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A katana (刀, かたな, lit. 'one-sided blade') is a Japanese sabre characterized by a curved, single-edged blade with a circular or squared guard and long grip to accommodate two hands.
In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages or loanwords (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo. [6] For example, "ice cream" is written アイスクリーム (aisukurīmu). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and foreign ...
kōgai (笄) – a skewer for the owner's hair-do, carried in a pocket of the scabbards of katana and wakizashi on the side opposite of the kozuka. [33] [34] kogatana (小刀) – any knife, particularly a small utility knife carried in a pocket of the scabbards of katana and wakizashi. ko-itame-hada (小板目肌) – see itame-hada. [35]
Japanese swordsmithing is the labour-intensive bladesmithing process developed in Japan beginning in the sixth century for forging traditionally made bladed weapons [1] [2] including katana, wakizashi, tantō, yari, naginata, nagamaki, tachi, nodachi, ōdachi, kodachi, and ya.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
The development of Japanese swordsmanship as a component system of classical bujutsu created by and for professional warriors , begins only with the invention and widespread use of the Japanese sword, the curved, single-cutting-edged long sword. In its curved form, the sword is known to the Japanese as tachi in the eighth century.
Hyohō Niten Ichi-ryū (兵法 二天 一流), which can be loosely translated as "the school of the strategy of two heavens as one", is a koryū (ancient school), transmitting a style of classical Japanese swordsmanship conceived by Miyamoto Musashi.
Many legends surround Japanese swords, the most frequent being that the blades are folded an immense number of times, gaining magical properties in the meantime. While blades folded hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times are encountered in fiction, there is no record of real blades being folded more than around 20 times.