Sword of the Samurai

Appreciation for the katana cuts across cultures and genres, slicing into the hearts of history buffs, japanophiles, comic book fans and more. But what’s so special about the sword of the Samurai? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian discuss the science of this most skillful blade, the grisly test for its sharpness and its importance in Japanese culture.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert,
you and I have played many a D and D game.
We've talked about it on the show before. Many of
the listeners are D and D fans, some are not.

(00:24):
But I'm curious what weapon did you decide to go
with your first time playing the first time you rolled
up a character. Oh, I went with a katana of course,
Samurai sword. Yeah. This is one of the beautiful things
about D and D is that they meticulously researched weapons
from throughout history so they could insert them into this
game full of elves and goblins. But you learn about

(00:46):
things like katanas and falcions and glaves and all these.
I have all this weird, useless knowledge about melee weapons
from throughout history. Uh. Yeah, katanas are fascinating. Yeah, I
mean it was the sword to and uh. And and
to your point that the fantasy world of Dungeon and
Dragons especially is the it is an unreal history, that is, uh,

(01:07):
that is forged out of out of many a detail
from our actual history of taking on New Shape and
New Form. Yeah, like you're halfling thief can have a
katana and that's not like cultural appropriation or anything, which
we're gonna talk about episode yeah, or is it. I
don't know, it might be well we'll have to get
into that. Ye spoilers to the next episode. But be
that as it may. Uh. Yes, the katana, the Samurai

(01:31):
sword definitely a sexy, sexy weapon. Any any child, any
adult can tell you that that this is a this
is a really cool sword to look at, two wield
and fantasy battle. And I mean it's all over our media, right,
I mean, teenage Muntan, Ninja turtle. Yeah. I forget which
one had the katana. Leonardo Leonardo did. Yeah, he was

(01:52):
always the one you want to do Leonardo does. Swords
is the riff. Yeah. Oh, and then of course the
Highlander movies, Connor McCloud with this ivory, hilted katana even
though he's the Scottish maybe alien immortal. Well but see
he got that sword from an ancient Scottish Egyptian played

(02:13):
by with the Spanish name, played by Sean Connery, So
it's like it's a little complicated with immortals. But but
clearly like the stik of the sword was was was
presented in that film. Yeah, I've been really interested in
just samurai fiction in general lately, and so the Katana
has been on my mind, which is why I asked
you if we could do an episode on this. I'm

(02:33):
working on a project that is going to incorporate elements
of samurai, you know, lore like armor and clothing and
weapons of course, and and their ethos. So I've been
catching up on all the samurai fiction and reading a
ton of Lone Wolf and Cub You know that manga.
I'm familiar with it. I've never read it though. It's
about this father and son. The son's like three years

(02:55):
old as a journey through historical Japan, and he's this
exiled runan. It's pretty fascinating. And then, of course I
watched a ton of Cia Kurasawas movies, the big ones
being Seven Samurai, Thrown of Blood and you know Jimbo.
Those are all starring Toshiro Mufune as the title samurai
usually in most of those cases. Uh. And then of

(03:16):
course there's Jim Jarmish's Ghost Dog The Way of the Samurai.
You remember that movie from the nineties. I never saw it,
but it's the Forest Whittaker Samurai movie. Yeah. And and then, uh,
the other one that I've seen recently that I like
a lot surprising was that takash miche uh movie Thirteen Assassins. Yeah,
it's pretty good. I I haven't watched any of his

(03:38):
films recently. I'm not usually a big fan of his work,
but this is a great samurai movie. And it definitely
shows the power of the katana. There's lots of limbs
flying around and and I assume it's suitably weird. H Yeah, Yeah,
it's definitely, like especially like when you think of like
seven Samurai and thirteen Assassins like next to one another,

(03:59):
and like there's probably fifty years in between the two
of them, it is significantly weirder. Well, you know, I
don't think I've really enjoyed any samurai fiction recently, unless you,
of course, count the American Samurai and Samurai Cop starring
Robert Sadar. Yeah. I mean his katana must have been
made in the Ancient Tree, right, I remember that movie vaguely.

(04:21):
That isn't that tied in with another series of movies?
Is that the American Ninja movies. I don't know that
it's directly tied in with those, but it's in the same,
the same spirit, the same uh you know, culturally slightly insensitive,
but but I do. I also remember reading James Clavel's

(04:41):
Showgun back in middle school. There is a ve novel
about intrigued between between samurai and you had this this
Western character in the midst of it, you know, this outsider.
I've never heard of this. It is a really long novel. Yeah.
The main thing I remember about it, aside from various
details of swordplay and uh and and a few elements

(05:05):
that were perhaps a little too mature for for me
as a middle school reader, I do remember that it
was it was so thick, and I brought it to
scout camp with me, and then it got damp because
it rained, and so the spine remained the same size,
but the bulk of the paperback swelled up to like
three times the size of the spine. Totally remember that. Yeah,

(05:27):
that's funny. Now. When I got older, I did get
into Crosawa films for a while, and I think I
just mainlined a bunch of Corosawa films and today the
really the only one that stands out to me. It
is Throwing of Blood. Yeah, it's great. Throwing of Blood
is the their version of Macbeth basically right and take
brilliant black and white. Yeah. Yeah, it's creepy too, like

(05:49):
the way the witches are done and everything. Yeah, that's
a great film. Yeah, one of my favorite McBeth adaptations
and probably the best death by Aero scene ever. Spoiler
from adst. So, yeah, we've got plenty of samurai fiction
to go around, and we're not even like going through
and listing like there's I mean, if you look at
samurai fiction list on Google, there's just like hundreds of

(06:10):
movies that have been made. And uh, you know, I
think I mentioned this on the show before I grew
up in Singapore and so I ended up watching a
lot of Wosa movies growing up too, And they weren't
necessarily using katanas in all of those movies, but like
that same kind of uh Asian sword play mysticism, it
worked its way into those films in the same way

(06:32):
that they do sort of in Curse Awa. But Curse
I was not necessarily other than like throwing a blood,
there'sn't like magic um. But yeah, so it's just always
been something that's on my mind. And then I started
looking into this and I found out, holy cow, these
swords are apparently like a marvel of engineering even by
today's standards, and they're they're relatively complex in terms of

