A wakizashi is a traditional Japanese sword with a shoto blade between 30 and 60 cm, with an average of 50 cm (between 12 and 24 inches), similar to but shorter than a katana and sometimes longer than the kodachi. The wakizashi was usually worn together with the katana by the samurai or swordsmen of feudal Japan . When worn together the pair of swords were called daisho , which translates literally as "large and small"; dai or large for katana, and sho for wakizashi. The katana was often called the sword or the long sword and the wakizashi the companion sword.

Wakizashi were made with different zukuri shapes and sizes, and were generally thinner than katana. They very often had much less niku (translated literally as "meat" or "flesh", the measure of how convex the edge is) and therefore cut softer targets much more aggressively than a katana. Its hilt is normally of a square shape, but on rare occasion it has none.

A wakizashi was used as a samurai's weapon when the katana was unavailable. When entering a building, a samurai would leave his katana with a servant or page who would then let it rest on a rack called a katana-kake , with the hilt pointing left so that it had to be removed with the left hand, passed to the right, then placed at the samurai's right, making it difficult to draw quickly, and reducing suspicion. However, the wakizashi would be worn at all times, and therefore, it constituted a side arm for the samurai (similar to a modern soldier's use of a pistol). A samurai would have worn it from the time he awoke to the time he went to sleep, and slept with it under his pillow. In earlier periods, and especially during times of civil war, a tanto (dagger) was worn in place of a wakizashi. For some swordsmen, such as Miyamoto Musashi, the blade was used as an off-hand weapon while the favoured hand wielded the katana in order to fight with two weapons for maximum combat advantage. Contrary to popular belief, the wakizashi was not the sole tool used in the ritual suicide known as seppuku; this usage was also commonly assigned to the tanto.

Seppuku was the ritual suicide of a member of the warrior class who felt he or she was living with great shame, from disappointing one's master or from being humiliated in a number of other ways.

The samurai, when asked to, or granted permission to, commit seppuku, would kneel in the traditional manner with his wakizashi at his side. He would take the short sword from it's saya and thrust it deeply into his own torso, cutting himself open vertically. He would then continue on his ritual, in spite of the pain, by cutting once more horizontally across the original wound. The samurai, having disembowelled himself, will have then died an honourable death. It was permissible to have a close friend or trusted ally to act as a second, meaning that he or she would stand behind the samurai and strike his head off with the katana after the first cut had been made. If a female samurai were to commit seppuku, she would only cut her own throat, a much simpler and cleaner ritual.

*please note the katana and stand are used for illustration purposes only. They are available to buy seperately