Samurai and kaji
Japanese proverb
Kaji is a blacksmith, gunsmith, "sword maker", and the people of this profession in feudal Japan were the only ones who stood on the social ladder along with the samurai. Although de jure they belonged to artisans, and those in the Japanese table of ranks were considered lower than the peasants! In any case, it is known that some emperors, not to mention the courtiers and, in fact, samurai, did not disdain to take the hammer in their hands, and even engage in the craft of a blacksmith. In any case, Emperor Gotoba (1183 - 1198) announced the manufacture of swords worthy of princes, and there are still several blades of his work in Japan.
Wakidzasi is the “short sword” of the Edo era. Tokyo National Museum.
There are legends about the hardness and sharpness of Japanese swords, as well as about the blacksmith art itself. But in principle, in their manufacture there is no such big difference from the technical process of forging a European blade. However, from a cultural point of view, forging a Japanese sword is a spiritual, almost sacred act. Before him, the blacksmith undergoes various prayer ceremonies, fasting and meditation. Often, he also wears a white Shinto priest. In addition to this, the whole blacksmith shop must be carefully cleaned, by which, by the way, women never even looked in. This was done primarily in order to avoid steel pollution, and women are from the “evil eye”! In general, the work on the Japanese blade represents a certain rite, in which each operation during the forging of the blade was regarded as a religious ceremony. So, for the performance of the last, most responsible operations, the blacksmith even wore a karigina and an eboshi court cap in a court ceremonial costume. The forge Kadzia for all this time became a sacred place and through it stretched the straw rope of Simenava, to which Gohei paper strips were attached - Shinto symbols designed to scare away evil spirits and call upon good spirits. Every day, before starting work, the blacksmith in order to cleanse poured cold water over him and begged for help in the work ahead. No member of his family was allowed to enter the forge, except his assistant. Kaji food was cooked on sacred fire, for sexual relations, animal food (and not only meat — that was by itself, Buddhists did not eat meat, but also fish!), Strong drinks were imposed the strictest taboos. Creating a perfect blade (and a self-respecting blacksmith broke broken blades without any pity!) Often required work for quite a long time.
A scene from the 10th century, Master Munetika, forges the sword “ko-kitsune-maru” (“fox”) with the help of the spirit-fox. Engraving by Ogata Gakko (1873).
How long this time has been can be judged from the information that has come down to us that in the VIII century it took 18 days to make a sword of a tati from a blacksmith. It took nine more days for the silver master to make the frame, six days for the varnishman to sheathe the scabbard, two days for the leather master and another 18 days for the workers who covered the hilt of the sword with leather, twisted it with cords. one unit. The increase in the time needed to forge a strip of a long sword was noted at the end of the 17th century, when the shogun called for the blacksmiths to forge swords directly in their palace. In this case, it took more than 20 days to fabricate only one coarsely polished sword strip. But the production time was sharply reduced if the blade itself was shortened. So, it was believed that a good blacksmith could make a dagger strip in just a day and a half.
The shank of the blade with the signature blacksmith.
The forging process was preceded by the process of refining steel, which the blacksmiths themselves conducted in the old days. As for the sources of raw materials, it is - magnetite iron ore and iron-bearing sand mined in different provinces. After that, this source material in special furnaces of the Tatar was processed into crude steel. This furnace was essentially an improved model of a cheese-burning furnace, which was widely used both in the West and in the East, and the principle of operation was the same. From the 16th century, iron and steel imported from abroad began to be used more often, which greatly facilitated the work of blacksmiths. Currently, there is only one Tatar oven in Japan, in which steel is boiled exclusively for the manufacture of swords.
The image of the stages of the forging of the Edo period.
