試斬大小

Gosoke coerced me into buying a wakizashi this month, so I told him that it had to meet certain standards. If I'm going to buy one, then damn it, I want one that can cut! He agreed and told Oka-san (his sword appraiser way the hell out in Shiga prefecture) to send him a bunch of waks that have potential as cutters. Gosoke emailed me earlier this week with the good news. "Twenty man (200,000 yen) and it's yours!" he said. I swear I could hear him smiling through the phone. He had a couple on hand to show me when I stopped by Suimokai Hombu on Thursday afternoon. One was an incredibly beautiful and long koto (lit. "old sword") wak that weighed next to nothing. The next one he showed me was almost just as nice aesthetically, but was a bit shorter and was a considerably heavier "mumei" ("no name") from the shinto ("new sword") period... at least that's what he thought.

Basically, any good sword expert will tell you that one major difference between koto (old) and shinto (new) period swords is the quality and weight of the steel. For some reason, the magical sword-making skills that are now only talked about in some mythical sense (and are a part of Japanese folklore) suddenly vanished around the 15th or 16th century. All swords made after this mysterious period are known as (see above) "shinto," due to their distinctly different features. While many swordsmiths in the shinto and shinshinto ("new new sword" ... yeah, I know, just bare with me) periods still emulated the koto smiths to the best of their abilities, even masterpieces from these periods paled in comparison to fine koto blades.

Ergo, the lack of information in addition to the weight difference between the koto wakizashi and the unknown wakizashi led us to believe that the unknown wak was a shinto blade. I bought our mysterious friend, the heavy shinto blade since more weight means easier cutting!