Nihonto Club can now be found on Twitter (@NihontoClub). Follow us to get the most up-to-date information about the site.

Dear Members and Guests,

I'm delighted to inform you that NihontoClub.Com has moved to a new server which offers greater stability and performance (for just a little greater price). It's been tough few weeks for me as our former hosting company (BlueHost.com) was blocking the site without warning, claiming it was causing performance issues on the server. Due to their rude and inconsiderate approach I decided not to contest this claim but move all the sites to a different hosting provider.

And I can tell you, it's been great so far. It's a VPS (virtual private server), not shared hosting. The site shows much faster response, there is no lag at peak times. Also, using an opportunity to spend some time with the test site I've made quite a few changes which were planned long time ago, but kept being delayed as I would have had to bring the live site down for a while to apply them.

After running the site for almost 2 years by now I have a pretty good idea which resources are popular and which aren't. Some areas like Glossary and Weblink Directory remained too heavy and clunky to use, with few redundant or unnecessary features. This also affected the overall site performance.

Nihonto Club wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We hope that the coming year will be full of good moments and surprising discoveries for you on the long way of Nihonto study.

Due to increasing number of user registrations from automated spam scripts, additional checks & trials have been added to critical areas of the site in order to distinguish valid users from spam bots.

If you experience any issues with these verification procedures, please contact Nihonto Club administration using this form.

Kind Regards,
NihontoClub.com Administrator

Swordsmith Index page is now extended with specialised search facilities.

Main index page offers 3 options to search for smith records by ID (Hawley IDs are now in use), Name (romaji) and Name (Kanji), or any combination of those. Individual search mode can be chosen for each field: Is Equal To, Contains, Contains Any Word, Contains All Words, Starts With, Ends With, Does Not Contain.

You can also find a number of new tabs at the top of the main index page:

• All Schools
• Mei Search
• Editor's Assistant (only available to registered users)

The first tab leads to

Swordsmith Index is now available on NihontoClub.com. 12212 swordsmith records have been initially uploaded. With the initial data import being quite modest, the final goal is to provide a record structure giving a comprehensive view of smith’s background and features of his works in a way which allows easy data aggregation and filtering.

Basic data cleansing and correction of typos and obvious errors has been performed on the data before the initial import. Another important goal was to reduce (to certain degree) a level of ambiguity when referring to names (e.g. fathers, students, teachers), schools, places and times which often accompanies Nihonto sources. However, due to bulk operations and massive data transformations done using Excel files and SQL database, mistakes were unavoidable. Therefore all the imported records are marked as 'unverified' using a verification flag. They would need to be verified manually over next months (years? decades?) to fill the gaps and increase the data quality.

The feature has been fully implemented now. Registered users are allowed to post an unlimited number of collections by publishing content of Private collection type (see Create content menu once logged in). Each collection is a list of records of the following customized types:

• sword record (available fields: Nagasa, Saki-haba, Moto-haba, Sori, Sori Type, Sugata, Type, Period, Jihada, Nakago, Mei, Hamon, Boshi, Horimono etc)
• tsuba record (available fields: Width, Height, Thickness etc)
• generic item record - for any other item types (available fields: Custom Type, Description)

The following new features have been added:

• Each glossary term has a new field now to define its Japanese name(s)
• When viewing the Glossary by category, terms in each category are shown in a table with 2 columns: term in English and in Japanese
• A new page has been added: view glossary by term. It shows the Glossary as a flat table:

  

  with sortable columns

At the moment the Glossary is almost empty. I'll try to fill up the Sword Glossary within next few months, doing it on a regular basis. Enjoy!

This site uses Japanese characters extensively. Many computers with English or other Western operating systems don't show them by default.

If you see boxes, question marks in following text:

日本美術刀剣保存協会

you still do not have support for Japanese characters.