(06:55):
how they were made and incredibly expensive. Oh kill Bill Uh.
We've seen that. Obviously, that's probably the film that most
people would know Katanas from, because there's a whole long
scene where the katanas being made for her, but like
specific accomplished sword smith. Uh. And that was the one
that really brought to my mind, like, oh, there is

(07:17):
there's an art to this, right, It's not like they're
just like cranking these things out of forge. Now, one
other point about the Samurai before we get in want
into more detail here. I think it's also worth pointing
out that even if you're not dealing with actual Samurai
lacquered armor and uh Samurai swords, the spirit of the
Samurai castle long shadow over the history and the pop

(07:39):
culture of Japan. So even in things like uh, you know,
various science fiction and anime UH franchises, and and even
in for instance New Japan Pro Wrestling, of which I
am I'm a fan, you see the Bushido code, the
way of the samurai reflected in the way some of
these characters are presented to Yeah, there is like a

(08:01):
very strong association with that. I don't know if lifestyle
is even the right word, but like quality of character. Uh.
And these weapons actually because I can say a distinctive
warrior ethos. Yeah, yeah, very much. So. That's one of
the things that I love about Lone Wolf and Cub
is that it's meticulously researched, and the lead character obviously

(08:21):
follows that ethos very closely and constantly talks about it
as you do in Mango, like he's always telling his opponents,
you know, beforehand, like this is why I'm about to
cut you in half because my specific code of honor,
uh makes it so I have to do this because
you're a dishonorable cur Well. I think that the great
thing about the katana is that it is a perfect

(08:42):
extension of the samurai and and the cultural qualities that
go into that. Yeah. So uh, I guess we should
go ahead and get into it a little bit. I
feel like everyone knows on some level what the samurai were,
but we probably need to just unwrap it a bit
as well here, right, so, as I was mentioning earlier,
these are not just like your everyday warriors, right, It's

(09:04):
not like every warrior in Japan was a samurai. They
were expected to have personal characteristics and attitudes that were
different from those of the ordinary soldier. And that's why
they were given the responsibility of wielding these specific weapons,
because they were considered honorable and trustworthy, just like the
sword was because it was so meticulously made. And so

(09:28):
then you get this, uh, what's referred to as the
lifestyle of kendo. We're not going to go away into
this in this episode, but that's basically what's referred to
as the way of the sword, and that subsequently developed
around these weapons. It was a culture essentially based on
how amazing these weapons were, not just in combat, but
just as like artistic artifacts. So the katana itself, it

(09:52):
was invented a millennium ago. That's crazy to think about,
and it is basically if you've never seen one before,
it it's it's this famous curved sword that samurai wielded.
It's still today marveled for its aesthetic construction and skillful engineering.
In fact, we were just talking about this before we
went live on the mic that if you go to
most comic book conventions or like the local pop culture

(10:14):
convention for us as Dragon Con, on the floor, there
is usually a weapons dealer. Uh, and you can buy katanas. Uh.
They have lots of them. I mean they usually have
like swords that are like such and such person's sword
from such and such a movie, right, like Ari Norns
sword or Protos sword or something like that. Um, But
you can just buy katanas too, and they're like a

(10:36):
couple hundred bucks. I think. I have to say I
always enjoy looking at displays for that kind of stuff
to see what what is the most ridunculous blade that
is that is available for purchase, you know, the like
the least realistic, um, you know, most ridiculously designed weapon, right. Yeah.
And that's the thing too, is like I'm not entirely

(10:57):
sure unless you're like a really big fan of the
aesthetics and ethos of samurai lifestyle, Uh, why you buy
a katana and like put it on the wall in
your living room. Although, like I've heard of people who
have those like actually using them in self defense, like
if somebody breaks into their house. But again, I don't
think those swords are made for fighting. Like, I think

(11:17):
they're their metals probably gonna break because they're not made
in the fashion that these katanas were made in. Yeah, now,
I do want to drive a couple of facts home
for here for everybody. So when we're talking about the
invention of the katana sword and the development of katana sword,
there's no joke katana that invented the blade. No, Like,
this is a this is an evolution of a tool,

(11:38):
a tool that was that was that was created to
to fulfill a particular purpose, but then takes on additional
sort of cultural resonance as well. Yeah, it's kind of amazing.
I can't think of a single artifact in our modern
culture that has this much reverence attached to it, right,
and that like it's a thing that took like I mean,

(11:59):
we'll go through this, but it took like something like
sixteen people to make over the course of like months,
and uh then you you you know, give it to
this one person to wield and they're buried with it.
There's a lot of personal attachment to it. I can't
think of anything. I mean, like everything we have is
pretty much disposable, right, like your car, your phone, all

(12:20):
that stuff. It's not like it's made to last for
your entire lifetime and be made of like the best
metals that are possibly available. Yeah, this was this was
a finely crafted item that was that was that was
built to last. Now, at the same time, I do
want to stress that there was nothing magical, like there
wasn't anything truly magical about the Samurai s or these
were tools and Katona's plus two there's no magical bonus. No,

(12:45):
no that for horriple that that's even even rare. But
but as tools, they were items that were they were
made uh with with various physical restraints in place, and
it was certain compromises in play. So these were these
were blades that that could be dull, that could be
uh damaged or destroyed. Uh you know, generally the blade

(13:07):
itself would last longer than the hilt to hilt might
be replaced, etcetera. But it is as phenomenal as these were,
we don't want to fall into the trap of of
of thinking them as something um supernatural, you know, yeah, definitely, um.
But I think that where that sort of supernatural idea
comes from is that historical adherence to the idea of

(13:29):
it being so important in particular lifestyle, so the sword
itself was actually considered a crucial part of a samuraized life.
In fact, when they were born, a sword was brought
into the bed chamber during delivery, and when they died,
their sword was placed by their side. The sword was
basically said to be akin to their soul, so they
really thought of it in in that higher regard. I

(13:50):
don't I don't think you would say today like my
cell phone is my soul, or my my my toyota
is my soul. Well, both of your kia soul. I
think one might not say those things, but I feel
like some people might have. I think that those statements
are true for some in it that's true. Yeah, there's
a certain amount of marketing around that. Just before I

