Where would one buy a authentic katana? I have around a grand to spend. not really sure how to go about this...

nipponto.com/
aoi-art.com/
sanmei.com/en-us/
nihontoantiques.com/

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>authentic
Maybe that one place, it's probably an island. Has a guild/union system that's fairly specific about doing things authentically.
If you want an older one, a war trophy sort of thing is probably fake or a mass produced thing that isn't quite what most people would refer to as authentic. I keep forgetting the name of this little island place, it's almost as if it's a really huge part of the world that anyone could figure out. Why does this just keep sounding like you could have figured out how to do this on your own?

almost no jap is going to let an undeserving outside aquire an actual katana. if you do get 'one', it will be no better than some shit billy ray made in his garage.

>he doesn't know old guys have tons of them rusting away

there were quite a few that left glorious nippon after they were nuked. my grandfather supposedly had one but it was gone by the time i was born

I'd get a katana that's made with modern techniques, so that it's strong. None of that folding crap. Just a European sword that's shaped like a katana, basically.

The "folding crap" was used by Europeans too. Modern techniques are a hell of a lot more advanced than what was used in Renaissance Europe as well. In terms of the material and the precision a smith can achieve nothing made prior to the 19th century can compare to today.

That said, many mass production swords now have horrible balance and other issues.

Buy a gun

You know, OP. I'm thinking here is right. I just can't seem to remember it either, though. It's that weird place they come from, with those weird donuts from Pokemon. Maybe you could try checking there? It might be a bit hard, though. I don't think it's possible to learn their language, you might have to try sign, or drawing what you want.

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>where would one buy a authentic katana?
Define "authentic" first. What are you asking for?
You can get "traditionally made" katanas for a few hundred bucks. Real antiques can cost from a couple grand to a million or more. for example:
nihonto.com/for-sale/

>hanwei

Are you sabotaging OP on purpose?

lolno. there are more art-quality swords outside of japan than are inside japan. all the major art auction houses sell them a few times a year, and there are specialist dealers too.

By far the most of the swords captured by US soldiers in WW2 are cheap Shin-Gunto army swords made in the 40s, though. Some Japanese soldiers had old family swords, but those are the minority.

If you want a real katana check out sanmei, I think the cheapest one I saw was about 5 grand and some easily exceeding over 20 grand

You don't unless you're a millionaire. Priest blood ain't cheap

>>most takehomes were shitty shin-guntos
Yes, that's true. But that didn't stop them from bringing home good swords too. And don't forget the massive numbers that have been sold as well; it's not just war trophies.

A few decades after WWII when the Japanese economy was booming most Japanese people didn't give two shits about traditional stuff and everyone wanted to have a new life in modern cities with high tech and neon. As a result, a huge amount of traditional objects of art--including swords, but also paintings, sculpture, tools, furniture, etc) was sold to the west because hardly anybody wanted that "old crap" anymore. During the 80's an unbelievable amount of museum-quality swords got auctioned to the far corners of the world.

Pic related is an excellent read if you give a shit about that kind of thing.

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sword-buyers-guide.com/authentic-japanese-swords.html

The short answer is plan on spending at least 3 grand.

The thing though is that the katana blade was kinda made with the older processes in mind. Yah they bent, but to have the hardend blade and softer back is kind of part of the whole package. It seems kind of disengenuous to use modern style, agan partially because with it the blade is fatter than it has to be.

What would you name it if you got one?

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>Yah they bent, but to have the hardend blade and softer back is kind of part of the whole package
Absoloutely agreed. But that has nothing to do with "folding". It seems that some people are confusing two seperate things here:
-folding steel and repeatedly hammering it, folding it again, etc. This was done to purify the steel by driving out the slag. There is no question that modern steel made in an electric vacuum furnace is far cleaner than that made via the crucible process, which in turn is far better than what a traditional Japanese forge yields (tamahagane).

The idea of differential heat treatment, as well as the idea of using different alloys of steel for the cutting edge vs. the back of the blade is a totally different thing. This does have legitimate pros (and cons), and can be executed with modern materials.

If you wanted to make the ultimate Katana in terms of performance/function, you would use modern steel for the edge, and circa 1900 style wrought iron for the rest.

why do katanas look so damn good? i do not know why but they just look nice to the eye, despite not being terrible different from a stereotypical western sword, especially the sheaths on the katanas look super nice

Hard to say exactly. It is known that aesthetics was a major influence for katana design from the early 1600s onwards.

It should also be noted that the curve was a side effect of the two metal construction. During the quench the spine contracts more than the edge which creates a very natural curve that's very difficult to do by hand.

Old European swords were also folded, frequently made using a mix of different steels, and all that stuff. The fully homogenous sword is extremely rare before the modern day.

