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Showing posts from January, 2019

Iron and Steel Technology in Japanese Arms & Armors - Part 3: Bladesmithing

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Iron and Steel Technology in Japanese Arms & Armors - Part 3: Bladesmithing A sword smith of the Edo period  working on a blade , from  彩画職人部類. Introduction  Finally, after a very long time, I'm able to continue with this series; it took a lot of efforts and it was a very hard topic to research , despite the amount of sources available on the net and before getting to the article itself, I would like to spend some words about this specific field: Japanese traditional sword making . To make the long story short , it was extremely complicated because most of the so called modern days  traditional Japanese sword making is related to the Shinshint ō  ( 新々刀 ) tradition, which was developed around the 1764. This is quite late for the period in which my study was focused, the 16th century; moreover there was a dramatic shift in terms of design from the  functionality of the sword to the aesthetic and artistic value of the weapon. So not only swords were made from d