washed down from above. Does anyone have information on how it was collected so many years ago?

 

One interesting & related question is whether the iron-sand composition changed along any given waterway, as the very heaviest particles would get deposited higher up?

 

Ken

 

[SAS]

http://d-arch.ide.go.jp/je_archive/english/society/wp_je_unu8.html

Found this, looks pretty good.

[Ken-Hawaii]

Funny, I had just finished reading that, Steve. This excerpt https://books.google.com/books?id=bRFDAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA146&lpg=PA146#v=onepage&q&f=falseis more like what I meant, but I still don't know whether people just wandered over to the riverbanks with big buckets, or something, to collect the sand.

 

It seems like titanium was a fairly common elemental component in some areas, as I've found several references to it. But, again, this is getting sidetracked.

 

Ken

 

[SAS]

I read that people panned for gold, same process for satetsu i would imagine, but I don't know if they ever built sluices like in the West. I did read about how they went to areas where granite rock formed riffles, which would concentrate the heavies.