Speaker 1: Good evening and welcome to night. We'll spend a quiet
hour in the forge of a Japanese master sortsmith, in
the days when a single blade might take months to make,
and its maker was counted among the most honored craftsmen
in the land. Where somewhere in the countryside of old Japan,
several centuries ago, in the soft light of early evening,
the fire has been tended since morning, the steel folded
and folded again, and the forge itself is treated as
a sacred place. A rope of straw hung above the hearth,
white paper streamers stirring gently in the warm air. And
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we begin, take a moment to settle in, get comfortable,
however that looks for you tonight. When you're ready, close
your eyes, take a slow, deep breath in through your nose,
and a long, slow breath out. One more in and out.
The katana is the legendary curved sword of Japan throughout
the nation's history. It was made very slowly by a
small number of master smiths using forging techniques that changed
very little over the centuries. The blade was long and
gently curved, single edged, with a pale, rippling line running
just below the cutting edge. That line was slightly different
on every sword, marking each one as a unique piece.
To forge a katana was part craft, part ritual. There
were prayers at the forge. There were ropes of straw
hung above the fire with white paper streamers folded into them.
There were rules about who could enter the workshop and
when and what they were to wear. This is the
story of how those swords were made, and of the
smiths who refined their forging into a subtle and revered art.
The sword has a long history in Japan. Straight double
edged blades came first brought in from the mainland, copied
at home, set into shrines as treasures of the early courts.
For several hundred years, these straight swords were the swords
of Japan. The curved blade came later. It seems to
have settled into its mature form somewhere in the late
tenth and eleventh centuries, in the hands of smiths working
for the rising warrior class. Whether the curve came from
the way the steel cooled, or from the wishes of
the riders who used it, or from both, is not known.
But once it had appeared, it stayed. From that time on,
the sword had a recognizable shape, a gentle arc, a
single cutting edge, a long grip wrapped for two hands.
Schools of smiths grew up around it. Some worked in
the old province of Bizen on the inland sea. Others
worked in Yamato, near the ancient capital. Still others worked
in Sociu on the coast east of where the city
of Tokyo now stands. Each school had its own ways,
passed down master to apprentice for generations. The sword was
not only a weapon. It was, in time a treasure,
a gift between lords, an heirloom passed through families, an
object kept on a stand in the alcove of a
quiet room. The best blades were given names. Some of
those names are still known to day. But the making
was the heart of it, and the making began long
before any hammer touched any steel. The first thing the
smith needed was the right kind of iron. In most
of the world, iron was smelted from rock like ore
dug from mines, broken up heated with charcoal in tall furnaces.
Japan had little of that kind of oree. What Japan
had in many of its rivers was a fine black sand.
The sand was heavy, it was rich in iron. The
old smelters had learned over a very long time how
to turn it into steel. They did it in a
low clay furnace called a tatara. The furnace was a
long box of clay, built fresh for each smelt, with
bellows along its sides. Into it went layer after layer
of the black sand and charcoal all night. For three
days and three nights. Men worked the bellows in shifts.
The fire was kept burning. The master smelter watched the
color of the flame and the sound of the air,
and added more sand or more charcoal as he judged.
At the end of the smelt, the clay furnace was
broken open. Inside lay a great rough lump of bloom,
part slag, part iron, part steel, of different qualities, all
fused together. This lump was called the bloom. It might
weigh two tons. It was dragged out, cooled and broken
up with hammers. The pieces were then sorted by eye
by the master. Some pieces were too soft, others were
brittle and full of trapped slag, and a few the
precious ones were a clean, dense, high carbon steel with
a bright crystalline brake. When snapped. That steel was called tamahaganeh,
which means roughly jewel steel. The jewel steel was what
the swordsmith wanted. It was sold to him in small,
flat pieces, like broken biscuit, each piece smaller than a hand.
The whole long process of the smelt had been done
so that he could begin his own very different work.
A single sword would use only a few pounds of
this steel. Only a small part of what entered the
smelter reached the smith. The smith chose his pieces carefully,
weighed them, set them aside, and waited for a clear
day to begin. The forge itself was usually a small
wooden building set a little apart from the smith's home.
