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demonslayedher · 2 years

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Japanese Sword Production Lore As It Relates to Kimetsu no Yaiba – Part 1 of 4

You are an eager young Nichirin swordsmith named Teppi. By reading this, I am putting you to work. We will focus primarily on the transformation of Shoujouhi iron sand into the lumps of steel which the swordsmen select after surviving the Final Selection, but there will be other Swordsmith Village nerdery throughout. See here for the master list of parts & additional Nihonto resources. --

This is the year you’re finally old enough to help forge a real Nichirin-to. You pick up one of your father’s finished blades, admiring its shape and curve as you hold it straight upright, whispering to yourself, “sugata.” You grew up with the ting-ting-TANG, ting-ting-TANG of forging as your lullabies. You then turn the blade horizontal by the oil lamp to watch the spot of yellow light glint down the middle line, and you whisper, “hamon.” This one is sleek and straight, the standard for Nichirin blades, but you always knew to anticipate thorny wind or flame patterns if your father spent extra time applying clay. Your mother raised you on sword manuals of the five basic Breaths, that you might know their traits and needs. Finally, you hold the blade to the light coming from the open window, feasting your eyes on the speckled skin of the blade. It may only be your imagination, but you believe you can see the entire rainbow of colors it holds the potential to unveil when a swordsman’s grip acts on it like a prism. This is your favorite part, “jihada.”

“TEPPI!” your father bellows. “WATCH THE LUNCH!!”

“Ah!” you scream and fumble the sword, then dart your glance over to the hearth so fast that your mask rattles. The embers in the scrap wood have died down to only flecks of light, meaning the rice has likely gone cold. Your father pushes you aside to your bum and swoops in with a bamboo tube to his lips and puffed cheeks. The fire whooshes bright, and lunch is saved.

“How are you so absentminded!”

“I was rightly distracted!” you declare, holding up his gleaming craftsmanship over your head. “Face it, Pop. I don’t have the heart of a chef, I’ve got the eyes of a metalworker!”

“You’ve got the brains of a 2-day-old!” he says as he snatches the elegant work. “Metalworker? Metalsworker, he says. Have you not learned anything!?”

“I eat and breathe and sleep metal—”

“FIRE!!” he screams and bumps his Hyottoko mask against yours. “WE’RE FIRE WORKERS!!!”

“Uh, Pop? That sword is metal.”

He withdraws with a sigh and shakes his head. “You leave me no choice, boy. I’ve got to send you off to the Murage.”

Notes & Vocabulary: While there’s a lot more to it, these are the very, very basics of Nihonto (Japanese blade) appreciation. See more on the masterlist page for deep nerdery. Sugata: The form of a sword, such as its size and curvature (sori). Hamon: Where the hard and soft wides of a katana meet in the middle, a visible line that can come in various styles from straight to wavy or jagged. Jihada: The pattern of the steel, which takes different forms depending on how the sword was folded in the forging process. Hyottoko: The style of mask worn by the swordsmiths in KnY. While the real life origins of this folksy mask are uncertain, a common theory is that the name comes from combining the words “Hi Otoko” (Fire Man 火男), as the face may be modeled off a man blowing into a hearth (“kamado”) to tend the fire. This results in one of his eyes squinting, whether to protect it or due to always facing the heat. This seems to be the origin story Gotouge accepts, as Kotetsu wears “Hi Otoko” on his back, and Gyokko also uses those comments when commenting on the artistic merits of leaving them in his sculpture. While often associated with clown-ish characters in folk dances, it may also be used to represent a god of fire, or a god of the hearth.

“What’s a Murage?” you ask, bouncing along on a Kakushi’s back. You are blindfolded.

“The master of the iron furnace.”

“Iron!? He works with iron!” you happily kick your legs, hitting the thighs of the Kakushi. “Then Pop sent me to learn from the best.”

“If anybody had faith in you, I wouldn’t be carrying you, you know.”

“Eh? Isn’t this a service?”

“It’s insurance so that you don’t expose the location of Youkouzan. Most of the other swordsmiths go on their own two feet.”

“What’s Youkouzan?”

The Kakushi comes to a stop. He sets you gently to a seat on the ground. He then pounds your head with his fists. “YOU GREW UP IN THE SWORDSMITH VILLAGE AND YOU DON’T KNOW THIS!?”

“Ow—ow—ow---”

“It’s the mountain closest to the sun. The sun shines on it all year round, it doesn’t get cloudy or rain—”

“If it’s closest to the sun, don’t you mean the tallest? Like, Mt. Fuji?”

“—but more importantly, that’s the only place to find the raw materials for Nichirin blades: Shoujouhi iron sand and ore.”

“Shoujouhi…” you repeat, the word a rare taste on your lips. That word is for the reddest of reds, like how the sun is drawn in art, as though trying to mimic its heat. A blade of that color would be outstanding.

“Since that’s the only place to find it, if someone went around willy-nilly asking for directions, that might lead you-know-what straight for it.”

“…rain?”

“DEMONS!!” he thumps your head again.

“Eh? But if it’s in the sun all the time, they can’t get to it anyway, right? Right?”

“I see why your father sent you. You’re lucky to come straight here, you know. I hear they used to send people all the way out to learn in the old Izumo Province before being allowed to touch the real stuff. Oh well, those tatara furnaces are all shutting down anyway. Western ore is cheaper, and nobody needs swords anymore.”

“Fools, all of them. Nichirin blades were always the most beautiful anyway.”

