In case if you were wondering why it's been so quiet here for last 6 months, I may reassure you that there is still a great deal of work to do (and many new ideas also) in order to keep improving the resource, and it will be dealt with sooner or later. However, at some stage I realized that further development of Nihonto Club will be difficult, if not impossible, without some very important skill. Therefore I had to finally start formal learning of Japanese language last February. Which I'm enjoying to the very last bit and which takes all my free time (ex.

Chris Chaffee's new retail shop for authentic Japanese art swords, RealNihonto.com strives to deliver the most realistic online sword examination experience available. While creating our retail nihonto shop we asked ourselves, "What would we want to see before purchasing a sword online?" Since there is nothing better than examining a sword in hand, we decided that the next best thing would be to show video of someone else doing just that.

RealNihonto.com is an online retail shop for nihonto and nihonto accessories. The owner, Mr. Christian T. Chaffee has been studying Japanese art swords for 20 years and has retained some of the most remarkable pieces he has come across for his own collection.

The site is also aimed at education and appreciation of the fine art of handmade swords so please visit the site and enjoy viewing video and high resolution photography.

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Can any one tell me what this says on the tang?
I will be very grateful, thank you for your help.

I have a japanese sword that a friend brought back from japan in 1945, and was wondering if anyone could tell me what it says on the tang if I mailed them a rubbing of the tang? Right now I have no way of posting pictures. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sincerly, Greg K. Hulme.

I was reviewing smith's singatures and names in Kanji the other day in order to figure out few things. There is a terrible mix at the moment between traditional Chinese and Japanese characters. While I tried to use traditional Kanji for the names, signatures use all different forms (e.g. I changed all 国 (as for kuni) to 國 in the names, but plenty of mei still contain 国. Same applied to 'hiro': 広 and 廣).

There are different conventions in different sources:

• Toko Taikan uses simplified Japanese forms for smiths' names.
• Yamanaka uses Japanese forms.

Reading Japanese names is not easy. Reading a name from 500 years old sword tang is significantly more difficult. But even when the kanji is read, what is the correct way to pronounce it and, subsequently, put it in romaji? Not just various Kanji symbols may have different readings in names, but some smiths preferred non-standard readings, or Chinese form instead of Japanese form. Is it Akitoshi or is it Myoju? (an example from Hawley himself) It may be a source of great confusion, especially for non-Japanese students with good, limited or even no knowledge of the Japanese language.

Luckily, specialized reference literature helps to find answers. The reader may just open Hawley's book and look up the right name. But is it as unambiguous and easy? The answer is no. Even the same name in kanji may have different readings (and records) in Hawley's and they won't be the ones which are easy to find either. First of all, we shouldn't forget that Willis Hawley was using paper notes, cards and a typewriter to compile his monumental book. It didn't allow machine validation which we enjoy in present days, insertion and modification was difficult and error-prone. Some duplicate records were added (and then found). Then, Hawley himself may have (consciously or unconsciously) put some records multiple times under different pronunciations. And finally, some smiths may have changed their names themselves leaving the honour of recording it to Nihonto historians.

Hi Stan and All,
I know I have not contributed for a while, but I have been busy elsewhere and now will try to make an effort to help and to also learn more about our collections/hobby/addiction/passion once again.
caught up on news, all looks good,
great site Stan!!
regards
John

I was updating many smith records recently and got fed up with the amount of time needed to locate a record for a particular smith (by name, era, province, school etc). When trying to find one smith I always end up with filling out missing Kanji, signatures and whatever else is missing for few other smiths with the same name.

It is very distracting, so I've decided to solve this problem (at least to some extent) by stopping for the moment and filling all the missing Kanji in formal smith names. It's not a small job: 2156 smiths (out of 12258 record in total) don't have Kanji representation of their name in Swordsmith Index at the moment. It's clear from the past experience that doing 100 record per day is already a very challenging task. So I've decided I'll do my best to finish this work by Christmas.

Hello ,I am new to collecting swords,,I have collected knives and blades ,and old weaponery for a while but dont have that collection anymore....I have only 3 swords in my collection..1 I bought brand new from a sword maker in china,..it is only a cheapy ,but a good cheapy,if that makes sense,,the 2nd is a ww2 generals katana and the 3rd another katana i have been told dates from the late 1800`s ..dateing method was a tang viewing....,,I have no idea about maintianing a sword apart from keeping it clean and oiled ...if anyone has any advice on products or methods I would greatly appreciate