(14:10):
came in here, I was reviewing one of our YouTube
videos and the commercial that played before it was for
Dodge Cars, and it was Vin Diesel driving a Dodge
car around and basically being like, if you drive one
of these, you will be as cool as my characters
and fast and the furious, uh, and you will belong
to my muscle family. Oh god, did I saw a
trailer for one of those films and he referred to

(14:31):
it as like the order of the muscle. Is that right?
Is it? Or that's the commercial that's the commercial I
just saw. Yeah, it's like it's a sacred uh um.
You know, society templary drop something close to twenty dollars
on a challenger. Yeah, and you joined the family. Uh.
But the samurai you couldn't just buy your way into.
So they wielded two swords and together these were referred

(14:53):
to as the die show. Die means large and represented
the single edged katana, and it's small companion was the wakazashi,
and these were used in close combat, usually for beheading.
Uh usually like if you had an honored opponent and
you you had killed them already and you wanted to
take their head, or for disemboweling yourself during the act

(15:14):
of seppuku. Uh So sometimes they use ritual daggers instead,
but this was really what the wakazashi was for, and
another samurai would usually stand by to behead the victims
so their death would be quick. This is something that
Takashi mik Is fascinated within that Thirteen Assassins movie. Yeah,
this was the sep the the ritualized honorable suicide, right

(15:36):
and Uh, yeah, I remember that being a major feature
in James Clavel's Showgun as well. Right, yeah, there is
a certain Western fascination, right. The katana itself was usually
thirty to thirty three inches long, while the wakazashi was
eighteen to twenty inches long. Now here's the thing. We're
gonna go real deep into the metallurgy of this in

(15:56):
a second, but just to sort of briefly tell you
about this, the katana had to be forged so that
it had both a sharp edge and it would not
break during a duel. So if it was too hard,
the sword itself would be brittle, but if it was
too soft, the sword wouldn't take on the keen edge
that it had. So, for instance, like if you hit

(16:16):
something with it and a crack was introduced to the blade,
as would inevitably happen in battle when you're you know,
hitting other swords, armor, all kinds of things, it would
run all the way through the blade. But instead of
the way that they constructed these, it just stopped at
the core and they could sort of repair the crack
around the core. Now, windshields today are actually made with

(16:38):
a similar principle. They've got these two layers to them,
so that the first layer cracks when like a rock
hits your your windshield on the highway, but then it's
stopped by the plastic interior. That's why you see that
sort of spider web. Yes, all right, we're gonna take
a quick break and we come back. We're gonna roll
through the metallurgical details of the Samurai sword. All right,

(17:02):
we returned. So the katanas had to be made of
this really really well put together steel. It was the
purest of steels, and it was called tamahagana or jewel
steel by the Japanese. Now, the methodology for putting this
together was basically, you had to make the swords core
with the soft metal that I was speaking of earlier

(17:24):
that wouldn't break. Then you would cover it with harder metals.
But these were repeatedly folded and hammered over and over
again until they were literally millions of these layers laminated together.
Constructing a sword took three days and three nights. When
they say that, they're just referring to the metal part,
not not the other aspects, and we'll we'll walk through

(17:44):
that shortly. But smelters, basically to put together a sword.
They would shovel twenty five tons of iron bearing river
sand and charcoal into a rectangular clay furnace that was
called the tatara. And the charcoal was important in this
process because it fueled the furnace up to two thousand

(18:06):
five degrees fahrenheit. And this was important because it reduced
that iron ore down to steal and would eventually yield
that jewel steel that we were talking about. Right. Uh,
do you remember Princess Mononoke? Yes, of course, So I
had forgotten this, but apparently the plot of Princess Mononoke
is that the humans are cutting down the trees in

(18:26):
the forest. The whole reason why is because they're fueling
these furnaces specifically so they can make more weapons. So
this was like a major plot point of that film. Yeah,
it's been a while since I've seen that one all
the way through, because the the Boy is not yet
ready for the more dramatic Commuzaki films. Yeah, that's definitely
one of the more intense ones. So this steel, while

(18:46):
it's inside the oven, it was never allowed to reach
a molten state, and the reason why was so that
the carbon that was mixed into the steel would vary
throughout it somewhere between point five percent and one point
five percent of its property. These the higher the carbon,
the harder the steel, so they had to mix the
two types. You've got the high carbon for this hard

(19:07):
razor edge and you've got the low carbon for the
shock absorbent core. Now, on the third night, they would
actually break open the clay furnace and they'd expose this steel.
The pieces that broke apart the easiest helped them to
discern what the carbon content was. Right, they didn't have
like microscopes to sit there and look at the ore
and figure out, you know, how much carbon was in

(19:29):
each one. They literally had to do it by well,
not by hand, but they use tongs and stuff. Then
the swordsmith would take this and they would heat it
and hammer and fold it repeatedly over and over again.
And the reason why was this would combine the iron
and the carbon while drawing out any of the undissolved impurities.
And these referred to as as slag, which I like,

(19:51):
I think slag is like a good like this sounds
like a good like like dirty name to call somebody's slag.
Um If other elements besides iron and carbon remained though,
that this would weaken the metal, so you had to
get that slag out of there. The smiths would judge
how much carbon they had left over in this by
how much it yielded to them pounding on it over

(20:13):
and over again with their hammers. So uh. And in fact,
one of the ways they if they if they found
that it was too low in carbon, they would actually
add it back into the mix by exposing the metal
to ash from rice straw. So it's really interesting, like
can imagined the like years and years of smith ng
and learning all of these little techniques, and they weren't

(20:35):
thinking in terms of chemistry. They weren't thinking like, okay,
so the molecular bonds of carbon and iron are going
to produce such in such effect right there, just like
I know that if I hit it this many times,
it will get rid of this stuff, and if I
add rice straw, it'll put it back in. And so
the doubling of these layers actually increased every time the
metal was folded, right, and so you go too, and

(20:58):
then you multiply that, then you it four and so
on and so on until it results in a final
count of four million layers. Can you imagine these guys
just sitting here and hammering this stuff over and over again.
So you you start to see like the value of
these swords because they're just really being worked on in
this artisanal fashion for days. Now. Once the slag is removed,

(21:21):
the smith would heat the high carbon steel that was
left into a U shaped channel. Then they would hammer
the low carbon steel that was left, and they fit
that snugly into the channel, so the hard steel formed
that outer shell while the tough steel served the core.
The smith would then coat the sword in this thick
insulating mixture of clay and charcoal powder. And what they

