Japan

Coordinates: 35°N 136°E / 35°N 136°E / 35; 136

Japan (ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/; Japanese: 日本 Nippon [nip̚põ̞ɴ] or Nihon [nihõ̞ɴ]; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, "State of Japan") is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The kanji that make up Japan's name mean "sun origin", and Japan is often called the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Japan is a stratovolcanic archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku, which make up about ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan's population of 126 million is the world's tenth largest. Approximately 9.1 million people live in Tokyo, the capital city of Japan, which is the sixth largest city proper in the OECD. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the world's largest metropolitan area with over 35 million residents and the world's largest urban agglomeration economy.

Japanese sword

A Japanese sword (日本刀, nihontō) is one of several types of traditionally made swords from Japan. Swords have been made from Kofun period and generally Japanese swords are the ones after the Heian period having curves, and there are many types of Japanese swords that differ by size, shape, field of application and method of manufacture. Some of the more commonly known types of Japanese swords are the katana, wakizashi, and tachi.

Types

The type classifications for Japanese swords indicate the combination of a blade and its mounts as this, then, determines the style of use of the blade. An unsigned and shortened blade that was once made and intended for use as a tachi may be alternately mounted in tachi koshirae and katana koshirae. It is properly distinguished, then, by the style of mount it currently inhabits. A long tanto may be classified as a wakizashi due to its length being over 30 cm, however it may have originally been mounted and used as a tanto making the length distinction somewhat arbitrary but necessary when referring to unmounted short blades. When the mounts are taken out of the equation, a tanto and wakizashi will be determined by length under or over 30 cm unless their intended use can be absolutely determined or the speaker is rendering an opinion on the intended use of the blade. In this way, a blade formally attributed as a wakizashi due to length may be informally discussed between individuals as a tanto because the blade was made during an age where tanto were popular and the wakizashi as a companion sword to katana did not yet exist.

Nakayama Hakudō

Nakayama Hakudō (中山 博道, February 11, 1872 - December 14, 1958), also known as Nakayama Hiromichi, was a Japanese martial artist and founder of the iaidō style Musō Shinden-ryū. He is the only person to have received both jūdan (10th degree) and hanshi (master instructor) ranks in kendō, iaidō, and jōdō from the All Japan Kendo Federation. In addition, he held an instructor's license in Shintō Musō-ryū and a Menkyo kaiden in Shindō Munen-ryū making him the 7th sōke of that system. Nakayama was also one of the masters of the Shimomura-ha, which was called Musō Shinden Eishin-ryū, iaijutsu.

Biography

Nakayama was born in 1872 in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He moved to Tokyo when he was 19 years old and entered the dōjō of Negishi Shingorō of the Shindō Munen-ryū. In time, Nakayama became a master of Shindō Munen-ryū kenjutsu.

He taught at the Yushinkan Dojo, near Korakuen in Tokyo, and he trained many of the top swordsmen of his day. He was a personal friend of aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba, and he was instrumental in arranging the marriage between Nakakura Kiyoshi and Ueshiba's daughter, Matsuko. He also was the teacher of Ueshiba's student Minoru Mochizuki, developer of the Yoseikan dojo. Nakayama also taught kendo and Iaido to Gigō Funakoshi, third son of Shotokan karate founder Gichin Funakoshi, who gave his father´s karate a more Japanese flavour by adding kendo and Iaido based training exercises and technical improvements based on his swordsmanship training.

Fountain pen

A fountain pen is a nib pen that, unlike its predecessor, the dip pen, contains an internal reservoir of liquid ink. The pen draws ink from the reservoir through a feed to the nib and deposits it on paper via a combination of gravity and capillary action.

Filling the reservoir with ink may be achieved manually (via the use of a Pasteur pipette or syringe) or via an internal filling mechanism which creates suction (for example, through a piston mechanism) to transfer ink directly through the nib into the reservoir. Some pens employ removable reservoirs in the form of pre-filled ink cartridges. A fountain pen needs little or no pressure on the nib to write. World Fountain Pen Day is celebrated on the first Friday of November every year by the lovers of fountain pens.

History

The earliest historical record of a reservoir pen dates to the 10th century. In 973, Ma'ād al-Mu'izz, the caliph of the Maghreb, demanded a pen that would not stain his hands or clothes, and was provided with a pen that held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib, which could be held upside-down without leaking, as recorded in Kitab al-Majalis wa 'l-musayarat, by Qadi al-Nu'man al-Tamimi (d. 974). No details of the construction or mechanism of operation of this pen are known, and no examples have survived.