Just out of curiosity, had a spare hour this morn looking for points of view with regards specifically WHY blades were shortened in this manner. Lots of info on how it was done with diagrams and a write ups but little as to why.   Looking for points of view. The logical reason is simply so a longer tsuka could be fitted to a sword to enable TWO hands on the blade. agree ?   Bare in mind that just because a blade has TWO ana, this does not automatically make the blade Machi-ok