The most important aspect when forging a Japanese sword is that the blade has a different tempering from the rest of the blade’s body, and the blades themselves are usually forged from two parts: the core and the shell. For the shell, the blacksmith chose an iron plate made of mild steel and covered it with hard steel pieces. Then this bag was heated on a fire of pine coal, and welded by forging. The resulting bar was folded along and (or) across the axis of the blade and welded again, which subsequently gave a characteristic pattern. This technique was repeated about six times. During operation, the bag and tools were repeatedly cleaned, so it produced extremely clean steel. The trick here was that when overlaying metal layers of different strength over each other, large carbon crystals break, causing the amount of dirt in the metal to decrease with each forging.
Blade after forging and hardening before polishing.
It should be noted here that, in contrast to European Damascus steel, the meaning here is not in the welding of steel of different quality to each other, but in the homogenization of all their layers. However, some of the unrelated layers in the metal still remained, but it provided additional viscosity and amazing patterns on the steel. That is, Japanese folding, as well as Damascus forging, is a process of metal refining, the purpose of which is to improve the quality of the source material. For the shell of a Japanese sword, three or four such pieces are made, which, in turn, are re-forged again, and are wrapped one by one into the other. Different folding methods give a variety of types of patterns on the finished blade. So there was a piece of steel consisting of thousands of layers well-welded to each other, and its core was of pure iron or of mild steel, which was also pre-folded and forged several times.
Sword tati work master Nagamatsu. Tokyo National Museum.
The next step was to weld the casing to the core. The standard process consisted of inserting the core into a V-folded sheath and hammering to the desired shape and thickness. The blade, which was essentially ready, now faced the most difficult operation - hardening. Here we note a significant difference from the European sword. He was dipped in a red-hot state in water or oil as a whole. But the blank of the Japanese sword was covered with a mixture of clay, sand and charcoal - the exact recipes of this mixture were kept in strict confidence, and of different thickness. A very thin layer of clay was applied to the future blade, and on the side and back sides - on the contrary, almost half a centimeter thick. A small section of the back side was also left free on the tip in order to harden this part too. After that, the blade was laid with the blade down on the fire. In order for the blacksmith to be able to accurately determine the temperature by the color of the glow, the forge was darkened or generally worked at dusk, or even at night. This color in some historical sources indicated as "February or August moon".
Quenching process: on the right there is a blade covered with clay before quenching. On the left - the structure of the same blade after quenching.
When this heat reached the required value, the blade was immediately immersed in a bath of water. The part of the blade, covered with a safety layer, naturally cooled more slowly and accordingly remained softer than the blade. Depending on the method immediately after tempering followed vacation. To do this, the blade was again heated to 160 degrees Celsius, and then cooled again sharply. Leave by necessity could be repeated several times.
The sword of the tati was a rider's sword, therefore it had fastenings for wearing on a belt.
In the process of hardening, the crystal structure of the steel varies greatly: in the body of the blade it is slightly tightened, and on the blade it is drawn out. In this regard, the curvature of the blade can change by up to 13 millimeters. Knowing about this effect, the blacksmith should, before hardening, set the blade a lower curvature than the one he wants to get from the finished product, that is, make it less curved at first. Despite this, in most cases, the blade still needed to be refined. It was performed by placing the blade with the back side on a red-hot copper block, after which it was cooled again in cold water.
Swordsmen and gunners at work. Old Japanese engraving.
The finished blade was carefully polished and polished (which often took up to 50 days!), While other artisans made a mount for it. There is often confusion in terms - “polishing” and “polishing” in Japan are identical concepts, and this is an inseparable process.
