I was informed that a kind of small data base would be nice to go with your tablet that makes looking up certain things easier. Or in other words, a searchable eBook/PDF where you have things like characters used by swordsmiths, nengo, eto etc. in one place and don’t have to work with multiple files. With this, I created an extensive list of characters used by swordsmiths, sorted on the basis of stroke order, that comes with four different grades of simplification in writing for each characters, i.e. from standard printed style over two more hand-written styles to cursive script. This should give you more room to compare, and a greater headache of course due to the increased possibilities when it comes to cursive script 🙂
Also I added an eto list where you can look up which years are possible when a smith just added for example kanoto-ushi and no specific year. And in addition, I added all the poetic and other names of the lunar months which I was able find and a little more.
Most of the information in this compendium is of course found in several versions elsewhere but this is as mentioned before just to have that all in one file. So this is going to be for free and you can download the eBook/PDF below. For those who want that as a real book, I added a plain spiral bound version to Lulu that you can order for just printing and shipping (i.e. not going to add any royalties to that of course). But you are always free to make a little donation to this blog (see link at the very bottom) if you find this file or other articles of mine useful 😉 And by the way, my Easter eBook Super Sale is going to end tomorrow Monday. So last chance to grab a copy as there will be no more sale until Christmas (Lulu is not going to issue promo codes for eBooks, this is only done manually be me, so no sense in waiting for such a code).
Thank you and probably tomorrow I will continue with the Kantei series (two more articles until the topic sugata is finished).
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Markus Sesko 