Inside was a low floor of beaten earth. In the
center was the hearth, a shallow clay basin sunk into
the floor with bellows on one side, worked by hand
or by foot. Above the hearth. At the start of
the work, the smith would hang a fresh straw rope.
From the rope hung folded white paper streamers cut into
a clean stepped shape. The rope and the streamers marked
the forge as a place of ris ritual set aside
from ordinary use. The smith and his apprentices, before beginning
the most important stages of the work, would bathe and
put on clean white clothes, and offer salt and rice
at a small shelf shrine in the corner of the building.
It is easy from a distance to imagine this as
solemn or grand. It was not. It was ordinary for them.
It was the way one began a piece of work
whose outcome could not be hurried, and which depended on
many small things going right in order. The rituals were
part of the working day, like the sweeping of the
floor and the setting out of the tools, and the
long heating of the charcoal until it had the right glow.
The smith was called the khajie. He was usually a
man working in a family tradition, often the son of
the last master or the adopted son of a smith
who had no son of his own around him. Worked
two or three apprentices. The senior apprentice might have been
with him for ten years. The youngest might be a
boy of fourteen, just learning to keep the fire. Even
the apprentices did most of the heavy hammering. The master
held the tongs, set the angle, judged the heat. He
was nearly silent while working. A nod was enough to
bring the next blow. A small movement of the tongs
told the apprentice where to strike. Visitors who watched the
forge from the doorway often said the work seemed slow,
and then realized that every blow was placed. The charcoal
was pine charcoal, made specially. The water in the slack
tub was river water. The anvil was a heavy block
of iron set into a section of tree trunk buried
in the floor. The hammers were of several weights. Tongs
of many sizes hung on the wall. There were small chisels, files,
and a long flat block where the cooling blade could
be set down. Along the back wall, dust collected on
a low shelf where last season's chisels still waited to
be sharpened. A broom of bound twigs leaned in the corner.
A square of cotton cloth, stained and folded, sat on
a stool by the door. These were the tools. The
rest of it lived in the smith's hands and in
his eye. Now we come to the long, slow, central work,
the folding. This is the part for which the Japanese
sword is best known, and the part that is most
often misunderstood. It's worth going through slowly in the order
it happened. The smith began by gathering his small flat
pieces of jewel steel. He laid them out on a
flat plate of iron. He stacked them piece on piece
into a small block about the size of a thick
paperback book. He wrapped this block in a thin sheet
of soft iron, like a packet. He coated the whole
thing with wet clay and sprinkled it with rice straw ash,
which would help the steel weld and protect it from
the air. The packet went into the fire. The bellows
worked steadily. The packet glowed dull red, then bright red,
then orange, then a clean, pale yellow white. The smith
watched the color with great care. Too cool and the
pieces inside would not fuse. Too hot and the steel
would burn and good carbon would be lost to the air.
When the color was right, the packet was lifted out
and set on the anvil. The apprentices struck it fast
and firm, with measured blows. The loose pieces of steel
inside welded together under the hammer into a single dense bar.
This was the first welld The bar went back into
the fire. When it was ready again, the smith set
a small cold chisel along its center and made a notch.
The apprentices struck. The bar folded back on itself like
a piece of warm clay, one half over the other.
The two halves were welded together with more blows. Where
there had been one layer, there were now two. This
was the fold. Then the bar was heated again and
folded again. Two layers became four, Four became eight, eight
became sixteen. It sometimes said that the Japanese smith folded
his steel a thousand times. A thousand folds would have
left him with only a thin film. The number of
folds was usually somewhere between ten and sixteen, but because
each fold doubled the layers, the count rose very quickly.
Ten folds made over one thousand layers, fifteen folds made
over thirty thousand, sixteen made more than sixty thousand. The
famous number many thousands of layers was real. The way
it was reached was simpler than the legend y fold.