(21:45):
would do is they would they would put different consistencies
of this clay around the sword, so for instance, the
front edge would be lightly coated while the rest would
be covered, and this would protect the blade during further
heating and give it that kind of signature wavy design
that you see in the metal, you know, like it's
the way it reflects now. After coding, the blade was

(22:07):
heated just below fIF hundred degrees fahrenheit and they forgot
any hotter. Well that was bad too, because it would
actually make it crack afterwards. So swordsmiths they were so
concerned with the quality of these artifacts that they were
worried about even their sweat touching the metal, so they

(22:28):
would not touch it with their hands. Like even obviously
you wouldn't touch like a super hot burning sword coming
out of a fire. But but like at the very
stages in between, they didn't use their hands at all.
They made sure that I mean, they're standing over a
hot fire for days at a time, they're making sure
that no sweat is dropping down on this because they
didn't want it to somehow interfere with this, you know,

(22:49):
unknown chemical concoction they were working with. Okay, so then
you get to this stage where the smith pulls this
out of the fire and plunges it into water for
this really the rapid cooling process that's called quenching. This
made me think of Highlander as well. It sounds very
cinematic moment. You see this in a lot of sword movies. Totally. Yeah. Now,

(23:11):
because of the distribution of carbon, there's a difference in
the degree and speed at which the steel along the
blade contracts when it's cooled, and this causes it to bend,
which creates that distinctive curve of the katana. Now, as
many as one in three of the swords that they're
constructing were lost during this stage. So we always see

(23:33):
this in movies. Right, they put it in the water, steam,
looks super cool. They pull it out, it's the best
sword ever, right, ready to go. But like one in
three times they pull it out in the sword with
like crack and fall apart or something like that. After
days of hammering this thing millions of times. So the
quenching actually allowed the clay coating on the cutting blade

(23:54):
to cool quickly. In this formed something that's called Martin site,
which is a type of iron that has assumed a
fretic crystalline structure with enclosed carbon atoms. Now, these atoms
are what gives that material it's hard quality, so that
the keen edge that has its hard quality as the
Martin site. The slower cooling time of the core actually

(24:15):
created a chorus grain structure that was both soft and flexible.
So this is why these curved swords. Actually they were
lowered horizontally into the water. They weren't just like you
see it sometimes in the films, like they hold it
by the hilt as if the hilt is already on it, right,
and they'll just like dip it into the water, and
that's not how they did at all. They would lower

(24:37):
them down horizontally, so certain parts were cooled down first,
which would you know, obviously change the composition of the metal.
All right, then you've got this blade. It's pretty cool.
It's made of this amazing composition of different densities of metal.
Then you polish it for two weeks by grinding and
polishing it with these stones that are called water stones,

(24:59):
and they were typically composed of a hard silicate bunch
of particles that were suspended in clay. The clay as
you're you know, you're you're rubbing it on these blades,
wears down over time and that reveals even more silicate particles.
So this essentially makes the stones polishing quality improve through
its life as the finer silicate particles come out and

(25:22):
they make they basically make it so that there's less
steel removed while you're polishing it. So the stones themselves,
like we're not even talking about the sword yet. These
little stones were worth more than a thousand dollars each
and we're passed down through generations of families, so there's
just you know, like all these aspects of the sword

(25:43):
making really had this um, this high quality reverence to them. Now,
other methods of polishing the swords included fine stone powder
or powdered steel or something called forge cinder, and they
would also use wet stones like the way we're used
to seeing like medieval swords made or sharpened. But it

(26:04):
was preferred to polish the swords in the winter actually
instead of the summer. And the reason why was because
they thought summer was generally more wet and would subsequently
bring rust to the blade. Now, I don't know if
there's actually any chemical logic to that, you know, in
terms of like how they're making these swords, but so
you would find that most of these katanas would be

(26:25):
made in the wintertime. Yeah, it seems as you're developing
your your sword making technique, you know, over over generations,
like you're gonna have some uh some some essentially some
science is gonna work its way in there. But then
you also, uh, there's the potential for just sort of
superstition to become wrapped up in it as well. Yeah.
I imagine that there's probably like an entire culture of

(26:48):
superstitious mysticism that has maybe been lost to history. Actually right,
because most of the research that I was looking at
for this was putting it in present day tense of
here's how we under dan chemistry, here's how these things
were made. They weren't looking at it from the perspective
of the sword smiths. So the final stage is when

(27:08):
the metal workers add a decorated guard of iron or
other metals at the sword's hilt. This is, you know,
the guard for if your sword basically comes in contact
with another one. It's kind of a what's his name,
Kylo Wren, he's got his, he's got his lightsaber guard, right,
So it's this this little circular iron thing that goes
at the hilt end there, and the carpenters would fit

(27:31):
the entire sword with a lacquered wooden scabbard and that
was decorated with adornments, and then the handle would be
fashioned out of gold, exotic leather and stones. The swordsmith
then would get the blade returned to him after the
carpenters did this work, and he would review his work.
And it actually took fifteen people nearly six months to
create a single sword. Now I don't imagine they were

(27:54):
working for six months straight. Obviously, like there were there's
sort of an assembly line fashions, right, but um, it
just goes to show you, like how much went into
the construction of these devices. So it's a finely crafted item.
I mean in a way you'd be you'd be privileged
to die, right, It makes me kind Yeah, I wouldn't
mind that. Uh. So they were worth hundreds of thousands

(28:17):
of dollars, especially nowadays, they're worth that much to modern
art collectors. Sometimes the smiths would put their names on
this metal, but others actually had like kind of a
policy where they were like, oh, I'm not gonna put
my name on there. Anybody who actually understands swords is
going to recognize just by looking at it that this
is my work, that the quality here comes from my

(28:39):
particular style of smith ing. Now, all kinds of other
things were written on these swords. They would put poems
on them, sayings, the owner's names, anything you can think of.
And there's a couple of things that should be noted
about the blades in terms of quality. First of all,
the more strongly the whitish color of the hardened blade
is the more strongly that contrasts with the blue tinge

(29:02):
of the rest of the blade, the better the metal
and it's forging were considered, so you could kind of
look at it same way, sort of like a jeweler
looks at that stuff today, right. I I imagine they
had like something kind of like a loop maybe for
for a magnifying glass that they would look at this
metal with. There's also another thing that's a sign of
poor forging, and that was if there was a weak