Moreover, if European blades usually consist of two chamfers, and their blade forms another narrow outer chamfer, then the Japanese blade has only one chamfer on each side, that is, there are only two, and not six. Thus, when “sharpening” it is necessary to process the entire surface of the blade, which is why both grinding and polishing are a single process. This technology gives a really very sharp blade, similar to a razor blade, and gives it a great geometry, especially for cutting. But there is one big drawback: with each sharpening, the surface layer is removed from the entire blade, and it “grows thin”, and it becomes thinner and thinner. As for the sharpness of such a blade, there is a legend that when Master Muramas, proud of the unsurpassed sharpness of the sword he made, stuck it into a fast stream, then the leaves floating downstream hit the blade and cut it in two. Another sword, equally renowned in the sense of sharpness, was called “Bob” only because the work of the master Nagamitsu falling on the blade of this sword was also cut in half. During the Second World War, one of the masters chopped off the barrel of a machine gun with a sword, which the film seemed to have even made, but it later seemed to be able to prove that this was nothing more than a propaganda stunt designed to boost the fighting spirit of Japanese soldiers!
The handle of the Japanese sword. The close-fitting of the cords, the skin of the stingray, which covered its hilt, the fastening pin of the maguka and the decoration of manuka, are clearly visible.
When polishing, Japanese masters usually used up to twelve, and sometimes up to fifteen grinding stones with different grain sizes, until the blade received this very famous sharpness. With each polishing, the entire blade is processed, with the accuracy class and the quality of the blade with each treatment being increased. When polishing, various methods and varieties of polishing stone are used, but they usually polish the blade so that it can distinguish such forging and technical subtleties as hamon - the quenching strip from the surface of the blade from extremely light crystalline steel with a boundary line, which is determined by the clay cover applied by the blacksmith ; and Hada - a grainy pattern on steel.
Continuing to compare the European and Japanese blades, we note also that they differ not only in their sharpening, but also in the cross section of the blades of the katana, the knight’s long sword, and various sabers. From here they have completely different cutting qualities. Another difference is in the distal constriction: if the blade of a long sword from the base to the tip becomes significantly thinner, the Japanese blade, and so much thicker, practically does not thin. Some katanas at the base of the blade have a thickness of almost nine (!) Millimeters, and by the yokot they become thinner only up to six millimeters. On the contrary, many Western European long swords have a base thickness of seven millimeters, and to the point they become thinner and there they are only about two millimeters thick.
Tanto. Master Sadamune. Tokyo National Museum.
The two-handed sabers in Europe were also famous, and here they came closest to the Japanese swords. At the same time, how many do not compare the Japanese nihonto and European sabers and swords, a definite answer that it is better to get is impossible, because in fights they have not met, to experiment on today's replicas hardly makes sense, and to break for this valuable ancient swords hardly anyone dares. So there remains a vast field for speculation, and in this case it is unlikely to be able to fill it with reliable information. This is the opinion of a number of historians of a relatively low or, on the contrary, a very high efficiency of the Japanese sword. Yes, we know that he chopped dead bodies well. However, at the same time, the Japanese historian Mitsuo Kure writes that a samurai, armed with a sword and dressed in armor, could neither cut the enemy’s armor nor finish it off!
In any case, for the Japanese samurai, it was the sword that was the measure of everything, and the blades of famous masters were a real treasure. The attitude to those who forged them was also corresponding, so the social position of the blacksmith in Japan was determined mainly by the swords he forged. There were many schools that cherished the technologies they had developed and kept their secrets carefully. The names of famous gunsmiths, such as Masamune or his pupil Muramas, were on everyone's lips, and almost every samurai dreamed to possess the swords of their workings. Naturally, like all mysterious, the Japanese sword spawned many legends, so today it is sometimes simply impossible to separate fiction from truth and determine where fiction is, and where is a real historical fact. Well, for example, it is known that the Muramas blades were distinguished by the greatest sharpness and durability of the blade, but also by the ability to mysteriously attract unhappiness to the owners.
Tanto master Masamune's blade - "can not be perfect." Tokyo National Museum.
