Shinken

Shinken (真剣), lit. real sword, is a newly forged Japanese sword, usually for high level iaido and/or tameshigiri (cutting) practice. As opposed to an iaito (a regular metal sword for iaido practice), a shinken has a sharp edge and is hand-made by one of approximately 250 Japanese swordsmiths active at the moment, most of them members of the Japanese Swordsmith Association, but also a few amateurs who work outside the organisation. Those swordsmiths are limited by law to producing no more than twenty-four swords a year each, causing many swordsmiths to make cheaper alloy iaito too. This limit, along with highly specialised skills and the need for a great deal of manual labour, accounts for the high price that a shinken can fetch — starting from about $4,000 for the blade alone, and going many times higher for genuine Mukansa or Ningen Kokuho blades.

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Japanese: When used as an adjective, Japanese refers to anything that originates from Japan. It may refer to more than one article:...

Sword: A sword (from Old English sweord; akin to Old High German swerd lit. "wounding tool", from the Proto-Indo-European *swer- "to wound, to hurt") is a long edged bladed weapon, consisting in its most fundamental design of a blade, usually with two edges for striking and cutting, and a point for thrusti...

Iaido: Iaido (居合道 iaidō)is a sword-based Japanese martial art that trains the motions associated with drawing a katana from its sheath, striking an opponent, removing blood from the blade, and then re-sheathing the katana with smooth, controlled movement. Modern day exponents typi...