(29:24):
glimmer that ran parallel to the hardened edge inside the
darker metal. So this is the kind of thing that like,
I mean, you and I would have no idea of,
but like if you're next time you're at your old
convention there and there's somebody selling these katanas asked to
look and say, well, look that glimmer doesn't run right
the hardened edge. I'm not going to pay for this. Sorry, Deadpool,

(29:48):
Yeah exactly. Yeah. What kind of katan is Deadpool? Wheel? Yeah?
I I wish I had to remember him earlier. That's
what I think. That's most of the katanas that decisi Well, actually,
and you know, um, this is this is not funny,
But there was a recent incident in Phoenix at a
comic book convention in which a guy showed up with

(30:09):
a bunch of guns, uh, in order to shoot police officers.
And luckily he was somebody saw him posting about this
on Facebook ahead of time, and so the security was
able to arrest him. Since then, at least the conventions
that I've attended, like I just set up and tabled
at one two weeks ago. Uh, there's police presence now

(30:29):
on the floor. And when you go through, the police
check all of the costplay weapons and they put like
a little they sometimes they call it peace bonding, but
it's like a little tag basically that goes around your
sword or your your toy gun or whatever that indicates
like this isn't real, You're not gonna hurt anybody. Yeah.
So Deadpools, all the Deadpools I saw, I had these

(30:50):
little tags. Yeah. So let everybody slastic sword. Yeah yeah. Now,
in terms of who made the swords where they were
essentially referred to as words smith's. But the most famous
of which of these was a guy named and I
hope I'm getting this right, Massi Moune I believe is
his name. Uh. And this is this is a name
that's like sort of legendary in samurai fiction now too,

(31:12):
like they were. They've I've actually heard like Massa moun
a sword used before in comics and stuff like that,
is like this was forged by the greatest of sword
smith's and so you know it's it's a vorpable blade. Basically,
it's you mentioned the Highlander sword in the Highlander lore.
It is supposed to have been forged Massimne in five BC.

(31:33):
Oh perfect, Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, there you go.
So he just made all these swords that all these
you know, essentially superheroes now wield. BC. Is the Highlander
date though, don't you don't let that get trapped in here.
And that's the the actual well that's actually interesting because
it's not actually known when this guy lives. Um. So
he reached this sort of legendary status in swords smith

(31:56):
in lore, but nobody can actually pin down the date
that he lived in and he was constructing these supposed
swords um. And you know, basically the way that they
would make them. The swordsmiths, like I said, this wasn't
just like a blacksmithing job. This was cultural and so
they would pray, they would fast, and they would even
purify themselves in cold water. First before they would start

(32:18):
the smithic. I wonder, actually I didn't see this in
the notes, but I wonder if the purification and cold
water had to do the sweat thing. Maybe like you
douse yourself in cold water, uh to sort of try
to keep yourself from sweating for a certain amount of time.
I don't know. Yeah, And I wonder too about the
Shinto connections. Here. You're you're making this, You're forging this

(32:38):
blade out of the elements of the natural world, and
they're all these uh in every substance has its own
sort of spiritual energy exactly. You're manipulating those energies to
create this, this holy weapon. And I would imagine that this, uh,
this sword in particular would have a lot of spiritual energy.
But then, so you get these things, you make it,

(32:59):
it takes six months. How do you then test it? Right,
It's not like you just hand over this untested blade
to a samurai. Here you go bet your life on it. Yeah,
And there's real interesting stories, you know, sort of folk
tales about massa munai and other swords and the sort
of battling over who had the best swords, and they
would do stuff like dip their sword into a river

(33:19):
and like a fish would swim through it and get
cut in half. And then massa Munai swords didn't cut
the fish in half because like it was a it
wasn't an evil sword. It had like peaceful intentions, and
so the fish would swim around it like stuff like that, right,
may maybe hold it up and you you speak across it,
and they only the words, yeah, Well, we were gonna

(33:39):
get into ways to test a Samurai sword in the
traditional way of testing samur so at Samurai sword right
after this break. Alright, we're back. So so yeah, how
do you how do you test drive a katana? Well,
so I would imagine that you know, you have to
make sure that it cuts through flesh. You're not gonna

(34:01):
just like bang it against iron. Although some of the
things that I read were that they would essentially like
to show the quality of it, they would see how
deep it would go into certain kinds of metals, usually brass.
I think, yeah, I ran across a few of those
those tests as well, But those are kind of dangerous
because you run the risk of damaging the blade. And

(34:22):
ultimately it is an item designed uh and and homed
to cut through human tissue. So they what they like,
go chase squirrels around. It's a little grizzlier than that. Yeah.
So I looked at a few different sources on this.
The first one I I ran across was one by

(34:44):
one Benjamin smith Lyman. This was from the Journal of
the Franklin Institute in eight titled Metallurgical and Other Features
of Japanese Swords. Given the date on this, given the
Western author, I was a little skeptical at first, but
this is what he said. The usual Japanese test of
a sword or on the human body on corpses of
beheaded convicts, or in the beheading, or by ruffians on

(35:05):
beggars and peaceable wayfares, or even a dog. Yeah. I
read the same article and when I hit the dog
part weirdly, I was like, yeah, ruffians fine, but the dog.
Come on. There's actually this kind of infamous Lone Wolf
and Cubs story about the abuse of a dog by
um people testing up bow bows. I think they're like
trying to make sure that their bows are gauged the

(35:26):
right way. So they tie a dog to like a maple,
and it runs around in a circle and they have
to try to shoot it, and it's it's awful, you know,
but it's you know, supposed to be historically accurate. Well,
you know, when I first started encountering this material about
the testing of the blade, you know, as as a
Westerner especially, you know, as one who comes across the

(35:46):
Western accounts of the sort of thing pretty frequently, you know,
I was naturally a little bit skeptical because it sounds
like a bit of classic Go Orientalism, right, doesn't it,
and an exotic and barbaric practice of the people from
a distant And so I was I was inclined to think, well,
maybe that's that's not quite what's going on. But the
act did exist, and the act was known as tamishi geary,