At all two reasons. The first was to spread out
and slowly remove the impurities that had come through from
the smelter. Each weld squeezed a little more slag out
at the edges. Each fold gave the smith another chance
to set right anything uneven. Step by step, the steel
grew cleaner, finer, and more us uniform. The second reason
was the grain. The folding gave the finished steel a
layered structure, very fine, almost invisible to the naked eye,
that would later show once the blade was polished and
treated as a faint pattern in the metal. That pattern
was called the harder the skin. Different schools of smiths
folded in different directions and so produced different skins. Some
looked like running water, others like the grain of pine,
others like small clouds. A trained eye could read the
skin and tell from across a room which province a
blade had come from. The folding took most of a
day for a single bar, sometimes longer. The fire had
to be tended through every heat. The bellows worked at
a steady pace, never rushed between welds. The smith might
pause to wipe his face, to take a sip of
cold water, to look at his apprentices, to listen to
the fire. After the folding was complete on one bar,
the smith would set it aside and begin another, for
he wanted in the end two pieces of folded steel.
The two pieces were of different kinds. The first piece
was folded many times until it was very hard. This
would become the outer skin and the cutting edge of
the sword. It was called the hard steel. The second
piece was folded fewer times and was kept softer with
less carbon. This would become the inner core of the sword.
It was called the soft core. A sword made only
of hard steel would have a beautiful edge, but it
would also be brittle. It could shatter on a strong blow.
A sword made only of soft steel would be tough,
but its edge would dull quickly. The old Japanese answer
was to use both in layers, so that the finished
blade had a hard outside that could be sharpened to
a razor and a soft inside that could bend a
little and absorb a blow without breaking. The smith took
his bar of hard steel, heated it, and worked it
into a long, flat u shape, like a folded sandwich,
open at one long edge. Into the open edge, he
slid his bar of soft core. He welded the assembly
together with more heats and more blows. Now there was
a single long bar, soft inside, hard outside. This bar,
still short and thick, was the unborn sword. From here
the work changed. Now the smith began to draw the out.
With every heat, the apprentices struck along its length, lengthening it,
slowly narrowing it, shaping it. The thick block became a
long bar. The long bar became thinner and longer. Still
at one end, the smith left more metal that would
become the tang, the part hidden inside the handle. Along
the length, he began to suggest the line of the
back and the line of the edge, and the long
flat plane between them. This stage took several days. Heat hammer, look,
heat hammer, look again. The shape grew under the hands slowly.
By the end there was something that could be called
a sword, although it was still rough, still gray, still
without its final curve, still without its temper. The smith
then took up small chisels and files, cleaned the surfaces,
even the edges, set the long shallow ridge that runs
down each side of a finished blade. He cut the
slot for the future handle. He filed the back to
its proper shape. He worked often alone, now by lamp light,
sometimes for many evenings in a row. When this was done,
he had a finished blade in every way but one.
It still had no curve and no hard edge. Both
of those came together in a single moment at the
next stage. The voice rests for now. The next stage
was the tempering. It was the most uncertain part of
the whole process, and the part the smith feared most
years of work could be lost in a few seconds.
At the quench, the smith began by preparing a special clay.
The recipe was different in every workshop and was usually
kept private. It was a mix of clay, charcoal, powder,
and sometimes a little crushed stone, blended with water to
the thickness of soft butter. The smith painted this clay
over the whole blade with a small brush, but he
did not paint it evenly. Along the back of the
blade and over most of its width. He laid the
clay thickly along the cutting edge in a long, thin strip.
He laid only a very thin film. In places he
might leave the very edge bare. The pattern of the
clay was the smith's signature. Some smiths painted a long,
even line, Others painted soft waves. Others still painted small
islands or shapes like distant mountains. The clay was left
to dry. The blade now looked strange, like a long,
pale gray leaf, with one slim line of dark metal
showing along its edge. While the clay dried, the smith
made his fire ready. He used fresh charcoal, well burned
down to give a clean, even heat. The forge was darkened,
with shutters drawn or lamps put out. This was on purpose.
The smith needed to see the color of the steel
as it heated, and the smallest light from outside would
confuse his eye in the dim forge. The blade was
set into the bed of coals, edged down, and turned
slowly along its length. The smith watched. He was looking
for one particular color, a warm, even glow that the
old smiths described as the color of the moon in February,
or the color of a young leaf in spring. Eat
smith had his own description. The color was not very bright.
Brighter would mean too hot, duller would mean too cool.
When the color was right along the entire length of
the blade, the smith lifted it from the fire in
a single smooth movement and plunged it edge first into
the long wooden trough of water that waited beside the hearth.
