Tatara (furnace)

The tatara (鑪^?) is the traditional Japanese furnace used for smelting iron and steel. The word later also came to mean the entire building housing the furnace.

The steel, or tamahagane (玉鋼^?), used in the forging of Japanese swords (nihontō (日本刀^?), commonly known as katana (刀^?)) by contemporary Japanese forge masters like Kihara Akira and Gassan Sadatoshi is still smelted in a tatara. One of the few remaining tatara is the Nittoho tatara in Shimane Prefecture, Japan.

It is generally agreed that the word tatara is foreign to Japan, originating in India or Central Asia. There is a possibility that the word came from a place in ancient Korea, where the two dynasties would often meet. According to the Kojiki (one of the oldest Japanese historical texts), this meeting place was called Tatara-ba or Tatara-tsu, and the word was possibly imported with iron-working technology. Japanese scholar Tokutaro Yasuda suggests that the word may be from the Sanskrit word taatara, meaning "heat," noting that the Sanskrit word for steel is sekeraa, which is very similar to the word used in Japan for the steel bloom which the tatara produces. The two Chinese characters used when the word has the original meaning are 踏鞴 and, besides as tatara, they can be also read as fumifuigo, or foot bellows.

...
Wikipedia