I may have gotten lucky again - another Seki

[Ken-Hawaii]

I just added another NBTHK Hozon-papered wakizashi to our collection, this one attributed to Echizen Seki. The blade came from a friend of mine who is also the togishi, & wow, did he do a great job!! Let me know if you want his name & contact info. Mike has been a member of the Japanese Sword Society of Hawaii much longer than Linda & I have, & we obviously have a lot to learn from him.

 

But back to the topic of Seki Nihonto, I haven't had a chance to start looking up the provenance, & would appreciate any comments. Curran, I now can see why you commented that people fall in love with this school. I can spend the next few years learning about just these two blades!

 

I just noticed in the preview that the nakago is awfully blurred, so I'll have to reshoot that.

[Stephen]

wow really beautiful sword looks like a lot of Soshu den as well, wild hamon. Very nice, I may have a sword for Mike in a few weeks please let me know who he is.

[Martin]

Hi,

 

nice sword indeed.

Wasn´t it listed on ebay recently? Thougt I saw it there just yesterday...

 

cheers,

Martin

[mike yeon]

nice blade. I was looking at that auction myself. I've been wanting to pick up a hitasura blade as one of my next purchases. This one is more profuse with tobiyaki than hitasura. Beautiful balde.

 

mike

[Ken-Hawaii]

Good eyes, Martin! Yes, the blade was up on eBay for about a day because I didn't think it was in our budget. Linda, thank goodness, had other ideas about that, & told me to go visit Mike & buy it immediately. I'm headed over to see him again this afternoon as he found a kozuka for us that has a closely-related theme. I'm sure lucky to have a sword-swinging wife! Any of you have one, too?

 

Stephen, his name is Mike Nii, with an appropriate e-mail address of hamon@hawaii.rr.com, & he lives out here in beautiful Hawaii. Are you looking for a togishi, or do you want to sell him a sword? Just curious.

 

I have a question on exactly what "Hitatsura" means. As far as I know, it just means "tempered area" or something similar. Is there another meaning or definition?

[mike yeon]

Hitasura means full temper. Usually, during the tempering process, clay is applied to blade. A greater amount of clay is applied to the spine to allow it cool slower during the quench. less clay on the edge is needed to form the hamon/yakiba. This coating is even up and down the blade on respective sides.

 

This creates the classic soft steel/hard steel ratio that makes a Japanese sword so wonderfully functional.

 

When the coating is not even, areas outside of the yakiba get tempered so there's areas of hard steels in places where there normally would not be (IE the ji and mune)

 

With this in mind, hitasura blades are very "hard" but more brittle (more hamon = harder but more brittle steel). That's why you won't see many hitasura katana.

 

Like stephen mentioned, this is a characteristic of soshu-den. I beleive some hizen smiths also made hitasura blades.

 

Hope this helps/does not confuse you.

 

mike

[Stephen]

for Hitatsura for something other than full temper in my mind I came across this site..its new to me as I seldom look for other than true Nihonto, Walters swords might not fit in this board thread but I'm giving the link for a few min. of some interesting stuff to look at with the oouu and aaahhh factor.

http://www.waltersorrells.com/blades/new.htm

 

Ken thanks for the address, its for a blade to have polished, did he study under Bob Benson in Hawaii

[Ken-Hawaii]

Stephen, I've never asked Mike if he studied under Bob Benson. They definitely know each other, as we're all members of the Japanese Sword Society of Hawaii. I'll consider asking Mike when I see him this afternoon, but feel free to ask him yourself. FYI, Benson polished the Owari-Seki wakizashi, & I'd love to hear your comparisons on whether he or Mike did the best togi. I don't feel that I'm expert enough to make that decision/observation.

 

Hmm. Looking at Walter Sorrell's Web-site, it does appear that Hitatsura (should that be capitalized? I didn't think it was a name.) is an interesting way to temper a blade. Why would a smith create a blade that is possibly too brittle to use in battle? Is Hitatsura more likely to be a mistake in clay application or a way to show off, rather than something actually planned? My wakizashi doesn't have hamon that crosses the shinogi, but then again I'm quite unlikely to use the blade in combat any time soon...:D.

 

Onwards to provenance again, the only references I've found on-line so far mention Echizen-Seki as being roughly in 1660, & possibly near Mino again. I'm awaiting Barry's reference books, but if anyone has a bit more information, I can target my searches a bit better.

 

Has anyone created a wiki that addresses Nihonto information? That would certainly be useful!

