Someone Commissioned a 180cm Wooden Sword. Everyone Named the Same Manga.

What's going on

Wooden swords are ordinary objects in Japan. Kendo clubs and classical swordsmanship schools train with them, they sit in school storerooms, and souvenir shops in Kyoto and Nara sell them to tourists by the rack. A normal one is about a metre long and weighs well under a kilogram. The one in these photos is 180cm long, roughly 10kg, 25cm across at its widest point and 6cm thick, cut from bubinga — a West African hardwood dense enough that drum makers use it for shells. A craftsman posted it as a completed commission.

Almost nobody treated it as a mystery. Japanese readers landed on the same reference immediately: Shigurui, Yamaguchi Takayuki's manga about a 17th-century sword tournament, and in particular the Kogan-ryū school that features in it, whose head instructor Ushimata Hikoju trains with a wooden sword of exactly this absurd class. The school's name, its training drills, the town it sits in — all of it turns up below, as though the object had walked out of the book and into a workshop.

The other running joke is zoological. The maker labels the shape "oar-form", a nod to Miyamoto Musashi, the swordsman who by legend turned up to his most famous duel carrying a sword he had whittled from a boat oar on the way there. Everyone else looked at the long tapering profile and saw a marlin.