Chokuto ( п 刀 ё tekuto :, "straight sword") is the common name for the ancient type of swords that appeared in Japanese warriors around the 3rd – 4th centuries of our era. It is not known exactly whether the chokuto appeared in Japan or was exported from China ; it is believed that in Japan, blades were copied from foreign samples. At first, the swords were cast in bronze , later they began to be forged from a single piece of low-quality (there was no other then) steel using fairly primitive technology. Like its Western counterparts, the tekuto was intended primarily for stabbing. Most of the tekuto had a relatively narrow blade with a small internal curvature, which made them partly similar to the ancient Greek copy .
The characteristic features of the tekuto were a straight blade and one-sided sharpening. The most common were two types of tekuto: kazuti no-tsurugi (a sword with a hammer-shaped head) had an hilt with an oval guard ending in a copper head in the shape of a bulb, and a coma no-tsurugi ("Korean sword") had an hilt with a head in the shape of a ring . The length of the swords was 0.6–1.2 m, but most often 0.9 m. The sword was worn in a sheath, covered with sheet copper and decorated with perforated patterns.
The oldest known tekuto is a sword such as sukanto-no-tachi.
See also
- Jian