With The Daily Show on a summer break, I began to search for some other TV content to fill time. Naturally, I wandered over to PBS to see what they had. I came across this fascinating documentary entitled, "
Secrets of the Samurai Sword." The documentary does a good job of explaining the cultural, spiritual, and scientific aspects of the Samurai sword. It's quite fascinating that even though 1,000 years ago, the Japanese swordmakers didn't understand the science behind their craft, but were able to create such effective weapons.
If you go to the 33 minute mark of the video, they do a live demonstration of a katana blade in the hands of a grandmaster swordsman. An archer fires an arrow directly at the grandmaster, and the grandmaster is able to defend himself by cutting arrows out of the air. Here's a clip of it:
Another interesting aspect of samurai swords is how they are rated. The more bodies a sword can cut through in one stroke, the higher quality the sword is. There's talk in the video about legendary five body blades which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you jump to the 46 minute mark, they go over the meticulous work required in polishing finished swords. They use whet stones to polish the swords, and the stones can go for thousands of dollars. The sword polisher spends ten days polishing these swords.
I'll end with a passage from the Samurai honour code.
The Way of The Warrior: Think Not Yourself As Established
A man who thinks he is already established is unwise; a man content with fixed views won through considerable effort has already fallen into a trap. Without a moment of self-content with what little one has found out, one should keep thinking his accomplished results as being still unsatisfactory and not good enough, exploring the right way to the attainment through one's whole life. Truth lies in no place but in this course of pursuit itself.
[Update] For Canadians who want to watch this video, you can watch it
here.