are katana and tantō. From around the 16th century, many Japanese swords, including tachi, were exported to Thailand, where katana-style swords were made and prized for battle and art work, and some of them are in the collections of the Thai royal family. In the Sengoku period (1467–1615) or the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568–1600), the itomaki tachi (itomaki no tachi, 糸巻太刀), which means a tachi wound with thread, appeared and became the mainstream of tachi after that. itomaki tachi was decorated with gorgeous lacquer decorations with lots of maki-e and flashy colored threads, and was used as a gift, a ceremony, or an offering to the kami of Shinto shrines. In later Japanese feudal history, during the Sengoku and Edo periods, certain high-ranking warriors of the ruling class wore their sword tachi-style (edge-downward), rather than with the scabbard thrust through the belt with the edge upward. This style of swords is called handachi, "half tachi". In handachi, styles were often mixed, for example, fastening to the obi was katana style, but metalworking of the scabbard was tachi style. With the rising of statism in Shōwa Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy implemented swords called shin guntō, worn tachi style (cutting-edge down). In the Shintō period from around 1596 in the Azuchi-Momoyama period, the traditional techniques of the Kotō period were lost, and no smith was able to reproduce the tachi of the Kamakura period. However, in 2014, Kunihira Kawachi succeeded in reproducing a tachi from the Kamakura period. He received the Masamune Prize, the highest honor as a swordsmith. On the tachi he forged, midare-utsuri (a pattern of hazy white shadows between hamon and shinogi), characteristic of the Bizen school in the Kamakura period. Nobody could win the Masamune Prize without extraordinary achievements, and in the field of tachi and katana, no one won until Kawauchi for 18 years. Features With a few exceptions, katana and tachi can be distinguished from each other, if signed, by the location of the signature (mei) on the tang. In general, the signature should be carved into the side of the tang facing outward as the sword is worn on the wielder's left waist. Since a tachi was worn cutting edge down, and the katana was worn cutting edge up, the mei would be in opposite locations on the tang of both types of swords. An authentic tachi had an average