[Darcy]

Hitatsura starts out as a natural expression on Soshu swords around the time of Yukimitsu and Masamune. Originally there is frequent yubashiri in the swords that are too loose to be considered tobiyaki.

 

In the middle Nambokucho it becomes an obvious part of the construction of Soshu swords and those they influence, the large amounts of tobiyaki in the hamon become what we now consider hitatsura.

 

By the Muromachi period it becomes rather mechanical and artificial and possibly made through a different process.

 

Towards the end of the Muromachi other schools copy the hitatsura of Soshu using their own approach, so you will see hitatsura for example in the work of Yosozaemon no jo Sukesada of Bizen.

[mike yeon]

Darcy can certainly explain the reasons behind the birth of hitasura tempering far better than I can.

 

As for:

 

Why would a smith create a blade that is possibly too brittle to use in battle?

 

By brittle I mean hard. The yakiba (tempered edge) is harder steel than the rest of the blade. Harder steel = better edge retention/sharper edge. However, harder steel is prone to breakage.

 

Koto blades tend to have a thinner yakiba/hamon. Thinner hamon, more shock absorbent softer steel = better against armored opponents.

 

You start seeing big flashy hamons during the shinto period. Many were for aesthetic reasons. However in general, shinto blades did not have to be shock as absorbant as koto blades since most combat during the edo period was between unarmored opponents. That's why there's such a high regard for koto blades as being utilitarian.

 

Also, this is not to say blades with big hamon/yakiba just snap in half at the slightest impact. (smiths long before that developed ashi to localize the breaks and you'll see chips rather than blades broken in half.)

 

mike

[Ken-Hawaii]

I hear what you're saying, Mike, but as I have worked almost 40 years as an engineer in metallurgy, I'm finding it hard to equate "hard" & "brittle" with "functional" & "reliable." I think I'm fairly familiar with how Nihonto were constructed, but the explanations I'm seeing for hitatsura on my wakizashi have me a bit perplexed.

 

By brittle I mean hard. The yakiba (tempered edge) is harder steel than the rest of the blade. Harder steel = better edge retention/sharper edge. However, harder steel is prone to breakage.

 

No argument that the ha/yakiba is harder than the mune, or that harder steel means better edge-retention & (generally) a sharper edge. But hard steel doesn't equate in my book with brittle steel, assuming the usual folding of the blade by a competent smith to minimize impurities. I read somewhere that metallurgical tests on Nihonto showed the average ha to have a hardness of up to 58 Rockwell, while the average mune was about 15-20 points softer. That's not unlike many modern-day knives - many of which I have broken in field use.

 

I'm frankly still scratching my head why ashi lines help stop chipping of the yakiba; at most, I would expect a bit more flexibility of the blade, but 1000 years of swordsmiths obviously discovered this by trial & error. So does the hitatsura in my wakizashi help or hinder its usability? It's great for me to explore my blade a centimeter at a time, but if the brittleness of the entire structure might cause it to fail in battle, why would smiths build it that way? I can see that tobiyaki in the ji might be formed from nioi areas of concentration, but is hitatsura just the further spreading of nioi?

 

I'm probably missing something simple here....

[mike yeon]

Hey Ken,

 

Take "brittle" in the relative sense. Harder steel is more "brittle" than softer steel. I should correct myself and say "harder steel is MORE prone to breaking than softer steel."

 

I'm not at all implying a blade with a bigger yakiba is not realiable. Quite the contrary. All nihonto are made with the hard steel/soft steel equation. Difference being the ratio. This ratio markedly changed with the coming of the edo period. No more armored opponents.

 

If you're hitting a hard target like an armored opponent, I will put my money on a blade with a smaller yakiba/thinner hamon.

 

If you're fighting someone wearing just an obi, a blade with a big yakiba will do just fine.

 

Compare the majority of koto blades to shinto blades. One preliminary kantei point when asked "is it koto or shinto?" is the size of the yakiba/hamon.

 

While there are exceptions, blades from the koto period were meant to see everyday use. The quality of blades declined during the shinto period because frankly, there was no more war. The shin-shinto period is testament to this.

 

As for ashi lines, ashi = softer steel within the yakiba. It will not stop the chipping of the yakiba but will conceivably localize a break. When stress is applied to a section of the blade, the idea is the blade will chip at the harder areas because the ashi around it will absorb the stress.

 

This being said, you have a beautiful blade on your hands. I myself love a big, wild hamon and one of my favorite smiths is kozuke daijo sukesada.

 

Enjoy your blade.

 

mike