by WarAngel and Motoyasu

If there has been anything that has harmed the art of the Japanese sword more than the demands of battle or the stress of time, it is lack of education, lack of respect, or both.

While this statement sounds harsh towards those of us in the West, consider for a moment how when the Japanese surrendered their swords at the end of World War II that many swords were either destroyed, allowed to rust, used as farm tools, or melted down. Though many standard issue swords ("gunto") were of lesser value being mass-manufactured from bars of stock steel and were merely ground to shape, there were some precious swords that were in fact hand forged or forge folded - even ancestral blades that had been within families for many generations. Those of us in the West who have spent a little time in the study of the Japanese sword ("Nihon-to") feel the pang of loss of these artistic treasures - the result of our prejudices and unenlightenment.

Japanese swords today reflect centuries of care, preserving the original craftsmanship as much as possible. In fact, many swords made centuries ago appear as if they were made today. Contrast this with swords of Western heritage; we are lucky when museum pieces are a little better than rusted relics!

The process of restoration, maintenance and sharpening are summed up in an art known as Togi - the art of Japanese sword polishing. As opposed to Western polishing of using belt grinders and finally buffing wheels to create a mirror polish (a process that takes only a few days, weeks or months to master) an apprenticeship under a Togi master in Japan is an arduous process of ten years.

The reason for the decade-long study of Togi is due to the definition of polishing for the Japanese sword. It is not merely to achieve a good finish or to remove rust from the blade. The Togi professional must be skilled in kantei - a Japanese term for sword judgement, appraisal and identification. For one, even though Japanese swords have maintained their general shape over the centuries, the many subtle nuances in the geometry combined with its various aesthetic features (such as temper line shape, grain, etc.) betray much historical information regarding the creation of the sword blade, such as the identity of the smith, the blade's chronological period, the province of origin, and the tradition, influence or school of its manufacture. In short, these features are all "read" by the skillful eye of the Togi professional. The trained Japanese sword polisher tries never to override the intent of the original smith but does his best to preserve and/or restore the original poetry of the blade so that it can be appreciated by future generations.

Unskilled or improper polishing thus ruins that poetry and devalues the sword. The extent of devaluation can be staggering: a sword originally valued at US$20,000 was reduced to being worth at best US$2,000 because the owner decided he wanted to pay less for polishing and thus commissioned a polisher whose skills were less than ideal for such a blade! Is it worth saving about $500-1,000 on the polishing job if $18,000 is lost on the value of the blade?

"Any kind of repair to a Japanese blade always involves polishing," relates Christopher Lau, a Togi professional under the art name, Motoyasu. Because polishing is, essentially, the removal of material from the blade, a qualified and experienced polisher is essential for properly restoring an antique katana blade. The Ottawa, Canada based polisher explains, "Polishing a new sword is much different than an old sword: on a new sword, fresh from the forge, you've got a lot more metal to work with - errors can generally be corrected without harming a new sword too much - but on an old sword that has been polished many times already, there's much less room for maneuvering: if a mistake is made, it may well be fatal to the sword."

It is thus advisable to not allow anyone to touch your antique blades unless they have devoted a lot of time to the study of Japanese swords.

Removing Chips Through Restorative Sword Polishing

To remove chips, even if they're only on one small section of the blade, you have to polish the entire blade and reduce the width evenly over the entire blade to the depth of the deepest chip (if you only polished the chipped area, you'd end up with a big ugly dip in the edge where it is narrower than the rest of the blade).

Because a Japanese blade only has a limited amount of hardened metal capable of holding an edge (this is demarcated by the temper line), every time you polish lessens the life of the blade- this means that if a chip is very large, it could mean that the sword cannot be restored and must be retired from service or discarded.

Since proper polishing is so critical to both the function and life of the blade, this job should only be done by a trained polisher.

What you see in the movies is fiction. For example the movie "Highlander" shows the star - Christopher Lambert - sharpening his katana with a whetstone after having sliced into a concrete column, leaving a large portion of the edge in the concrete. In real life, a sword losing chunk of metal that big would be headed for the scrap heap!

Additionally, while using a whetstone in this fashion might be acceptable for inexpensive western knives, such a method is completely incorrect for Japanese blades.

When polishing Japanese swords, the sword is applied to the stone, rather than the other way around. There are reasons for this, one of which - being the most important - is the amount of force you can apply. Such force allows you to remove a great deal of material quickly when it is required. Additionally, because the forging grain and activity on Japanese swords achieves visibility due to the way the stones act on the different hardness areas of the blade, sufficient force is required to bring this activity out. You cannot create the same effect with any other method: stones tend to behave differently when used sword-on-stone vs. stone-on-sword. The difference between effects is most evident using the last stone, the uchigumori: when used sword-on-stone, forging grain and activity is brought out clearly, but the blade surface is left burnished and still quite shiny; when used stone-on-sword in the next stage, small flakes of this same stone do not act the same way but instead creates the whitish "frost" on the edge of the blade. In addition to the differences in how the stone works on the blade, using stone-on-blade is much slower and can tend to scratch because you cannot apply the same amount force and cannot apply it as evenly across the entire contact area as with stone-on-sword. This is why in the second stage mentioned above, small flakes of the stone (generally thumbnail sized) used must be used as a small "finger stone" that fits completely under your thumb instead of the large block used previously- only in this way can the pressure on the stone be completely even and constant, otherwise the stone will cause scratches. This underscores why training and experience are so important: when polishing, the polisher must have confidence in what he's doing: all strokes must be fully committed; there must be no half-hearted uncertain strokes- the pressure must be even and constant. If all this does not occur, the shape of the sword will end up unclear and even the finest stone can badly scratch up a blade.

