YEOJU, Gyeonggi Province — Still freezing outside, Lee Eun-cheul, a swordsmith, sweats buckets in front of a furnace flaring to more than 1,300 degrees Celsius. He pushes and pulls wooden bellows to ...

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Taro Asano spent six years as an unpaid apprentice before his master, Fujiwara Kanefusa, told him he was ready to be licensed as a master swordsmith. To be officially licensed in Japan, swordsmiths ...

Michael Bell started up the electric motor on a gigantic press he uses to shape the blades of Japanese swords. “Bam! Bam!” The dies clanked together on the approximately 3-foot-long flat piece of ...

Swordsmithing isn’t just an industry, it’s also part of Japan’s cultural heritage. To preserve the craft, Tetsuya Tsubouchi, one of the Japanese Swordsmith Association’s directors, says two things ...

Longtime swordsmith Jacob Powning was travelling the world, visiting museums and working with researchers, when he glimpsed something that drove him to make a huge life change. He had been documenting ...

Although it might sound unusual for artifacts with a centuries-long history, swords are currently in vogue in Japan. Museum exhibitions of historically significant katana have been attracting large, ...