I watched a special on Nova about making Japanese swords the old way, in modern Japan. There's only one ironmaker who makes a batch of iron for the "artisan" swordsmiths each year. Ore from one particular location has just the right amount of "other" trace elements to make a superior steel. He builds a single-use blast furnace, and works 48 hours straight to produce the melt. Then the furnace is busted open, and he hands out chunks of "hard" and "soft" iron to the lucky smiths.
They then build these ragged pieces into bars by heating and hammering them together. A piece of soft iron is wrapped around the hard iron, and a soft iron tang is hammered onto one end. After that it's heat-hammer-shape many times until the sword blank is heated one last time and hardened by the dunk into cold water (oil would work better, but they didn't have oil). The differing properties of the hard core and soft backing produces the curve of the blade.
I think it was the differential tempering that set Japanese swords apart. That left the cutting edge crystal hard, while everything else got softer and more flexible. I think it took longer to polish and sharpen the blade than it took to forge it.
And I guess there's a lot of interest in swords in Japan even today. Of course, the "artisan swords" are never sharpened. They're there only to admire the skill of the smiths, and those who produce the elegant and expensive decorations. Martial arts groups use unsharpened aluminum swords. I takes a special government license to possess "live steel".
I also notice, from my time at Nissan, is the Japanese (at least the engineers) are fascinated by our "gun culture". Those with green cards buy guns like us folks. Those on temporary visas learn to hang around Japanese or Americans who own guns. For all I know, when they go back home, they probably denounce us to their fellow citizens as "clinging to their guns and religion". Where have I heard that before?
As part of our Saturday event, we had allowed the sensei of the dojo we “borrowed”(er... rented) that day to partake in our class. He was, of course, a student of some thirty-plus years of asian martial arts of various kinds.
Near the end of the day, after our “free-play” exercises, he was naturally curious to see if his decades of training in martial arts would ~work~ against the longsword stuff he’d seen that day. So he picked up a practice Katana, and our Instructor picked up a practice longsword.
It wasn’t pretty. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.
Clearly, the big difference was that the asian MA focus is about form over function. It has to look good before it has to work well. The European martial art tradition is that much more about killing, and ruthlessly.
In the show I saw on the History Channel, the folks they were using, who were re-enacters at those medeival dinner theatres around the country, were using titanium swords, because steel swords are too likely to shatter and injuring people with their shards.