(36:10):
and that literally means to test the cutting ability of
a blade, and in modern martial art jargon, the term
often refers to a training method in which the users
slashes conventional mediums, you know, like a dumby or a
piece of ballistic ji. Yeah, or I guess one of
those it's like MythBusters. Yeah, I guess you could also
slash one of those, like karate dudes. You know, they

(36:30):
always have that same face, the big reperkarate dudes. I
never practiced karate. What are you talking about? These are like, Oh,
you go to a dojo and they all have the
same weird face and they're made out of pink plastic
or something none never, so you do, but you're trying
the sword out on this plastic. Well, I don't know
if you probably wouldn't want to actually slash one of
those dojo guys because they look expensive. They're mainly for punch. Yeah,

(36:53):
they probably cost worth than a dog. But you would
use this nowadays you would use a stand in for
a human body, But at that at the time, yeah,
you would use an actual cadaver. And uh, I think
it's it's worth taking a step back and saying this
is quite practical, right, because you're crafting a precision weapon
with an express purpose in mind the slashing and dismemberment

(37:15):
of human bodies. So why wouldn't you test these on
the thing itself? Because you're a guy is going to
go into battle with this thing, and uh, and his
life is going to be on the line and he
needs to effectively in the lives or at least injure
other individuals in order to carry out his job. Yeah,
this I think to probably shows you how that culture

(37:37):
was hierarchical and elitist in a way, and that like
the people who wielded these weapons literally thought that they
were better than other people, and so their lives were
subsequently worth more. But just the the the idea of
using a cadaver as a test, I mean, we can
look to examples in our own culture where things of
this nature carried out. Forensic scientists today will study the

(37:59):
effects of the decompos issue on actual corpses. The US
automotive industry has even depended on the use of cadavers
to make our cars safer, and the U S Military
has used cadavers to test everything from land mines and
sniper rifles to body armor. So it's it's not just this,
you know, archaic curio from the past. Killing people is

(38:21):
a serious business, and and in order to to effectively
carry out that business, uh, we've often turned to the
use of cadavers. Yeah. Luckily, we've I guess graduated morally
to the point where we're not putting like death Row
inmates in cars and then driving them into walls. Right, yeah,
so so far so right. We haven't hit the running

(38:44):
Man yet and his kazu hero Sakai points out in
his two thousand tin paper in which he u He
looks at skeletal remains that show signs of Tammi shigiri
uh He says that the uh Tokugawa Shogunate had several
execut Usian methods. So there was decapitation with the sword,
there was crucifixion that was burning, and there was also

(39:06):
sawing or a cubo, and then there was also tamishi
gary which was also like written into the uh into
the laws of the day, and this was carried out
as part of chase execution. This was reserved for male
felons who are not protected by either samurai or a
clergical status, and the prep practice survived till the beginning

(39:27):
of the Meiji period. In that's intense. Yeah, So the
way this would take places, you had the already decapitated
corpse and it was placed on elevated soil with its
limbs held extended for testing by another individual. Then the
performer of the tamishi geary would cut at fixed points

(39:48):
on the body, and sometimes you'd have two or more
bodies piled on elevated soil so as to mark how
many bodies could be cut through with a single blow
of the sword. Now, depending on the blade, the number
might range between two and even six bodies. Holy cow,
I can't even imagine a scenario. I just watched that

(40:10):
dumb new Transformers movie an optimist Prime beheads like five
robots at the same time. But other than that, I
can't imagine a scenario where you're gonna be cutting six
people simultaneously. So I guess it's not as much about
the the practical battlefield application of this, so you wouldn't
necessarily be cutting through to samurai enemy samurai at once.

(40:30):
But it's a testament to the blade's ability. It's like
bragging rights basically, because you could say, like this, you
can put a little six on the blade that can
cut through six. That's exactly what happened. So the blade
sharpness rating was recorded in the sodomy, which is which
was inscribed on the tang of the blade. The tang

(40:51):
is the portion of the blade itself that's fixed in
the hilt, so that's where most of the writing would be,
so you wouldn't actually see it if the hilt was attached. Yeah,
this is this made me think about underwear a lot,
because this is very much like the tag of the
underwear that is tucked away. Uh. So that you know,
I guess if you're just walking around in your underwear,
nobody can see the tag, but it's there and uh

(41:12):
and it's also kind of like the inspected by tag
that you encounter with garments, right Meundy is in Mack
Weldon should incorporate that into their underwear. So you've got
like how many bodies this underwear can cut through? Tag? Yeah?
So this would be chiseled or engraved in gold, and
it featured the name of the tester, the cutting positions
of the bodies, and the number of bodies that it

(41:33):
could that could be cut simultaneously. Um. Yeah, So it's
very much like a bloody version of the inspected by
tag and a pair of underwear. It's very d and
d that like system categorization of the weapons. So, and
the the other thing about this is there there is
evidence to support all of this. The aforementioned Sakai paper
examines Edo era skeletal remains and he identified the unique

(41:56):
wounds associated with the Tamishi geary practice, and interestingly enough,
he also explains a couple of vertebra cuts. Uh, they
are there that possibly occurred during the extraction of the kidney. Uh.
He says that the Amata family quote who monopolized Tamishi
geary business during the eighteenth century, also made a medicine

(42:16):
called jim Ton from corpse kidneys. So, okay, so you
get your corpse, well presumably it gets its head cut
off in an execution, then you remove its kidney, and
then you put it out for this this cutting practice, right,
and then afterwards I'm assuming they're not buried. They must
just like throw them to the wolves or something like.
They they've treated this corpse so poorly at this point,

(42:39):
I doubt they're gonna like put a headstone over it. Yeah.
It's definitely a testament to um to the the the
societal barriers that were in place at the time, because again,
this was not not everybody was going to end up
being used to test samurai swords. Only particular uh, male
of felons, of of the correct class. Right, I'm thinking

(43:02):
about like if I had to be executed, if I
would want to be executed this way, and like I said,
well you would, don't. It's not so much the execution
this was this is just just what's done to your body.
So It's really not that different from say, you know,
you die, you die by natural causes than your body
is used to test landlines for the U. S. Military. Right, Yeah,
And in a way you can think, hey, you've got

(43:23):
to be a part of the of the creation of
this fine blade, the rating of this blade exactly. Yeah,
maybe it's maybe it's not a bad way. Couldn't have
been made without me and my meat. So everyone out
there might be wondering, well, is this is this legit?
Could blades really cut through this much human meat? Well,
I mean, on one hand, we we have the sudden

