So, I've been practicing Iaido for seven years now. For almost all that time I've used my trusted Iaito or training sword. Like most Iaito it's got a zinc alloy blade coated in chrome to look like the real thing. It's a lovely sword, but slightly too short for me, and has taken a bit of a beating over the years. It's also semi-sharp.<\/p>\n
I have some decorative (reasonably sharp) steel swords, and I sometimes practice aspects (usually drawing and sheathing the sword) with those, but in many ways they are inferior to my Iaito, so I've long considered buying a steel sword, and have been deciding between three sellers, Nine Circles here in the UK, SwordStore.com in the USA, and Bugei. This week I discovered that nine circles have removed their better steel swords from sale, in fear of coming legislation to ban sale of swords. No-one knows yet when and what shape that legislation will take. It could, at a stroke, totally destroy a martial art like Iaido in the UK, since only those who already own swords will be able to train fully.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this all worried me, so this week I finally ordered a (very) sharp steel sword from SwordStore (which are a front for a company in Japan). It will apparently take four months, and I'm looking forward to it immensely; I spent several hours poring over which fittings I wanted, and I'm sure the result will be beautiful as well as practical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I've been practicing Iaido for seven years now. For almost all that time I've used my trusted Iaito or training sword. Like most Iaito it's got a zinc alloy blade coated in chrome to look like the real thing. It's a lovely sword, but slightly too short for me, and has taken a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[78,15,71,70],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-martial-arts","tag-iaito","tag-martial-arts","tag-steel","tag-sword"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p52I4w-t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglets.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}