Forging a Japanese Tanto - Kards

[Music] so and this belt is brought to you by cards a digital ccg style game that is set in world war ii what they've asked us to do is pick from a series of knives bayonets or daggers that are period appropriate and most of these were produced in factories either before or during the war however we chose the one that was not mass-produced and it has a very interesting cultural story attached to it we bring you the japanese tonto roughly the process of making a japanese sword begins like this the smith takes a piece of bloomery steel or tamahagani heats it up flattens it and sorts it into roughly two categories medium hardness steel and high hardness steel these roughly correspond to medium carbon and high carbon then the smith begins to stack both categories separately and fold them until they become relatively homogeneous although many japanese war swords were actually mass-produced but not all of them were in fact quite often you find ancestral blades that were picked by the family to be remounted in modern wartime kosherite or fittings uh you find very often national treasure katanas like that at auctions that are in gunto mounts daggers are very much the same way the very interesting thing about dagger specifically and the tonto we're making today is that it has a very thick back which makes it a heroic doshi dagger that is the armor piercing before the modern era a dagger like this would have been used very much like in the west a rondelle so you're fighting fighting fighting you find an opening and you stab a person in the armpit piercing the male now during the war with the advent of airplanes navy so on and so forth daggers started finding a very different purpose you see the military gear with all the straps especially if you're a paratrooper has a very annoying ability of tangling yourself up and when you're floating out at sea or landing in trees you need a sharp convenient knife that frees you from your ring now that function has always existed within the history of arms and armor that is if a samurai or even a knight falls in the river they need a way to free themselves from the cumbersome armor that's taking in on water and making it drown although training was available how to kind of float in armor it was still very much ineffective and the presence of a sharp convenient knife was very useful and life-saving [Music] so [Music] the historical period surrounding the second world war is most notable for the industrial emergence of state nationalism and the east was not an exception i'm going to take this build as an opportunity to talk about two very important books since the viewer asked me about the books i was reading one is called zen at war by brian dyson victoria and it describes the way the religion of zen has been co-opted and inverted into producing state propaganda and radicalizing the japanese troops the second book is the art of the modern japanese sword or modern japanese sword and it's co-written by leona hiroko kap along with yoshindo yoshihara this book describes the sword production during the period of the second world war and how that production influences the art of sword making today [Music] i'm going to try a new construction that is appropriate for a dagger or tonto blade where it's only the edge that really needs to be hard because there's the only part we technically heat treating so the entire back will consist of medium carbon steel in order to do that i forge an l shaped piece out of my high carbon steel and a rectangular piece out of my medium carbon steel and assemble them [Music] [Music] the next stage is the sonomi see once the high carbon and medium carbon steels are forged welded it's time to start roughly shaping out the blade at this stage we're shaping out the rough shadow of the future blade which is about 90 percent of the final piece the hand beveling will build up the rest ten percent the hand beveling is the stage at which more of the smith's artistry comes into making the piece because the traces of the smith's hammer at the same time his brush strokes in the steel now the idea of the final forging is such that you should be able to take a scraper and a file and finish the blade instead of grinding it before heat treating [Music] [Music] the most interesting part of our story interesting to me begins with a rise to power of the young emperor meiji in 1876 the meiji government issued an edict prohibiting the wearing of swords you see the major restoration wanted to do away with the old feudal customs and that heavily impacted two groups swordsmiths as well as buddhist priests now swordsmith art fell into disrepair for several decades however the issue of buddhist priests became very uh interesting you see what happened is during this time buddhism was declared a foreign religion and basically was forced to separate its shrines from the shinto shrines that left buddhists very desperate what happened is there was a new threat of western christianity coming back in and kind of out popularizing itself on several front traditionals and buddhism buddhists lost ground in the ability of exercising their faith inside shinto shrines and they needed a way to get back into power so what happened is buddhists started debates with christians where they would technically out-christian themselves in the west so for example the famous london debate that kind of uh made them well positioned into producing an argument to to the government that buddhism in japan is as japanese as shinto now what was necessary is a social force that would prove that to the state as a result several scholars for example dt suzuki started producing scholarly work that was arguing that zen buddhism was preserving maintaining and refining the