Shinken
Shinken is a Japanese sword that has a forged and sharpened blade. The term shinken is often used in contrast with bokken, shinai, and iaitō.
Shinken are often used in battōdō, iaidō, and iaijutsu, as well as tameshigiri. In these arts, shinken may be used alongside unsharpened iaitō or mogitō, training swords manufactured for swordsmanship practice. Gendaitō are handmade shinken by one of approximately 250 swordsmiths active in Japan at the moment, members of the Japanese Swordsmith Association. These swordsmiths are limited by Japanese law to producing no more than twenty-four swords a year each. This limit, along with highly specialized skills and the need for a great deal of manual labour, accounts for the high price that a Japanese-made shinken can fetch—starting from about US$6,000 for the blade alone, and going many times higher for genuine antique blades.
There is also a large worldwide market for "shinken" made outside Japan. Many collectors consider these to be somewhat worthless as collectibles, but some martial artists continue to purchase and use them, because of their considerably lower price, ease of acquisition, and also to spare their valuable Nihontō from what some view as abuse. The vast majority of these are made in China, but there are custom smiths all over the world manufacturing swords in the Japanese style.