Japanese Sword Maker - Hirokuni Hiroki

Today I had an very unique and amazing opportunity. We were offered a tour of the shop of a locally based sword maker, Hirokuni Hiroki. Hiroki-san is in the very top class of sword makers in Japan (of which there are only a few) and has been making swords for over 42 years. He is a humble and gracious man and his swords are incredibly beautiful works of art. Each sword takes about 2 weeks to forge, another couple of weeks to shape and several more weeks to sharpen and polish. Sword makers are limited to forging 2 swords a month. The Japanese government uses this limit to help preserve quality and discourage mass production. Master sword makers in Japan are given templates of all the different types of swords that have been produced throughout Japanese history. One of the traits of a master is the ability to faithfully reproduce each type and Hiroki-san had three completed swords of different types on hand to show us (shown below).

This is a short sword.

This sword is of medium length. What makes it unique is that it has a cutting edge on both sides of the blade. This was the type of sword carried by very high ranking warriors.

This is what most of us would classify as a typical "samurai sword" aka, katana. That's a $10,000 piece of Japanese art right there folks.