soul of the japanese people by the 1920s and 1930s the intellectual machinery of buddhism was in full force i'm going to read several quotes that are pretty indicative of the topic at hand for example the soldier must become one with his superior he must actually become his superior similarly he must become the order he receives that is to say his self must disappear in so doing when he eventually goes on to the battlefield he will advance when told to advance on the other hand should he believe he is going to die and act accordingly he will be unable to fight well what is necessary then is that he is able to act freely and without mental hindrance in this and several following citations what becomes evident is that we don't see actual traditional japanese buddhism that has been practiced for the past 1500 years on the island but a very interesting syncretic combination of german idealism a la ficta and hegel combined with a desperate form of buddhism that is trying to achieve power what comes to mind is the note hegel makes on his uh witnessing of napoleon marching through the streets because hegel's quote is he saw the foot of god in the world so what happens with buddhism is a very similar moment where the state is described as being one with the people and thus the duty of every individual soldier and buddhist is to become one with a state there is no difference between the individual the individual desire and the desire of the state and in the japanese context what is unique is that the emperor is the head of shinto and has divine right thus the propaganda apparatus of japan looks very much like the propaganda apparatus that national socialist germany was developing at the same time both types of machinery are idealizing the state and deifying it making it god at the same time describing that state as having a pure historical purpose a purpose that transcends the life of every single individual being and adding on to that the historical economic context of industrialized society the propaganda machine was replicating itself as efficiently as it was replicating bullets [Music] the social status of the sword makers was very similar to the social status of buddhist priests they both had to reclaim their right to power and in the case of the japanese swordsments they had to take a very similar path first they had to provide an argument to the government that swords are a spiritual and a religious inheritance of the japanese people that argument was easy because a sword smith during the creation of the sword is at the same time a shinto priest but the japanese government wanted to modernize and was heavily investing into mass-produced swords and daggers bayonets rifles so on and so forth so what happened is a very similar argument was made to that buddhist priest that there is something that goes beyond foreign western modernization that is present within the japanese sword and carrying a sword made on japanese soil from japanese materials into the unclean west will symbolically provide a type of purity and victory that cannot be found anywhere else once the wood parts are done it's time to work on the silver fittings there is very little room for error [Music] another interesting feature is the kogai or the hair ornament that is inside the scabbard very often of katana wakazashi as well as tonto in our case the kogai has a chrysanthemum pattern which is the symbol of the imperial family and the japanese state in order to do that i'm going to apply the nonomezogan technique which is roughly equivalent to the western [Music] domestini [Music] warriors who sacrificed their lives for the emperor will not die they will live forever truly they should be called gods and buddhas for whom there is no life or death [Music] the sword has thus a double office to perform to destroy anything that opposes the will of its owner and to sacrifice all the impurities that arise from the instinct of self-preservation [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] neither one of these two books is without criticism for example the modern japanese swordsmith book is way too short for my personal taste and i would have liked more information on the foundation of the sword smithing school in the 1930s but alas such a book is yet to be written the book zen at war has been in fact criticized as painting too wide of a brush in two dark colors and has been accused of a certain lack of sophistication however the material presented within it seems to be fairly reliable if you guys are in search for a top-notch ccg play style game that takes place in world war ii be sure to give cards a try and be sure to check out the brand new that works bundle that includes this tattoo that we made that's now available today and is a special gift to you the first 100 people to share this video on social media using the hashtag works will receive a special promo code for one free game pack and a draft ticket normally a five dollar value be sure to like this video if you enjoyed the build and as always please comment below what build you'd like to see this team build next and don't forget to subscribe to this channel that works

Channel: That Works

Views: 597,173

Keywords: japanese tanto, forging a tanto, forging a katana, traditional Japanese bladesmith, kards, ww2 katana, tamahagane, ilya alekseyev, forged in fire champion, blacksmith, nihonto

Id: kDKtc-hKiq8

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/adoomsdaymachine]

Interesting vid! Fun to watch, though a little more spiritual than I was expecting.

For those interested, this is a "hocho" style tanto, in tsutsugane aikuchi mounts. I'd be interested to see it in photos. The polish looks hazy in the video, so I can't really see much in the way of activities.