Japanese Metalwork & Blades

About this book

A sword classic and a knife shopping guide — or two hundred forges, knife towns, casting cities and fine-metal techniques in one guide? Japanese Metalwork & Blades covers 200 entries in a single uniform format: every entry gives the Region & Materials, the Origins, How to Recognise it in a shop, and Buying & Experience — where to buy, what to check, and how the law travels with the object.

Bizen's sword capital and Osafune's blade town; Sakai's divided labour and Seki's cutlery city; Morioka's Nanbu ironware and Takaoka's bronze; mokume-gane, shakudo and nanako at loupe scale; and the tool metropolis of Tsubame-Sanjo. A front chapter teaches the four checks that authenticate any piece of metal — steel, edge, patina, mark — and the legal frame is treated as content, not fine print: the sword registration certificate (torokusho), deregistration and export permission, knife carrying and airline rules, and antique export permits, all as general guidance with "confirm with the authorities and your carrier" discipline.

No photographs: the recognition fields are written for the hand and eye instead — weight, edge geometry, surface grain, the ring of struck metal, the placement of a mark — because those are checks a buyer can actually perform in a shop or demand in a listing's photographs.

Companions, kept separate: Japanese Knives shops for knives by type and buying decision; Japanese Swords & Armor treats swords and armour as objects of appreciation; Japanese Traditional Crafts surveyed metal as one family in a five-material survey. This book is the metal deep dive organised by forge, town, technique and material, every entry written fresh.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.