Wrong About Japan Read Online Free PDF Page B

and in 1953, when the law once more permitted him practise of the craft, he accepted his grandson as his student. Thus Yoshihara-san, now amongst the most celebrated swordsmiths in the world, became the tenth generation of his family to forge these legendary blades.
I had hoped we would be shown a sword here, just once, but now I understood this could never be. We would not know the etiquette, how to sit, how to hold the scabbard, or the hilt, how to slide the blade out by the back surface only. We were gaijin, capable only of hurting the sword or ourselves. Yes, we probably would notice the hamon , those wistful clouds and waves dancing within the molecules of steel, poems written along the edge of death, but to seethem in any profound way would take at least three years of constant study, not a one-hour visit on a Monday morning.
In any case, I could see that Charley was bored out of his brain. He sat on the sofa with his hands folded on his lap, his shoulders slumped in early teenage melancholy It was time to go. Just the same, I asked if we might see where Yoshihara-san worked, and so we crossed the mossy garden again and entered a sturdy, high-roofed structure with a brick floor and two very simple kilns that looked more like rough stone troughs. My son, it was obvious, was waiting for the time to pass. For his father, however, it was a pleasant place to be, so clean and orderly. Along one wall, near the kiln, were hung some thirty different sets of tongs. Remembering that the traditional Japanese carpenters once used something like forty different planes, and had a name for each, I asked if these tongs had names.
He shrugged. His no did not require translation.
“What do you ask your apprentice to pass you then?”
“Apprentice?” He laughed. “I lean across and get it myself.”
I asked him about yaki-ire , the stage of the process where the smith, working at night, must correctlyjudge the colour of the heated blade before plunging it into water to harden it. The literature suggests that the colour of the steel ideally matches that of the full moon in February and August, and many of the famous swords of antiquity are dated with these months.
In his own book, Yoshihara and his collaborators write: “Yaki-ire—the process of heating a sword until it is red hot, and then plunging it into a trough of water—is perhaps the most dramatic moment in the swordsmith’s day. In the popular imagination, the glowing blade, the darkened smithy, the hissing billow of steam—all these make yaki-ire an almost mystical enterprise, whereby the metal structure of the blade is itself transformed, and a sword is born.
“The practical reality here, as is so often the case, is quite different. Yaki-ire is all in a day’s work, and as often as not ends in a ruined blade that must be either reworked or discarded. It is performed at night with the lights out so the smith must be able to see the true colour of the naked blade in order to judge its temperature….”
When I asked Yoshihara about forging swords at night, he once more made me feel hopelessly romantic. He worked in the gloom, he said, not at night. But his book gives a more complete answer: “People live at close quarters here, and sword makingcan be very noisy work. Yoshindo [Yoshihara] and Shoji [his youngest brother] are currently the only two swordsmiths working within the Tokyo city limits. In deference to their neighbours they restrict their hammering and folding of steel to the hours between nine and five on weekdays.”
We had come a long way from comic strips, or so it seemed, for just a moment.

3.
On two occasions in Tokyo, I spoke with Kosei Ono, not only a cartoonist but a highly respected critic of manga and anime, who put all of his considerable erudition at my service. Our final meeting, however, must have alarmed him. In preparing for my meetingwith Mr. Yoshihara I had read a number of books about the Japanese sword and had noted that the word saya meant