Seki - City of Swords

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend a sword forging demonstration in Seki, a city renowned for their cutlery going back to Japan's feudal era. The museum in Seki only does something like five demonstrations a year, so that one of them happened to be while I was here and had an available weekend seems like very good fortune. I'll admit that I'm a huge nerd when it comes to this kind of stuff; I'm not terribly keen on martial arts exactly, I just have an interest in arms and armor.

I went into the demonstration with a solid background in Japanese swords, but knowing how one of the things is put together says nothing about the basic construction. It's like saying you know how a car is made because you've seen the assembly line, even though you're unclear on how the individual parts were produced. I'd previously pictured the swords being produced by one person, when in reality it was a small team. 'Labor intensive' doesn't begin to describe the process. As part of the iron refining (the demonstration we were watching) the metal is folded over and over... in the roughly hour and a half we observed the team of four folded the iron twice, and swords can have more than ten folds. That's a lot of work before the thing starts looking even remotely sword shaped!