The Craftsmen Involved In Making A Samurai Sword
Just like the best clothes are handmade, genuine samurai swords are handmade and always will be. Creating a samurai sword is an extremely skilled specialist job and not one any layman (or even someone skilled in other areas of forging) can just start doing. Most people could correctly guess that a swordsmith is the person who forges the blade, but few people are aware that the swordsmith works with other specialist craftsmen who create other key areas of the sword. To further your understanding of how these incredible works of art are created, I decided to write this article to introduce you to the very basic order of sword creation and the craftsmen involved. As you’ll see, it’s much more of a team effort than you may think.
Swordsmith
The swordsmith is the main man whose project it is and who receives the commission (usually from a collector). He is the one who bounds away at a block of steel and creates the structure of the blade and gives it a rudimentary polish before handing it over to the polisher.
Polisher
Polishing in Japanese sword making parlance means more than simply bringing the blade to a shine, it also means sharpening it. A polisher will, at this stage, work for one or two weeks to bring out key features in the blade such as the hamon (the pattern of the hardened edge) and the jihada (the grain pattern, formed by the folding and forging stage). This is done with successively finer grained polishing stones. After the polisher is done, he hands the sword to the habaki maker.
Habaki maker
The habaki is a small but crucial piece of the sword often made from copper and covered with a metal foil (sometimes of precious metal such as gold, silver, or a gold/silver alloy); it’s the small metal piece above the hilt which acts as a ‘plug’ to keep the sword securely inside the scabbard, and bares decorative file patterns. Once the habaki has been made, the project is handed over to the scabbard maker.
Scabbard maker
Here the hilt is created along with the scabbard (plain wood or lacquered and decorative) the scabbard must be created to allow for drawing of the sword only on the back of the blade (to spare the sharpened edge and the polished sides any undue wear) and to fit snugly with the habaki to prevent the blade rattling inside the scabbard.
And finally…
Once the scabbard maker has completed his work, the sword moves onto the polisher for a final complete polish and then back to the swordsmith whom inspects it thoroughly and if the work meets his standards, will sign the tang of the sword and deliver the finished article to the buyer.
Bear in mind this is just a very crude overview, even knowing the basic process and having some basic idea of the highly skilled manpower which goes into the completed sword, it makes it impossible not to have a great deal more respect and appreciation for this art.