Nihonto Club Japanese Sword Information Exchange

I'm going on holidays for a week. I'll deal with all the support queries (if any) on 27th March.

Regards,
Stan

It's been five months since Swordsmith Index was released. I've been spending some evenings and weekends to find and type in more information as I was reading through various sources and here's what we've got so far:

Total smith records: 12250
Verified records: 389 (3.18%) - verified manually to ensure the information is reliable or at least in line with accessible knowledge.
Schools/groups: 93 - entered by hand

Smith Records:

School is known: 1146 (9.36%) - verified and entered by hand
Province is known: 4126 (33.68%)
Kanji name is filled in: 11808 (96.39%)
Era: 11281 (92.09%)
Lineage confirmed: 1460 (11.92%) - number of records which have father's or teacher's record known and correctly identified.
Total signatures: 2735
Unique smiths with signatures: 1946

It's not too bad, I guess. My main task so far was to populate the information about schools and lineage, which could help in the future with efficient search for particular smith of particular school and era. It's been a very, very useful experience, I've learned so much!  read more »

Holidays are over and I'm back to work on the site content. After 3.5 weeks in Cuba I really miss it. By the way, it wouldn't be a surprise really, but there is virtually no nihonto in Cuba. The only sword I managed to see was the one in Bacardi museum in Santiago-de-Cuba. It was a wakizashi in gunto mounts with a very strange (supposedly not Japanese at all) tsuba. Having spent few minutes trying to look at the features of the blade (and being stalked everywhere by vigilant museum workers) it was clear it's just a mass-produced war-time sword.  read more »

Dear All,

I'm on holidays for 3.5 weeks. If you need any assistance with the site, please be patient and we'll sort everything out in August.

Enjoy!

Kind Regards,
kazarena

I've just received Fujishiro's Nihon Toko Jiten (Koto Volume) from Mike Yamaguchi. Can't wait to go home and do some digging!

I was looking for a habaki for my new gimei Kanesada blade. Yes, I know, looking for matching habaki on eBay is a suicide mission on its own. However, this one was a good value and I decided to give it a try.

No, it didn't fit. This habaki is for monstrous size katana (despite the dimensions given by the seller). It had nice quality though, with good dark patina, so I don't mind too much.

The site has been moved to Drupal 5.1. This means that the first stage of site construction is over, things are settling down and I guess it's time to introduce myself and tell a little bit more about Nihonto Club.  read more »