Nihonto Club

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.

As Swordsmith Index is more or less in a good shape (in a sense of having something to start with) I've been working for last week on Sanjo school keizu. So far I've managed to find nearly all smiths attributed to the school according to Sho-Shin and Nihonto Koza, 67 in total. The only absent ones are: Yasunori EI-SHO 1046 and Morichika KAN-TOKU 1044. If you know the IDs of these smiths in Hawley's or anything about them, please let me know. Some smiths are difficult to attribute to either Sanjo or Heianjo schools and I'm leaving it up to you to decide how far my judgement is from more reliable sources.

Once I'm finished with keizu, I'm going to write down school's description and comments on most famous smiths.

It's still a mistery to me how to show smiths genealogy as a tree in an easy way which could be reused in different pages. Eventually I'll have to write my own module for that.

Overall I'm enjoying it quite a lot, I think the idea is working. This website has definitely improved the way I study Nihonto. As well, while I'm filling in the smith records, the whole idea of them being visible to (potentially and most likely) more experienced enthusiasts encourages me to treat this work much more seriously. It would help if more sources were available to me at that time, but it will come.

Also, I finally managed to enable Bibliography module the way I wanted it to be. I'd like to put few more records before posting about it in the News section, but overall idea is simple. It provides a way to list sword-related literature in a professional way with ability to filter by author, keywords etc. Also, it simplifies references in texts greatly: each source (be it a book or web page or magazine etc) can have a citation key and then all you need is to use this key in the text surrounded by {bib} and {/bib} (square brackets instead of {}). The page processor will replace it by a footnote e.g. [1] and will put a list of references in one of the industrual formats (customizable) in the end of the article. Let's say I wanted to refer to Connoisseur's: [1]. Have a look at the References section below, it's auto-generated.

Regards,
Stan

References