The swordsman cometh

Finally, the day draws nigh!

After almost seven months, my sword is nearly ready! Regular readers of this blog will know that amongst many other things, I’m a bit of a Japanese sword nut. I’ve studied the use of the Japanese sword for several years and on a trip to Japan earlier this year, I decided it was time to pick up a real one.

I have quite a few imitation swords that are functional in that I can train with them, but they are factory made and really, not comparable in quality to the real thing. So I saved up for a few years and with a wad of yen burning a hole in my pocket, I picked up an antique authentic nihonto (Japanese sword) in Tokyo.

As a budoka, finding a usable sword is a little like catching lightening. You have to try to find a sword which not only ‘speaks to you’ and which feels right to use, you also have find one that you can afford and also that has fittings in good enough condition that it’s safe to use. Very old or wasted fittings are extremely dangerous, because if not looked after, the blade can actually fly out of the handle when it’s swung.

Anyway, because of this, I took the decision to buy an antique blade in shira saya. What’s a shirasaya? Well, briefly, for those who may not have come across such things before, real Japanese swords are manufactured as a collaborative effort between at least four or more people. There is a smith who makes the blade, a polisher who gives the blade its final shape and also ‘polishes’ it using a series of fine stones to give it its final appearance and sharpness. This is then sent to a guy who makes a shirasaya, a plain wooden storage case that holds the blade and allows it to be transported or inspected.

The shirasaya is just a temporary storage case - the sword next needs to have koshirae (furniture) made for it - a wooden handle needs to be carved from two pieces of a particular kind of wood to exactly fit the nakago (tang) and this handle then needs to be encased in specially prepared ray skin and then further wrapped using tsukaito - a kind of silk or leather lacing that gives the handle it’s distinctive diamond-patterned grip.

The blade itself also needs a wooden scabbard custom carved for it to give it an exact fit, and this then needs to have various bits and bobs added to it to strengthen it, before it’s lacquered to make it weather proof. In addition to the handle and the scabbard, the sword also needs various specialist craftsmen to make a tsuba (sword guard) as well as the various washers and other metal items used in its assembly.

As you can tell, it’s a lot of work and it’s extremely hard to find people up to the task of carrying it out now. In Japan it costs many hundreds of thousands of yen (or thousands of euro) to get this done for you. However, my plan was to get the sword in Japan, and then have the koshirae made for it in the US, where there is rather oddly enough demand for such services to support the existence of a few specialist craft companies.

So that was six months ago, when I got the sword back to Ireland and shipped it off the US. And then yesterday, the e-mail I’d been waiting for – it’s ready.

: )

I’ll post more here when it arrives. Perhaps with some pictures, if there’s interest.

It’s a what, now?

So back from Japan and there are quite a few blog entries on the way, as I get the time. The first thing I’m moved to blog about is the new Sony Rolly. Myself and Jason spent a full twenty minutes standing in front of a kiosk in an electronics store in Japan looking at a promotional video of the rolly.

Really. Twenty minutes - twenty full minutes - spent watching a video of the rolly doing what rollys do. Exactly what that is, I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I still don’t know. Which is why we spent so long looking at it. I couldn’t decide if this was some sort of cross cultural misunderstanding - maybe Japanese people ‘get it’ instantly - or marketing genius along the lines of “let’s make the promos so ambigous, it will keep people guessing!”

It seems to be some sort of music player, except it lights up, pulses colours, dances and has bluetooth functions. But quite what it is or why you’d want it I’m not sure. The Japanese promo videos feature children dancing with their rollys, couple snuggling in bed with their rolly, and people meditating beside their rolly. Apparently you can programme your rolly to dance in specific ways, and then share your dance programmes across the net with your rolly-owning friends. Quite why you would want to do this, I don’t know but this does come from the same culture that brought us the virtual pet in the form of the tamagotchi so who can say?

Either Sony has invented something so totally and uterly redundent and useless that nobody will buy it and it will go the way of the Sinclair C5 or in fact, Sony has come up with an entirely new and original kind of personal electronics.

Thou shalt always kill

I’m off to Japan for a week or two.

In the meantime, you should watch this.

Really. You should - it’s genius.

The last day of summer

The North Beach in Greystones, County Wicklow.

Keepon keeps on!

Check out this extraordinarily cool music video. The little yellow robot isn’t a prop - it’s actually a real robot under development in Japan, designed to mimic social communication patterns. It’s freaky!

He’s called Keepon.

You can find out more here.

Catwalk fabulous . . .

So my incredibly talanted sister Deborah* and her guru-like husband Charlie had a triumph last night (in the Latin sense of the word) when they held their first catwalk fashion show in Dublin city at the uber-trendy Fallon & Byrne on Wicklow Street. Deborah and her friend Aideen Bodkin have worked in fashion for a long time, but decided to hold a show together during Dublin Fashion Week and it appears they are the Hotted Things in Town(tm) right now.

The show was thronged - absolutely packed out with journalists, fashion buyers, models and supporters. A couple of hundred people packed in to watch the show and they weren’t disappointed. I don’t know a huge amount about fashion, but I was blown away by the creativity and talent on display. And it seems that the press in attendence were too.

This morning, there is more newsprint dedicated to this show than I’ve ever seen for any publicity event, let alone fashion show. There is acres of coverage in The Irish Indendent, The Irish Times, The Examiner, The Daily Mail, Herald AM and probably more I haven’t seen.

This fantastic picture was published in a huge print on page two of today’s Irish Independent. (I hope the photographer who took it doesn’t mind me ‘borrowing’ it temporarily for non commercial use!) Whoo hoo! Congrats Debs!

(*For the record, all my family are fabulously talented in their respective fields.)

Arf!

It ’s a gorgeous summers day outside today, so me and Bob went for a walk.

Here he is, surveying his dominion.

Tickle me Emo

Know any young people? Want to wind them up? Start asking at regular intervals if they are ‘an emo’?

This works particularly well if they are as un-emo as possible. They will be highly offended and in fact will usually be so shocked by the question that they will be unable to formulate a response for several seconds. Expect much spluttering on their behalf and hilarity on yours.

Tony Wilson RIP

A great man has passed away. Tony Wilson needs nothing more to be said about him, other than that his exceptional bright and shining talent was to take people with vision but not voice and empower them to do something extraordinary.

Joy Division, New Order, The Happy Mondays, the Durutti Column. Modern Youth Culture would be nothing but for him.

In what would no doubt have quite amused him, he managed to die of cancer this weekend, just weeks before the opening of a film that documents the beginning of the band Joy Division and the start of Factory Records. It’s been made by Anton Corbijn.

Control Trailer - Ian Curtis

Man, I miss being 14

This is the coolest music video ever made.

No More Kings