The water hissed, steam rose. The blade was held under
for a few seconds, and then drawn out. Two things
happened in that moment. The first was that the thin edge,
with only a film of clay over it, cooled almost instantly.
The steel there was locked into a very hard form.
The thick back, under its heavy coat of clay, cooled
much more slowly and stayed in a softer, tougher form.
So the sword was now hard along its cutting edge
and soft along its back, in a single unbroken piece
of steel. The second was that the sudden cooling pulled
the blade. The hard edge contracted differently from the soft back.
The whole long blade bent in a single, quiet motion
into the gentle curve that a katana has always had.
The curve was not hammered in. It was made by
the steel itself in the moment of the quench, as
the difference between the two halves of its own body
set the curve. If all had gone well, the smith
now held a curved, hardened blade in his hand. If
it had not gone well, he held a cracked blade,
or a blade that had warped in the wrong direction,
or a blade with a small floor along its edge
that no later work could remove. In that case, the
blade would be set aside and the smith would begin
again with new steel. It is said that even the
great masters lost perhaps one blade in three at the quench,
and that the loss was simply part of the cost
of the work. Where the painted clay had been thick
and where it had been thin was now visible in
the metal itself as a soft, wavering line running along
the blade, just above the edge. That line was the
harm on the temper line. It was the visible boundary
between the hard edge and the soft back. It was,
for many lovers of the sword, the single most beautiful
feature of any blade. The smith would look at his
cooling blade for a long moment before setting it down.
He would not say much. Rentices would clean up around
him quietly. From here, the smith's main work was almost done.
There were still small things to do, final filing, a
final straightening with gentle blows on a hard wood block,
cutting the slot through which the handlepin would later pass,
and carving his name into the tang. The tang was
the part that would be hidden forever inside the wooden handle.
The signature went there because the smith did not need
any one but the maker of the next handle to
see it. That was the old habit. When the smith's
work was finished, the blade was wrapped in soft paper
and taken away. It did not come back to him polished.
A Japanese sword was polished by another craftsman. Entirely. The
polisher's tr raid was as old and as exacting as
the smith's. He had his own workshop, his own stones,
his own apprentices, and his own long training, which was
not the same as the smith's training. He began with
the roughest stone and ended with the finest. There might
be a dozen stones in the sequence, each one finer
than the last. The last stones were not really for
grinding at all, but for bringing out the surface, for
revealing what the smith had hidden in the steel. The
polisher worked seated on a low stool, with the blade
clamped at one end and supported by his feet at
the other, and a small pad held in one hand.
He drew the blade slowly down the wet face of
the stone, again and again, in long, even strokes. The
water on the stone clouded gray, then pale. He stopped
often to look. He held the blade up to a
lamp and tilted it and turned it and looked along
its length. He could see things in the metal that
nobody who had not been trained could see. The final
stones were small, They were no larger than a finger nail.
He held them between thumb and finger and rubbed them
along the surface of the blade with a slurry of
water and powdered stone by hand for many hours. As
he worked, the layered skin of the steel began to
appear like a faint cloud pattern in the surface. The
hard temper line began to glow softly against the darker
back the blade, which had come from the forge a
long gray leaf slowly became a cut tana. A full
polish on a single blade might take a polisher three weeks,
working every day. For very fine blades, it might take longer.
The polisher charged accordingly. The smith and the polisher together
had spent between them the best part of two or
three months on a single sword. When the polish was finished,
the blade was passed on again, this time to the
fittings makers. The fittings were the parts that turned a
bare blade into a usable, wearable sword. There was the
handle of wood, wrapped first in the rough skin of
a sting ray, and then bound with silk or cotton,
cord in a careful crossing pattern. There was the small
disk that sat between the handle and the blade, that
suba the guard. It was usually of iron, sometimes of
softer metal, often decorated with small pierced and chiseled designs.
There was the scabbard of light wood, lacquered in plain
black or in deep red, and fitted closely to the
blade so that it slid in and out with a
soft sound and stayed in place by friction. These parts
were made by separate craftsmen in separate workshops, all of
them as serious about their trade as the smith and
the polisher were about theirs. The handlebinder, the guard maker,
the scabbard maker, the lacquer worker, the metal fittings man
who cast and chiseled the small caps at each end
of the handle. None touched the steel. None was a smith.
