And with experts I mean that the Edo period scholars who wrote down their definitions were usually not sword but military historians and experts on the warrior class. So we are entirely relying to context interpretations of the original sources on the one hand, and on the more or less accurate views and interpretations of Edo period experts on the other hand. doing etymoligical studies and comparative researches of the sources, do not date before the mid-Edo period. The first real scientific approaches that tried to put all that together, i.e. The matter is further complicated by the fact that some terms were just used interchangably and that there were no universal dictionaries that defined terms and made their use mandatory, at least not until rather recent times. when a later edition of a work quotes the very same paragraph with a different term than the initial one. From the context we often get a pretty good idea about what kind of sword or dagger was meant but many entries are ambiguous, e.g. For example, in historic sources we find terms like koshigatana (腰刀), uchigatana (打刀), tsubagatana (鐔刀), futokorogatana (懐刀), chiisagatana (小サ刀), wakigatana (脇刀), kogatana (小刀), or shôtô (小刀). In earlier times, especially before entering the mid to later Muromachi period, the term katana (刀) was not referring to the katana as we know it today but to a short, dagger-sized and single-edged blade, or to a dagger in general if you want, and was mostly used as suffix (also with the Sino-Japanese reading tô) in a compound term. First of all, some etymological explanations. This is all correct, so nothing has to be set straight right away, but the matter is of course much more complex. Also many know that the wakizashi emerged sometime during the Muromachi period and that later on, it was so to speak the “maximum” of a sword a civil person was allowed to carry. I guess when the term wakizashi is dropped, most of us automatically think of the shorter twin brother of the katana that represents one half of the famous daishô (大小) sword pair. Well, due to the nature of the article, I was first focusing on mere blade lengths and restrictions but as my thoughts were spreading wider and wider, I thought it might be a good idea to write all that down in order to provide a general overview of this sword type. Inspired by an article that appeared in the Tôken Bijutsu about a year ago and on which I will elaborate in the second part of this post, I was once again reflecting on the entire topic of the wakizashi (脇指・脇差).
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