Why would we use old wrought iron for any part of the blade if we're after performance? All the extra slag may be a nice thing to self-flux when we do a lot of forge welding, but I see little reason to bother with forge welding in the first place if we're using modern materials, especially not extensive amounts of it.

It's the differential heat treatment that gives you the curve rather than the mixed materials, as the root cause of it all is that fully hardened steel (martensite) has a lower density than unhardened and slack quenched steel.
Making the curve by hand shouldn't be all that hard though, everyone making curved swords without relying on a differential hardening managed. And in Japan smiths would at times forge the swords with either a bit of curvature in order to get more of it than the quench alone would give, or a bit of reverse curvature to make a straighter or outright straight sword. The curvature can also be adjusted a bit after hardening, apparently it often isn't quite even straight from the quench.

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Tamahagane is essentially the same as crucible steel.

I think you got crucible and bloomery mixed up, as tamahagane is the latter rather than the former. In a bloomery furnace the metal created has never been molten, giving us a pretty "spongy" thing, often with varying composition from here to there since things can't move freely in the solid metal, trapped slag, etc.
A crucible steel on the other hand has been fully molten. One example is pulad/wootz which is created by melting high and low carbon iron in a crucible to end up with a suitable carbon content when they combine into a single material. Another example is most modern steel, created by blowing oxygen into liquid pig iron to burn off the excess carbon and with the steel that results also being molten. (Naturally, this means we could turn bloomery steel into crucible steel.) Since things can move more freely in a liquid the composition gets more even, and we get rid of a lot of slag as it floats or sinks. The downside is that there's no process that takes you straight from ore to crucible steel, you're always looking at a two step process at best.

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You're wrong.Go daily at auction for less(signed)You just know fuck all and think weeb shit is somehow intrinsically vsluable. Its not.

>I think you got crucible and bloomery mixed up

Yeah, don't know what I was thinking.

You know two things one is fuck and the other is all about how common antique weebs swords are at auction.

Posdibly the stupedist post yet.Swordbuyers guide is garbage priced more than antiques for idiots

Well they do every fucking day.Wierd fantasies you weebs have about the value of a signed katana.

Not after the got based blast furnaces but they had better steel and iron ore than japan to start with in britian, nothern italy and the ruhr.

They are available every fucking week user and more often some weeks. What is an auction?

Underage, get out. You'll get one for less than a grand plus auctioneers comission OP, signed if you are patient

The short answer is you are a moron citing a bullshit site and know nothong about the antiques abd auction trade. Stop pisting that site its utter ahit for teens

Switching to pig iron making blast furnaces (depending on how you define things most bloomery furnaces are also blast furnaces, and some furnaces can also make either bloomery steel or molten pig iron depending on the process parameters) reduced the need for folding with European metal (instead you had to somehow get rid of all the excess carbon), but it didn't remove it. For one thing even this metal wasn't all that clean, the decarburisation process would at times effectively add "slag" into the metal, and depending on how you adjusted the carbon content you may need to fold a bit to even things out afterwards as well.
As for iron ore, the one complaint that it seems we can level at the Japanese ores is that they were often a bit lower in iron content. Now this reduces the yield of the smelting, but it doesn't harm the quality of the metal produced. Too high an iron content will actually fuck you over there instead, though that appear to be trivial to fix if you're so "cursed".

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Sweet damn dude you know you could just make one post and call those people dumb all at once right? Someone must've shit in your cheerios this morning.

Just buy a hanwei practical. That's the best you'll get. There are l6 katana for $2000+ but they are barely better than $200-$300 1060/1566 katana.

>Another example is most modern steel, created by blowing oxygen into liquid pig iron
The most modern steel is made with sintering.

>a authentic katana?
>I have around a grand to spend.

you keep saving for about another 9,000, to get a basic one from a genuine maker.

from an auction house, try Thomas Del Mar's annual auctions, but you'll probably need a fair bit more.

So...what makes you think a katana would be cheap?

honestly a $300 Paul Chen / Hanwei sword is probably not only cheaper but also better steel than an authentic katana

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kultofathena.com/swords-katana.asp
Have a look around. Any sword website autistic enough to arrange by steel type should be a good one

Over here in Aus you can get officer issue WW2 Katana's pretty easily for less than 1000 AUD

That said i wouldn't mind a Shin-Gunto as room decoration, it's also a piece of history by now.

Messatsu no kokujin

Fleischfresser

You can get the Hanwei Practical for $195 shipped from swordsoftheeast. I have a Practical Plus, it's very good. I chop green bamboo with it and it's never so much as chipped.

ima-usa.com/pages/search-results?q=katana

Still some shin gunto's around, scoop up a khukri while you're at it