Each did one thing, and did it for his whole life.
When all of this was finished, the sword was complete.
It had been the work of perhaps a dozen people
across many weeks. It had begun as a furnace full
of black river sand, and ended as a single curved
blade resting on a stand of dark wood, the temper
line softly visible along its edge in the light of
a lamp. The history of the great smiths is long.
Most are forgotten, a few are still known. The most
famous of all is the smith who worked under the
name Massa Mune in the province of Soshu in the
late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The dates of his
life are not certain. The sword tradition gives him a
long life and many pupils. He was probably a real man,
but more swords are attributed to him than one man
could have made, and the legend has grown around the work.
His blades were famous for the quality of their steel.
The pattern in the metal was said to be especially fine.
Many small bright dots scattered through the body of the blade,
like stars set against the soft cloud of the skin.
Several of his swords have survived. A small number are
kept to day in shrines and museums, and are taken
out only a few times a year to be examined
and aired. Long after Masamuney's death, a story grew up
that compared him to another famous smith called Mura Masa.
The story said that Massa Mune's blades were peaceful blades,
and that Mura Masas were restless ones, and that one
could tell which was which by placing them in a
stream and watching how leaves drifted past. It's a good story.
It's almost certainly a later invention. The two smiths probably
lived in different eras, but the story was told and
retold for centuries, and is still told today because people
who love the sword like to think of the smith's
character living on in his work. Other names from the
long history of the craft are still remembered too. The
smiths of Bizen on the Inland Sea produced more swords
across the centuries than any other school, and many of
them are kept in collections today. The smiths of Yamato,
near the old capital of Nara, worked for the great
Buddhist temples. The smiths of Soshu were known for boldness
and a strong temper line. Each school had its own habits,
its own family lines, its own students, its own quiet rivalries.
A great smith might take in only one or two
new pupils in his lifetime. Those pupils might wait ten
years before being allowed to forge a finished blade under
their own name. The trade moved slowly from one generation
to the next. A pupil might in turn pass it
on to his own son, or to a pupil of
his own. In this way the knowledge crossed many centuries,
passed by hand rather than by writing. Much of it
lived only in the hands. The craft reached its high
point in the medieval centuries. After the long Wars of
the sixteenth century, the country settled into a long peace.
Swords were still made and still worn, but they were
worn more as a sign of rank than as working weapons.
The smiths continued their work, the polishers continued theirs, the
fittings became more decorative. Some of the most beautiful guards
in the collections of the world were made in this
long quiet time. Then, in the late nineteenth century, the
world of the smiths changed almost overnight. The old warrior
class was abolished. Wearing swords in public was forbidden. The
market for new swords collapsed, Most of the workshops closed.
Many of the old smiths laid down their hammers and
turned to other work, to the making of kitchen knives
or farm tools, or simple iron work for daily life.
For a generation or two it looked as though the
craft might be lost. It survived. A small number of
families kept making swords through the lean years. More out
of stubbornness than out of need. In the twentieth century,
the government and a small group of collectors helped set
up training programs and rules for the use of the
old jewel steel, and ways of teaching young smiths the
older techniques. A few of the great smelters were rebuilt,
the long furnaces of the Tatara were lit again on
a small scale in the mountains. To day, a small
number of smiths, perhaps two hundred or so, still make
swords in the old way. They are licensed, and the
number of blades each may make in a year is
limited by law. The work is much as it ever was.
There is the same kind of clay forge, the same
kind of pine charcoal, the same kind of jewel steel,
the same long days of folding, the same careful painting
of the clay, the same dark, quiet evening of the quench.
The straw rope still hangs above the fire, the paper
streamers hang from it. The bellows work in steady time.
The senior apprentice strikes when the master holds the tongs
in a certain way, And a boy of fourteen somewhere
is still learning to keep the fire. Even when the
day's work is done. The forge is swept, the tools
are set back on their hooks. The unfinished blade is
wrapped in soft paper and placed on the long shelf
at the back of the workshop. The fire is banked
down to a low, even glow. The lamps are turned down.
The master pauses at the door, looks once around the room,
and slides the door closed. Outside, the evening has come.
The mountains stand quiet inside the forge. In the dark,
the embers settle, soft and orange and slow.