(43:43):
may information on the blades themselves to to go by.
We have skeletal remains to to look to to know
this was actually a thing. Uh. The individuals who performed
these tests were masters licensed by the government, so it
couldn't be performed by just anyone and a career. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh and it was this was also very much
a value added thing. I was reading the Connoisseurs Book

(44:05):
of Japanese Swords by Cocaan Nakayama, and uh, and he
said the following, there is no doubt that that tamish
she may attracted customers and could raise the price of
a sword in much the same way that a title
could even during a time of lasting peace and low
demands for swords, right because you're getting into the artistic

(44:25):
value of yeah yeah, but it's uh, it's not really
the sort of thing we can really test for in
modern times with an old blade. Right now, various professional
and when we shall we say less than professional swordsmen
have taken katanas to to pig carcasses and other carcasses
off and on YouTube, and the results are pretty convincing.

(44:46):
You must know about this that one of Joe and
my favorite things on the internet, I believe that's The
company is called Blue Steel, and they produce replicas of
various historical weapons, and their YouTube video yos are literally
these it's these office looking guys with these weapons hacking
away at like giant pieces of beef hanging from a book,

(45:10):
or like a like a full pig. They'll hang like
a full pig corps and they'll come at it with
like a battle axe or something like that. And it
is the craziest thing like to to watch because they
play like this generic metal music over and and just
showing these guys like just going to town on these
animal corpses, but basically to be like, look at how

(45:30):
cool our axes are. Yeah, I think I may have
seen I've seen videos of this nature. I don't know
if it was Blue Steel because one of the groups
that conducts these kind of tests is Association for Renaissance
Martial Arts or ARMOR, and I saw I was looking
at a straight dope article, uh, from the last few
years where they spoke to Armor director John Clements, and

(45:52):
he states that there have been there have been plenty
of such experiments, you know, animal carcasses to prove that,
to prove that, yeah, these these weapons were effective at
body hacking, and that even fairly blunt blades can get
the job done as long as the weapon has quote
a hard and well honed edge, hitting forcefully with the
correct geometry and energy. Yeah. So this actually gets into

(46:16):
like a good point that I'll bring up shortly about
like the composition of the sword geometrically in terms of
how much cutting power it has. Yeah, and then it
also gets into the fact that you had to know
how to use it because even a finely tuned item
like this, it's not it's not a sentient dungeons and
dragon sword. It's not going to go out there and

(46:37):
hack for you, you have to be able to wield it.
But but one thing that to keep in mind, and
this is something that John Clements pointed out, is that, yes,
the average samurai was skilled with their blade, but only
five per cent of samurais were probably masters, which sounds appropriate,
like you wouldn't. I mean, mastery means you have a

(46:58):
degree of skill with an item or practice that is
beyond that of most practitioners. Yeah, I mean I would
think about it the same way, probably, jeez. And I
don't want to insult anybody who's in the military, but
I imagine that, like there are certain uh people who
are really good shots, right, like who are like the
five percent top tier of being able to hit something,

(47:23):
maybe usually snipers, right. Uh, So it's probably similar, I
would guess, so. Yeah. And and then of course in
the modern military terms, of course, is important to realize
that you're going to have specialists and then you also
you also need a lot of generalists and specialist in
other areas to carry out the overall goals of the combat. Yeah, exactly. Now,

(47:45):
Clements makes some other solid points about the katana here
that I want to share. He says that a curve
blade is mechanically superior to a straight one at delivering
edge blows to produce injury, and due to its hardness
a single curving edge, the katana is very good at
penetrating even hard materials with straight on strikes. So that's

(48:05):
one of the things that's interesting is the curvature is
actually an effect of the engineering, but it's also really
useful in terms of the application of the weapon. Yeah.
And he also points out that you could thrust. You
can thrust with the katana, but it is really a
dedicated slicer, so you had to put it in Dungeons
and Dragons terms. You can go for that piercing damage,

(48:26):
but you really want that slashing damage. And uh. And
he also had a note to hear about the durability
of the katana versus the Western long sword. Yeah. I
read a long article that I didn't include in our
notes that was comparing the two and which one was better.
That was that was from Arma, that was by climates.
He did one comparing the long sword to the katana

(48:46):
and another comparing the katana to the rapier, and he
said he makes a solid point. He says, no sword
is indestructible. They're all produced as perishable tools with a
certain expected working lifetime. And there's also evidence of both
the sword styles via a katana or long sword were
made inversions intended for armored combat and versions intended for

(49:08):
unarmored combat. Yeah. Yeah, I think that you can see
that with the katana construction obviously, because there were certain
unarmored reasons why they would fight with them. Yeah, And
this is in this last point is probably it might
be an overstatement of the obvious, but the Samurai sword
was not the the only method of combat for the Samurai.

(49:28):
They depended on range weapons such as long bows and
and and later the Japanese matchlock gun. Uh, you know,
they had poll weapons, so it was all part of
a well, it was a singularly important weapon and certainly
had extreme cultural importance. It was not the only tool
of battle, right. Yeah. My understanding actually from the research

(49:48):
I didn't include this in the notes, was that historically
Samurai actually started off as archers, as as horse mounted archers,
and they would specialize in that, and then I think
when the engine hearing of the katana came into play,
that's when they sort of graduated into that proficiency, and
then like you say, when a gunpowder and the engineering

(50:09):
of matchlock. Probably not pistols. I don't know what those
how big those guns were, but it was it was
like a match It was like a long rifle. Yeah,
then they started using those. So before we cut out here,
I have to include this one study that I found.
It was a lot of fun. It is a nineteen
forty six study that was commissioned by the U. S. Army.

