)Due to this disarmament and demilitarisation of Japan after WW II as you can imagine the manufacture of katana was not just frowned on, but was made illegal, banned.
Not that the US government necessarily imagined the occupying troops would be attacked by insurgence from a guy waving a katana, but because of the symbolic militarist metaphor the katana represented.
This ban would be later overturned through the personal appeal of Dr. Homma Junji to General Douglas MacArthur.
During their meeting, Dr. Homma produced blades from the various periods of Japanese history and General MacArthur became a keen student, being able to identify very quickly what blades held artistic merit and which could be considered purely weapons. As a result of this meeting, the general ban was amended so that the weapon grade gunto (simple military swords, more often, mass produced and often oil quenched) would be destroyed and swords of artistic merit could be owned and preserved.
To reinforce the 'art' ethic, laws were brought in governing the forging of genuine shinken or shinsakuto (cutting katana) in Japan, which specifies that a master is only permitted to make 2 blades over 2 shaku (61 cm) or very roughly 2 feet per month. As it happened, the master that was used as an *example* or paradigm was a particularly slow and methodical guy, much to the chagrin of modern master forgers.
In short, a genuine shinken is very expensive, so you can guess who filled the manufacturing gap, the Chinese!!
As you probably know through your own knife collecting, the Chinese are major players in manufacture, period!!!!
Hers a couple of vids of the forging of a katana in 2 different Chinese foundries.
Again sorry for the hassle, its a free server host
# Chinese forge, katana manufacture
wmv 18.4 MB
http://www.savefile.com/files/6964385
#Another Chinese forge wmv
wmv 5.81 MB
http://www.savefile.com/files/1198028
all the best
Bill
