The Sacred Samurai Sword: The Sacred Sammurai Sword

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The Sacred Samurai Sword The balance that defined the samurai's way of life found its focus in his sword. It was both a work of art and a weapon of death. The sword was the soul of the samurai, deemed sacred as the symbol of the warrior. He ate with it, slept with it; he would never be without it. The sword was so precious to him that if he had to leave it somewhere he had a secondary sword to go inside people's homes. He could not be without an edge weapon. It was something that identified him and from which he could not be separated. Accorded the highest status among the daimyō's luxurious possessions, swords were the items most frequently given as gifts among the military houses of the shogun, the daimyō, and their retainers. The wielding of the sword was the art of the samurai. The making of a sword was an art equally as skilled and equally as precious, an art performed by the master sword makers of Japan. All samurai sought perfection with the sword, not only in the fighting techniques but in the weapons themselves. The samurai and the sword smith worked together to develop the exquisite, deadly Japanese sword. Sword making reached its peak of skill by the 14th century. Working solely with a forge, The incursion of Western powers into Japan–and especially the arrival in 1853 of Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy, on a mission to get Japan to open its doors to international trade–proved to be the final straw. In 1858, Japan signed a commercial treaty with the United States, followed by similar ones with Russia, Britain, France and Holland. The controversial decision to open the country to Western commerce and investment helped encourage resistance to the shogunate among conservative forces in Japan, including many samurai, who began calling for a restoration of the power of the

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