Japanese Swords Home
This site is for people who love high quality Japanese swords and other weapons from Japan. Here, you’ll find Japanese swords reviews, discussions around traditional and modern Japanese sword forging techniques and handmade swords, articles and other random cool stuff!
Japanese Sword
is a term commonly used to identify a collection of traditional bladed weapons from Japan. Though often associated with the more popular katanas, a japanese sword may in fact be from the following family: katana, tachi, wakizashi, tsurugi, tanto, nodachi, naginata, and yari. These different swords (referred to as ‘nihonto’ in the East, and often incorrectly coined as ’samurai swords’ in the West) are typically categorized according to their size and forging methods.
Novice Japanese sword buyers are often faced with hundreds of katanas, wakizashis and tantos from a number of makers, so taking the leap to choose that first sword can be a daunting task for most. Articles, guides, and a variety of historical information are abundantly available for any enthusiast interested in the study of Japanese swords. There’s much more to picking the “right sword” than just shopping by price alone. We’ve decided to compile a series of tips to help the novice collector get started on his/her collection. This is by no means a complete Japanese Swords Buyer’s Guide – it’s just some tidbits that we hope is useful to our first-time buyers.
Read: Japanese Swords Buyer’s Guide
We’ve put together a comprehensive set of common Japanese sword terms, complete with a full Japanese sword visual glossary, to help you identify the different parts of a Japanese sword. This glossary is very handy when buying a katana, wakizashi or tanto, as most high quality Japanese swords are often described using traditional terminology.
Read: Japanese Swords Visual Glossary