As some of you may have noticed, there have already been some changes in the Swordsmith Index in recent weeks. This announcement provides details on the ongoing and planned updates for the Index.

Macrons for long vowels

When the first version of the Index was released nearly 3 years ago, a decision was made to give the ability to search and maintain data the highest priority. In order to facilitate that, all the names and terms were transformed to plain ASCII format (given the overall state of the internet technology at the time). There was some research done recently by Google which shows that Unicode is now widely adapted and supported across the Internet. This gave me reassurance that it's time to revise this decision. Since we migrated to a new platform 6 months ago, it is technologically feasible now to take another step forward and review the way Japanese names and terms are presented in Swordsmith Index and throughout the site. The proposed changes are also based on feedback from visitors and members of Nihonto Club.

Most importantly names of smiths, schools, provinces, eras as well as signatures will now be presented using macrons (ō and ū) for long o and u. Submission guidelines for Japan-related articles in Wikipedia are worth to be adapted: Manual of Style (Japan-related articles).

This change won't affect searching as both internal search and Google search can process macrons correctly (e.g. if we search for 'Bishu Osafune' it will find both 'Bishu Osafune' and 'Bishū Osafune'). This should make it easier to reconcile Rōmaji with Kanji, and also help non-Japanese readers with pronunciation. As this is (mostly) manual process, it will take a while to migrate the whole site with tens of thousands records into the new format.

Archaic pronunciations

Rōmaji for iye and suye (家, 末 and alternatives) will be replaced by modern forms ie and sue. E.g. Masaiye and Iyetsugu will be displayed and Masaie and Ietsugu. read more »

Ability to send private message (PMs) to other members is available again. Your mailbox is available in the menu on the left hand side (Messages). If you would like to contact somebody else, you may either use Write new message option and pick a recipient, or use the link Send this user a message on the member's account page.
If you don't want to receive email notifications when somebody sends you a PM, disable the flag Receive email notification for incoming private messages in your account.

Swordsmith Index now allows filtering by Province and Era.

Note: when filtering by Era, only traditional Nengō are available. It's currently not possible to filter by historical periods (e.g. Nanbokucho) or sword periods (Koto, Shinto etc). This is due to the fact that filtering works off the specified Start Era field in the smith record. Therefore filtering by Koto period will only show records with Start Era = Koto, and not any Koto smiths as one would expect.

Hi All,
I just joined up here, after being "inactive" in the Nihonto world for several years.
I'm the author of the ToShoW database app, and my wife and I did all the original data entry (later, a couple of other folks entered a bunch to get us to over 10,000 records). My wife manually entered nearly all of the kanji ON/KUN readings, etc., in the kanji database. For a long time, it was perhaps the best computer-based kanji 'dictionary' available, without spending big $$$. read more »

Dear Members and Visitors,

As promised, NC software has been upgraded over weekend. This is an essential step towards further development of the NC platform. The following features are available immediately:

• New spam prevention tools to stop occasional outbursts of unsolicited content and make it less painful for authentic visitors (e.g. when using contact form and password recovery)
• Faster and easier to use rich-text editor for posts and comments
• Numerous minor improvements across the board

 read more »

Talks about potential sword ban started in December 2007 after another high profile attack involving a 'samurai sword'. It is known that Department of Justice had been in contact with local martial arts organisations (Iaido Association of Ireland is particular) is order to avoid unnecessary restrictions for martial arts practitioneers and authentic sword collectors. In the light of recent global trends to regulate possession and transportation of 'samurai' swords (which sometimes comes in quite narrow-minded forms) the new Irish legislation appears to be reasonable, especially taking into account the (more than modest) size of the local sword scene. Mirroring the UK sword ban which was introduced in April 2008 as one of the questionable measures to fight 'knife crime', authentic hand-made Japanese swords (Nihonto) are exempt (however I couldn't yet find any reference to whether sports equipment such as iaito and shinken is to be banned or not).

The real concern is the practical side of the legislation and the way it's going to be implemented. There's been numerous occasions in UK since introduction of the sword ban when law-abiding collectors had trouble importing antique swords. It's perfectly understandable due to the fact that in order for Customs to make sure that it's legal to import a sword, some sort of cerfificate required proving its age and provenance. And the most common cert of this kind (if any) is the NBTHK paper hand-written in Japanese. No wonder Customs officers, sorting office workers and law enforcement authorities would not be able to take it as a supportive documentation without difficult (and costly) translation.And this is the neigbouring UK which is much more accustomed to importing/exporting Japanese collectible weapons than Irish. How many Customs officers and An Post employees were instructed about differences between replica and authentic Japanese swords or even have seen ones? Will they be collector-friendly or take an eBay approach and stop any import of 'illegal samurai-like swords' unless (with immense trouble) proven otherwise? If temporarily or permanently seized, will real Nihonto be given a proper care?

There is no doubt that curculation of cheap and dangerous replica had to be stopped, even with the level or crime involving samurai swords being ridiculously low in comparison to the usage of widely available home utensils.But will the fair treatment of martial arts practitioneers and sword collectors be guaranteed? Time will tell.

Ever wondered if one day you could just:

• search your favourite trusted sword related sites for information about some smith or school?
• get a list or an RSS feed of all Nhonto articles published this week?
• look at new items available for sale today from your trusted dealers on one page?
• Get notified when Kotetsu is for sale again from Aoi Art (or any other seller)?

All this is possible with modern technologies. In fact, I have most of it up and running since Christmas on my home server. Have a quick look here:

A web crawler is running at designated times through a set of well-known Nihonto related sites, and results are available through Multisite search within NihontoClub. It also covers Nihonto Club site itself, providing much higher quality searching facilities (let's be honest, NC built-in search isn't great - it doesn't even recognise word variations). You may see how many times the phrase was found on each of the targeted seb sites, filter by site, etc (see the screenshot).

There's one downside: it needs more power. In order to make it usable just for one person, I'd need almost twice as powerful web hosting (which means higher running costs).

I'm working on a fully automated version now, which will be available some time before the end of the year (sorry folks, too many real life committments) and it's going to be hosted on my home server with free access from the main website. It won't be fast, there may be downtime, but I hope you may find it useful.

I have aquired another Wakizashi, pics on page 2 of my gallery. It is said to be Nobuyoshi, but not sure of era, school, date etc. I have included pics of 2 documents that came with the Wakizashi, but (blush blush!) they may be upside down. Any info appreciated.

Baz

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