Waki2-1

Waki2-2

wakizashi 001

wakizashi 002

wazihandle

waziblade1

I have acquired another Wakizashi. It is said to be Nobuyoshi, but not sure of era, school, date etc. I have included pics of 2 documents that came with the Wakizashi, but (blush blush!) they may be upside down. Any info appreciated.

Baz

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

Some of you might have noticed that photos weren't showing up when uploading them into Image Gallery. This has been fixed now. Images uploaded in the past which had broken thumbnails are now appearing correctly.

Apologies to all the users who had issues with uploading.

Regards,
Stan

There's been the following announcement on eBay site:

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/200902231205572.html

This means no more bargains for Irish and British collectors and researchers, thanks to Government's inability to fight crime.

Soshu tanto

Kaifu

Official Launch date Feb 16th, 2009
Items available for sale Sunday, March 8th at 12 noon exactly

RealNihonto.com is an online retail shop for nihonto and nihonto accessories. The owner, Mr. Christian T. Chaffee has been studying Japanese art swords for 20 years and has retained some of the most remarkable pieces he has come across for his own collection.

The site is also aimed at education and appreciation of the fine art of handmade swords. So please visit the site and enjoy viewing video and high resolution photography.

The Japanese Centre Northern Ireland has announced on their web page:

TENSHIN SHODEN KATORI SHINTO RYU BUJUTSU
OTAKE SENSEI COURSE IN IRELAND
FIRST TIME EVER IN EUROPE SINCE 1980

ALL WELCOME

The course is from Saturday the 2nd to Thursday 7th May 2009 in Coleraine N Ireland. any Belfast airport will be ok. Dublin is fine but 2hrs train
journey. From any airport then train or bus from Central Station Belfast to Coleraine.

Dear Members,

There had been issues recently with sending activation emails to new accounts.

If you didn't receive a welcome email after creating a new account at NihontoClub.com please use Request New Password form or contact me directly.

Kind Regards,
Stan Nazarenko

Reading Japanese names is not easy. Reading a name from 500 years old sword tang is significantly more difficult. But even when the kanji is read, what is the correct way to pronounce it and, subsequently, put it in romaji? Not just various Kanji symbols may have different readings in names, but some smiths preferred non-standard readings, or Chinese form instead of Japanese form. Is it Akitoshi or is it Myoju? (an example from Hawley himself) It may be a source of great confusion, especially for non-Japanese students with good, limited or even no knowledge of the Japanese language.

Luckily, specialized reference literature helps to find answers. The reader may just open Hawley's book and look up the right name. But is it as unambiguous and easy? The answer is no. Even the same name in kanji may have different readings (and records) in Hawley's and they won't be the ones which are easy to find either. First of all, we shouldn't forget that Willis Hawley was using paper notes, cards and a typewriter to compile his monumental book. It didn't allow machine validation which we enjoy in present days, insertion and modification was difficult and error-prone. Some duplicate records were added (and then found). Then, Hawley himself may have (consciously or unconsciously) put some records multiple times under different pronunciations. And finally, some smiths may have changed their names themselves leaving the honour of recording it to Nihonto historians.

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.

I was updating many smith records recently and got fed up with the amount of time needed to locate a record for a particular smith (by name, era, province, school etc). When trying to find one smith I always end up with filling out missing Kanji, signatures and whatever else is missing for few other smiths with the same name.

It is very distracting, so I've decided to solve this problem (at least to some extent) by stopping for the moment and filling all the missing Kanji in formal smith names. It's not a small job: 2156 smiths (out of 12258 record in total) don't have Kanji representation of their name in Swordsmith Index at the moment. It's clear from the past experience that doing 100 record per day is already a very challenging task. So I've decided I'll do my best to finish this work by Christmas.