Rescue wakizashi

J W Bensinger

J W Bensinger

Joined
Mar 26, 2009
Messages
2,228
I got this years ago as partial payment for a knife-one side was buffed, and the other side was black, with patches of active rust-there was no saya, so I made one from poplar:
The guy who brought it back from the Pacific ground the kanji off the tang with a bench grinder, I think as an editorial comment:
The owner let me polish a little window in it to see if it was even a real shinken-it was, so it got the absolute minimum polish to stop the rust and restore the geometry. It has a pretty nice hada:
 
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It was bent from a bad cut when I got it, about 4" from the yokote-the edge is nearly glass hard, but the body of the blade is so ductile that I was able to bend it straight with my hands, for the most part.
It was also interesting in that when i did a final iron oxide powder/rice vinegar polish (I've never gotten nugui to work right) you could see where the clay had blown off the blade in the quench, and the hamon reflects it-one assumes the polisher had hidden that when he did the hayuza.
Sorry for the wretched pics-hamon and hada are a bloody nuisance to photograph. Here's one more, under white LED light (which seems to bring out the features of the steel-moonlight also does this)
 
I wince every time I see a kanji defaced or ground away,but from what I've seen there a lot of em out there like that. It's more understandable when you figure the guy that brought it home may have faced the owner, and took the trophy from his corpse. Some may have known it was the name of the maker, but some probably figured it was the owner, being normally "hand written". There's a lot of U.S. Militaria around with the original bearer's name on it, etched or written. To keep the sword is one thing, to keep the sword with the name of a guy - (or so you think)- you killed on it,..that's a bit morbid. Too bad nobody back then realized they'd be worth so much some day.
 
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If they had I never would have owned one...
In college I painted the house of a guy who had been with the occupation forces in Japan after the war. When Macarthur started collecting swords a family he had befriended GAVE him the family sword, so it wouldn't be destroyed. It was six or seven hundred yeard old. When his ship was pulling into peuget sound the officer in charge said if what you were bringing back wouldn't fir in your duffle, you couldn't bring it. The sword didn't fit, so into the Sound it went (because said officer was keeping all the good swag the Joes "couldn't" bring home).
If he'd knocked out the mekugi and popped the tsuka it woulda fit.
 
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