Japanese Swords

[John A. Larsen]

I just received my Jan 2016 issue of Blade magazine and there is an article on Japanese Swords of WWII. What caught my eye was a photo of a soldier standing in front of a huge pile of Japanese swords. According to the caption there are approximately 40,000 swords in a pile 6-feet high, and 300 feet long. Any U.S. soldier could walk in and pick up any of the swords and take them home, supposedly why so many Japanese swords are found in the U.S.A. You never know where they will turn up. I was visiting friends in Finland and we went to see a man who collected Finnish Uniforms and Patriotic rugs, and he pulled out four very nice Japanese swords. His brother had married a Japanese woman and her family gave the brother the swords, which he in turn gave this man. He let us look at all of them after we put on cloth gloves. John

 

[gadunz]

The rest were bulldozed into the ground.