Gunbai: Ancient Japanese Warfare

Iron and Steel Technology in Japanese Arms & Armors - Part 4: Armor making A shop of a armor makers in the Edo period, from   職人尽絵. After discussing how swords and blades in general were made in the last part of my series, in this article I will try to explain how plates for armors were made in the 16th century. If you are already familiar with my series, you will already know that these posts are exclusively made with the late Muromachi and Azuchi-Momoyama period in mind; in fact despite few scattered evidences, plates weren't used to make armors up until the mid 15th century as I have explained in detail here. Unlike with Japanese swords, the information on Japanese armor making seems to be quite rare and scarce , and on top of that, very few metallurgical studies exist both in English and in Japanese, so it is fair to said that this field is still a work in progress. As usual ,  before I start, here the disclaimer; I might have missed somethi...

Chokut ō ( 直刀 ) -  Early Japanese Swords  Three Chokutō blades: two tachi and a ken from the Met Museum. As the name suggest it, the topic of this article would be about Japanese   swords , but not the average Japanese sword people usually think about. In fact in this post I will cover the various blades used to shape Japanese history before the Samurai were born, before Japan was united and prior to the creation of the famous Nihontō. But before discussing the topic, I have to explain a little the nomenclature used in this article. Although in the West people usually associate the Chokut ō with one single type of sword, like for example the Katana, the  Chokut ō is an umbrella term used to indicate an entire family of swords, namely the  ones with straight blades. The terms itself,  直刀 ,   means straight blade ; inside this category we find the Tachi (written with the characters  大刀 which by the Kofun period were read tachi in...

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 onl...