Kyoto sword making: what you can try and what you can keep

Japan's tourism board describes the traditional process in stages. The starting steel, tamahagane, is smelted from iron sand and charcoal in a clay furnace called a tatara, with the team on hand for 72 hours.⁷ The smith then heats, hammers and folds the steel, up to 16 times, to combine iron and carbon and draw out impurities.⁸ Each stage depends on the one before it, so an error in the furnace or at the anvil shows up later in the finished blade, however carefully it is polished.

Next comes the clay. A coat of clay and charcoal protects the blade and gives it the wavy hamon, the temper line that shows after polishing, and the blade is fired to just below 815 degrees Celsius before quenching.⁹ A class of about 3 hours cannot hold all of this, and the Kameoka workshop forges a 15-cm blade instead.¹ Visitors who want the whole story should remember that smelting, forging and polishing are separate stages, as the description above makes clear, and that a class touches only one.

Finally the blade goes to a polisher, whose work can take several weeks, sometimes months, before fittings are added.¹⁰ That span of time is a good reason to see a finished blade in a museum rather than expect a class to imitate the process. A class shows you the heat and the hammer, while a museum shows you what weeks of polishing and decades of skill can produce. The two together give a fair picture of the craft.

The Kyoto listings with sword in the title mostly teach handling. A class lasts 1.5 to 2 hours, takes up to 10 guests and has instructors who speak English and Japanese. You learn bowing, how to draw a sword and stylised cuts from a samurai master, then enjoy a costume photo session and receive a completion certificate. It starts from $64 and is rated 4.8 from 807 reviews. The listing asks you to wear clothes suited for exercise.

A smaller listing, the Kyoto Sword Experience, lasts 2 hours and takes up to 5 guests with an English-speaking instructor. It includes a free history tour at the Samurai & Ninja Museum and a ninja star throw, at the Kyoto branch. It starts from $62 with 41 reviews at 4.7. Another listing places the sword in a 260-year-old former samurai residence with zen meditation, 2 hours, from $114.

None of these listings mentions forging, so choose them for performance and atmosphere rather than for craft. They suit travelers who want to hold a sword-shaped object, wear traditional clothes and photograph the result. If your interest is the metal itself, the knife class is closer to the work of a smith, while the Kameoka workshop is closer still but requires some Japanese or an interpreter.

The Kyoto National Museum holds blades, and its collection database includes the Norikuni long sword described above.³ Check the museum's own site for exhibition dates and opening hours before you go, because what is on view changes and a particular sword may not be on display. The database entry is a good way to learn the name and period of a blade before you stand in front of it, and it costs nothing to read the night before.

In Tokyo, the Japanese Sword Museum is open from 9:30 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30.¹⁶ It is a 7-minute walk from the west exit of JR Ryogoku Station on the Sobu Line.²⁰ If your trip ends in Tokyo, it makes a fitting finale to a Kyoto forge class, since it puts finished swords in front of you after you have spent an afternoon at the forge learning what the steel goes through before it becomes a blade, which is the best preparation for looking at one.

Whichever museum you choose, the trick is to look slowly. Notice the shape of the blade, the line of the temper pattern and the texture of the steel. Those are the same properties your own knife shows in a rougher form after the class. Seeing a sword in a case also makes it easier to understand why a polisher spends weeks on one blade, and why smiths treat their finished work as art.