But Muramasa is not one master, but a whole dynasty of blacksmiths. And it is not known exactly how many masters with that name were - three or four, but it is a historical fact that their quality was such that the most outstanding samurai considered it an honor to possess them. Despite this, Muramas’s swords were persecuted, and this was almost the only case in the history of the cold weapons. The fact is that the Muramas blades - and this is also documented - brought misfortune to the family of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the unifier of fragmented feudal Japan. His grandfather died from such a blade, his father was seriously wounded, Tokugawa himself was cut in childhood by Muramas’s sword; and when his son was sentenced to seppuku, it was with this sword that his assistant cut off his head. As a result, Tokugawa decided to destroy all the Muramas blades that belonged to his family. The example of Tokugawa was followed by many daimyo and samurai of the time.
Moreover, for one hundred years after Ieyasu Tokugawa’s death, the wearing of such swords was severely punished - right up to the death penalty. But since the swords were perfect in their fighting qualities, many samurai tried to keep them: they hid, they forged the master's signature so that they could pretend that it was the sword of another blacksmith. As a result, according to some calculations, about 40 of Muramas swords reached our days. Of these, only four are in museum collections, and all the rest - from private collectors.
Kosigatana era Nambokutyo-Muromati, XIV - XV centuries. Tokyo National Museum.
It is believed that the Nambocutho period was the era of the sunset of the great era of the Japanese sword, and then, due to the increase in their mass production, their quality deteriorated greatly. Moreover, as in Europe, where the blades of the brand "Ulfbert" were the subject of numerous speculations and fakes, so it was customary in Japan to fake the blades of famous masters. Moreover, just like in Europe, the famous sword could have its own name and was inherited from generation to generation. Such a sword was considered the best gift for a samurai. The history of Japan knows not one case when the gift of a good sword (the famous master) turned an enemy into an ally. Well, in the end, the Japanese sword spawned so many different stories, both authentic and fictional, related to its history and application, that it is sometimes difficult even for a specialist to separate truth from fiction in them. On the other hand, they are certainly very useful for both filmmakers who make films about samurai and writers who write romantic books! One of them is the story of how one old oil merchant cursed Ieyasu Tokugawa, for which one of his entourage and hacked him with a sword in the neck. The blade was of such quality and passed through it so swiftly that the merchant took a few more steps before his head rolled off his shoulders. So there was such a thing in Japan, and every samurai had the right to “kill and leave,” i.e. to kill any member of the lower class who committed an offensive in his view for his honor, and all lower classes would have to admit it.
So the samurai used their sword to finish off the defeated opponent.
But the wizard, who made the armor, didn’t use admission as an equal to the blacksmiths in Japan, although there were known entire families of famous master armors, who passed their skills and secrets from generation to generation. Nevertheless, they rarely signed their works, despite the fact that they produced products of amazing beauty and perfection, which cost a lot of money.
R.S. Finally, I can inform all readers of this subject who are interested in this subject, that my book “Samurai. The first full encyclopedia "(Series" The best warriors in history ") is out of print. (Moscow: Yauza: Eksmo, 2016 g. -656 p. With illustrations. ISBN 978-5-699-86146-0). It included a lot of materials from those that were published on the pages of the VO, but some others supplement - some of what was here is not in it, something is given in more detail, and something of what is in book, it is unlikely to appear for thematic reasons. This book is the fruit of 16 years of work on the topic, because my first materials on samurai and ashigaru saw the light exactly 16 years ago - these were two chapters in the book “Knights of the East”. Then, in 2007, a book was published for children at the Rosmen publishing house - Atlas of Samurais and many articles in various refereed editions. Well, now this result. It is a pity, of course, to part with this topic forever, and to know that you’ll never write anything equal to this book anymore. However, ahead new themes, new works. I am obliged to note (I just have to, so it should be!) That the book has been prepared with the support of the Russian State Scientific Foundation, grant No. XXUMX-16-41 93535 of the year. A significant amount of photo-illustrations for it was provided by the Antiques of Japan company (http / antikvariat-japan.ru). The drawing for the cover was made by A. Karaschuk. A number of color illustrations provided by LLC "Star". Well, and work has already begun on new books ...
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