(50:31):
I don't know where they got this sword from, but
essentially this general sent this group of scientists a katana
that they had and they wanted it to have a
metallurgical examination. I think the results are pretty fascinating in
lieu of what we've talked about today in terms of
how they're put together. Essentially, they wanted to understand its

(50:53):
metallurgical properties and how the variations in the sword fabrication
from different eras produced different style blades. Now, this particular
blade that they looked at, I'm immediately because of the date,
thinking that this must have come from somebody in World
War two, right, like either somebody who's stationed in Southeast

(51:14):
Asia or like, um, I'm reading it right now, and
there's like the one of the character's father like brings
back a katana with him from like a Japanese soldier
he killed in combat or something like that. Like I'm
thinking it's some scenario like that, but I'm sure it
could have totally been a peaceful method of acquiring this
sword too, you know. Yeah, I um, and I actually

(51:36):
grew up with a Samurai sword in the house because
it was it was a family member on my dad's
side had had acquired the item after the war, and
I think I think he bought it um in Japan,
if I'm remembering the story correctly, but I would. I
would often like take it was an interesting weapon to

(51:57):
take out and hold as a child because you could,
I was, I didn't wave it around, like I knew
that this was a very dangerous item because you could.
I don't know how sharp it actually was in comparison
to like a well maintained weapon, but you could. You
could look at it and you could imagine the damage
that could be done with it, and even imagine the
damage that might have been done with it in the past. Right, Yeah,

(52:20):
So this sword that they looked at in particular my theory,
and I'll see, let's see what you think afterwards is
that this was probably produced to sell to people it
or whether they were tourists or Japanese soldiers who just
wanted like a representation to bring with them into battle.
This doesn't sound like it was something that was meant

(52:40):
to be used in combat. They found that this sword
was made from extremely poor quality steel, and so this
gives you a hint. It had one point oh five
percent carbon, so earlier we said it was between point
five and one point five percent carbon was kind of
your your limited range. So it sounds like this is
right in the middle and it's considered poor. So they

(53:02):
examined it both microscopically and macroscopically, and in addition, they
performed tension tests on the core. It found that the
core of this sword had a tensile strength of a
hundred and ninety thousand p s. I Now, the sword
they examined it had a cutting angle of twenty two
to forty degrees, which I'm imagining is far more curved

(53:23):
than what we usually think of as a katana. And
they actually say that this gave it less cutting power
than the reference literature that was available in nineteen Because
traditional katanas were supposed to have a fourteen degree angle
for the cutting edge. They also found that the steel
that was in this it had high sulfur and phosphorus content,

(53:47):
which was indicative of a poor melting practice. So we
go back to what we talked about earlier. This is
the slag. They didn't work the slag out of this
metal and it was still in there. The hardness values
of it. It actually indicated to them that the sword
was air cooled instead of water cooled or quenched. Uh
and this also contributed to its poor quality. So all
these things, I mean, you can make a katana right

(54:10):
like through mass production, but they're not necessarily going to
be these these artistic artifacts that we've been discussing today.
Now today, if you purchase the steel that that jewel Tomahagan,
a steel I referred to earlier, it can cost fifty
times more than ordinary steel, even when we're talking about

(54:31):
like modern smith and cons Now I'm gonna throw this down.
This is a little bit of like Marxist theory here.
But the Samurai sword is this great example of Marx's
uh capitalist mode of production. That theory that is put
to work basically because you've got this object that's used
to be produced over a long period of time by experts,

(54:51):
but now it's produced on a mass scale, right, for
less cost and less quality. You can buy these katanas
everywhere now. There's no way they're engineered to be as
precise as the originals were. Only these swordsmiths knew how
to precisely build an object for the requirements that were necessary.

(55:11):
We can reproduce them using industrial techniques, but they don't
have that artistic beauty to them. I think in a
previous episode you and I were talking about the idea
of like an artistic object having an aura, right, and
this seems to be sort of the same thing here
is that, Uh, these katanas that were really refined in
the method that we talked about earlier had an aura

(55:32):
to them that the mass produced ones don't. Well, and
they're kind of it seems like it's kind of like
the modern samurai sword. Samurai sword produced today is kind
of like a well bred dog, you know, like it
has it may look great, it it may it may
you know, you can check off all the criteria, but
it has no purpose. It's not just as the you know,

(55:52):
whatever the small legged dog is is not actually being
used to hunt rats in a warehouse. The samurai sword,
if it is not being used as as a weapon
of an instrument of death and dismemberment, then is it
truly a Samurai sword anymore? Right, of course, it's kind
of a complicated question when you consider all the cultural

(56:13):
value that's placed on the item. But still at the heart,
you strip away all those layers of culture. You have
a tool, and that tool has a purpose and it
it does not fulfill that purpose anymore. Well, in the
last three hundred years, it seems that the Japanese themselves
understood this because they would recognize not all Japanese, but
obviously people who had a smithing background. They would recognize

(56:36):
when European medal was used instead of Japanese steel, and
they referred to that, and they would actually market and
the marker would say Southern barbarians. Um. Now, the emperor
banned samurai from wearing their swords in public in eighteen
seventy six, so that was essentially the beginning of the
end of that warrior culture. So subsequently we're now here

(56:59):
almost a hundred and a few years later. You know,
katanas are basically trinkets that are bought at you know,
conventions or I don't know, I suppose you get them
at like certain thrift stores, but you know what I mean,
like like oddity shops. Yeah, I mean, well, there was
the whole scene in Pull Fiction, right and I take
place in essentially a pawn shop, and Bruce Willis's character

(57:20):
has kind of run awhile with the katana. At the
end of it, they have that. The TV show Atlanta
has a scene like that as well, where they're in
a pawn shop and guys like, guys like you should
totally buy the sword. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's interesting
it In many cases the swords kind of become trinkets
or in the higher levels, they become you know, very

(57:42):
important collectible items, museum pieces. And still the the idea
of the samurai continues to fascinate, it can you continues
to cast this long shadow across Japanese culture, as you know,
as well as as various other fandoms, like the the
idea that the archetype of the samurai is um you know,
it's it's pretty powerful, definitely, and I imagine that there

(58:04):
are people out there listening who know a lot more
about this than we do, and I'd be curious to
hear from you, like did we did we miss anything?
I hope not. We did a lot of research for
this episode, but is there something about these newer katanas
that we don't know uh in terms of like the
smithing process and why they're they're subsequently worthless or made

(58:24):
by Southern barbarians. Well, and of course we we we
didn't have time to go into much in the way
of the martial art of using these swords, and there's
a there's a tremendous amount of information out there on that.
And if you are a connoisseur of such martial arts,
so we'd love to hear from you because perhaps that
you have some some favorite details that you would like
to share. Yeah, So if you want to get in

(58:44):
touch with us about that, tell us your sword stories.
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(59:05):
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(59:30):
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