Word: swords
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...humiliations of Japanese history took place in September 1945, just after the start of the U.S. Occupation. General Douglas MacArthur decreed that every sword in Japan should be confiscated as a dangerous weapon. Out went the Jeeps, and thousands of blades, some dating back to the 10th century, were rounded up from museums, private collections and shrines...
Today an immense ignorance of Japanese swords prevails outside Japan. There is one great private collection of them in the U.S., gathered over 40 years by Dr. Walter Compton of Elkhart, Ind. Last week 46 of his classical blades-the tachi or long cavalry sword, the shorter katana and the dirks known as tantos and wakizashis-went on view at Manhattan's Japan Society. The show is a scholarly event of the first importance, and its catalogue-mainly written by Japan's leading student of blades, 29-year-old Ogawa Morihiro-becomes at one stroke the standard text...
...study a Renaissance bronze or a medieval ivory in a vitrine and appreciate it, though with some loss. But with a Japanese sword, appreciation is more difficult. The visual subtleties of a great blade are taxing. No gaze through a glass case can substitute for the experience of holding and turning it under natural light, observing the grain of the steel surface, the contrasts of polish, the relentlessly delicate curves of ridge and back, and the hamon or temper pattern-hard as diamonds and impalpable as blown frost-along its cutting edge...
...this reason, connoisseurs of Nippon-tō are apt to regard the military uses of their swords as a distraction, even as an embarrassment. The annals of samurai conduct are filled with prodigies of sword wielding: as recently as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, for instance, a Japanese officer charged a Russian machine gun, so the story goes, and cut clean through its barrel and water jacket with one swipe of his tachi. But the art swords in this show were not meant for such ends. Their unblemished state testifies that they can rarely, if ever, have seen battle...
...Americans are viewed with hostility in France," he says, "From the outset, I felt it there." Scott says his sense of being an outsider was his "Damocles' sword" or "the clouds in the sky." "You can't feel it or see it most of the time, but you can always sense it," he says...