The Kakushi sighs at you. “And produced to be the most effective, we can hope.” Notes & Volcabulary:Murage: The master engineer of a steelmaking Tatara furnace. Youkouzan (aka Mt. Youkou): “Sunlight Mountain,” a place that only exists in the KnY universe, described by Haganezuka-san in Chapter 9. Location unknown. Shoujouhi-satetsu (aka Shoujouhi iron sand): Also unique to KnY. In real life, Japanese blades (Nihonto) were typically made of Masa-satetsu (magnetite sand) and Akome-satetsu (red iron sand), 80% of which was typically sourced in the Izumo region (modern day Shimane-prefecture, I’ll be focusing especially on the Okuizumo region, though the production extends beyond the town borders). The color “Shoujouhi” is the truest red of red, and I have more to say about the significance of the color red in KnY.

After many hours and Kakushi changeovers, you hear the footsteps thunk-thunk-thunk across wooden planks, and given the soft sound of water, you suspect you may be going over a bridge. Somebody calls out a greeting, the Kakushi calls back, and then decides, “This is a fine place for you to get down and walk.” He helps you get the blindfold off and you feel blinded for real until putting your mask back on; it really is sunny on this mountain. As the man in a face matching yours comes over, the Kakushi says, “Tetsuhiro-ojisan will show you the way from here.”

“Hey, Teppi-shounen, long time no see. Good to see you’ve got some long limbs on you now.”

“I’ve got muscle, too!”

“Good, good,” he says, and you think he means it. At this point, you notice he’s carrying a long pole with its end in the narrow stream of water running along the bridge instead of under it. There are a few other men from the village tending it, scooping something out. You and Tetsuhiro wave farewell to the Kakushi, and then make your way up the sloping path. “You’ve got good timing,” he says. “Tataragawa-dono’s getting older, we’d like him to focus on passing on his knowledge.”

“I’m here to be his apprentice!?”

“Well… we’ll see. Oh, Tetsumotonaka-san!” he waves to someone else, who waves back. Tetsuhiro then says to you, “We’re in luck having a Tetsumotonaka here.” He says no more though, and you continue your way up, and up, and up.

You’ve noticed that the higher you go, the wider the river gets. While it still seems like its course is guided by humans, the river looks more and more like what you’ve expect to find in the mountains—more rapids, unlike the muddy water down below. “What’s wrong with this river?” you ask.

“Wrong!? There’s nothing wrong with it!! You know how hard we worked to make it run like this? This is Kannanagashi!”

“Who’s that?”

“Are you thick in the head?! This is how we separate the Shoujouhi iron from the regular mountain sediment!”

You cast a skeptical glance at the muddy water. “Doesn’t look red to me.”

“Where did you think Shoujouhi comes from!? The marketplace!?”

“I thought it’d look more like a rock. Like you go pluck it out of the mountains. You know, plink! Ta-da, it’s iron!”

He sighs. “It doesn’t work that way. Not in Japan. Did you know? The iron quality here was never good.”

“WHAT? HOW DARE YOU INSULT OUR METALWORK!!”

“THAT’S THE BEAUTY OF OUR METALWORK!!” he screams back. “All we’ve ever had here was sand, but ever since before demons roamed, we found ways to purify and refine that sand and make it into steel. We work with what we’ve got.”

“What we’ve got sure looks pretty wet,” you reply. You’re pretty sure he’s pulling your leg.

Tetsuhiro shakes his head. “I don’t know where to start with you. I’ll leave you to Tataragawa-dono. There he is, just up ahead.”

You look where he points, and the first thing that catches your attention is the face of the looming mountain. You’ve never seen a mountain like this—it’s like an enormous demon took a big bite out of it, and a sheet of gravel covered the gaping wound. Below, completely dwarfed by the side of that hole, stands an old man in a Hyottoko mask. This must be the Murage. You are struck by the same awe as when in the presence of your father or the village head or other swordsmiths whom you especially admire. What sort of swords has this man made, to be considered such an iron master?

“So you’re Teppi, huh?” he says.

You puff out your chest. “That’s me.”

“Good to have an extra youth to put to work.” As he says this, you notice the masked men behind him scraping gravel from the mountain face toward the river, and your heart drops as you wonder if this might be the work you’ll be put to. As a budding swordsmith, it feels less elegant than anything you had in mind. To your elation, however, Tataragawa starts descending the path and says over his shoulder, “Come with me.”

Notes & Vocabulary:Kannanagashi 鉄穴流し: As described, the process of using water to separate iron sand from sediment. This was primarily undertaken in the Chugoku region of western Honshu, especially in the area today known as Okuizumo. While Kanamori (金森) is a common Japanese surname written as “metal forest,” KnY’s Kanamori instead has a name taken from this process: 鉄穴森. On that note, I picked up Tetsuhiro-ojisan and Tetsumotonaka from canon, and all the canon “Tetsu” (鉄) names are in reference to iron. There are other metal references for other side characters, too, like Kongouji-dono, with “Kongou” (金剛) being an indestructible substance (this could be used in reference to something like a diamond but is more closely associated with the Buddhist concept of Vajra, like an indestructible truth). The hagane (鋼, also pronounced as ‘kou’ in ‘Koutarou’) in Haganezuka (鋼鐵塚) is steel, though another way of writing ‘iron’ is thrown in there in the middle for fun, because all the swordsmith village names err on the side of being very extra. For this story, your self-insert Teppi is named “Iron Fire” (鉄火). You can probably guess where I got Tataragawa’s (踏鞴河) name, though tatara furnaces are typically referred to in phonetic hiragana asたたら.

#kny nerdery #SWORDS SWORDS SWORDS #kny fandom theories and meta

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