Damage Due To Improper Polishing

The above-shown pictures are of a World War II gunto. At the end of the war, GIs took these blades home as trophies but knew nothing about the sword or how to use it, let alone how to care for it. They only knew what they had heard in wartime propaganda that such swords could "cut through rifle barrels", etc. Thus many ended up mistreating and neglecting them: they used them in mock "sword fights" and chipped up the edges, they put grubby fingers all over the blade and left fingerprints which quickly rusted (body oils are acidic); when they got home and the novelty wore off, the swords were relegated to the attic or the back of the garage where they sat in less than optimal conditions and further rusted and deteriorated for the past 50 years. Then someone well-intentioned but equally ignorant comes along and takes sandpaper or a grinder to it to try to remove 50 years of neglect and further damages the blade. It's finally sold to the local gun or antique dealer for a pittance, and ends up on a table at a gun show or listed on an auction website.

Even those GIs who were cognizant of the need for rust prevention and thus packed the swords in grease or cosmoline didn't do the swords any favors - cosmoline might be good for guns, but the additives they put in the petroleum jelly tend to severely stain the blade and cause other damage. Some of these damaged and abused swords might still be worth restoring, but unfortunately, the majority aren't.

It it always best just to try to preserve the current state of any kind of antique object rather than to succumb to the urge to "clean it up". Above all else, resist the use of any kind of power tool: the use of a grinder or a buffer can irreparably harm a sword because the heat build-up due to friction can cause the harder martensitic steel that was originally in the edge of the sword to change to a softer state of steel (this is what is referred to as "ruining the temper"). Whereas sandpaper and stones will scratch and "hide" the activity and the hamon temper line (this kind of damage can be restored by a proper polish), heat from a power tool can actually destroy the temper line by softening the metal to such an extent that it can no longer be made visible even by a proper polish (in such a state, neither will the sword be a viable weapon, as the edge metal will probably be too soft to hold an edge well or to withstand the rigors of combat).

Restoration of Old Blades

While it is certainly possible to do a credible initial polish job on a blade that you just made using non-traditional materials/techniques, restoration and repair of old Japanese blades requires a lot more skill and knowledge and should not be done on your own: a trained polisher must be consulted.

Using sandpaper and small stones such as what some modern smiths do is fine for newly made blades where the major shaping has been done on the grinder (i.e. the blade is ground to nearly perfect shape before "polishing"). In this case, sandpaper or small stones are fine for progressively removing scratches from the pre-shaped blade.

However, for old blades or even blades where there is damage to be repaired (chips, rust, etc.), then some degree of reshaping is required. Because it's difficult to tell how many times a blade has been polished previously, even for a new blade, re-grinding the foundation using a power tool is a risky prospect, and it is just not possible for older blades where you might only be a few strokes away from exposing the soft core steel.

Repairs/restoration can only properly be done using traditional techniques. For old blades in particular, only the attentions of a trained polisher can salvage the blade.

There are many things that have to be taken into consideration when repairing damage on a blade: for example: whether or not to change the convexity ("niku") of the edge, whether to move the shinogi (ridge, line) evenly over the entire edge, or to taper it towards the point to maintain visual balance, whether to shift the position of the yokote line (tip separation line) and reshape the point, etc.

Some of these things will be at odds with trying to preserve the intentions of the smith and school - an improper decision can reduce the value of an antique to nothing. A polisher must have the knowledge to decide where to maintain and where to repair. For example, a characteristic of Yamato school is the very high shinogi ridge, such that the blade is a very pronounced diamond shape. When restoring such a blade, in order to maintain the recognizability of the blade as a Yamato school blade, then this pronounced diamond cross section must be preserved, even if you have to leave something else unfixed. Why is this so important? Well, some of these features are identifying characteristics of specific schools/smiths- so for example, if you had a sword signed "Masamune", and the signature was correct, but an unskilled polisher messed up the shape, the appraiser (or any knowledgable buyer) would say that this sword simply does not have the characteristics of a real Masamune blade, and so the signature must be a fake.

And and instead of having a sword worth a $1,000,000 you now have a sword maybe worth $1,000!

In order for a sword to be valuable, everything has to match up. The signature must be right, and the workmanship must reflect its smith. Any small deviation could result in the sword being declared a fake. Now, obviously, this is not so important with a blade you've purchased for cutting practice, etc., but in this case, proper restoration is still essential- even if the sword is used, with proper care, it should last several hundred years, but indiscrimate use of abrasives (even chemical abbrasives like MetalGlo and Flitz) can not only harm the weapon's functional potential, but also severely shorten its lifespan.

Christopher Lau - also known professionally by his art name - "Motoyasu" - is a Japanese Sword Polisher with forging experience, based in Ottawa, Canada, and serves as SFMO's Nihon-to Editor. He has an interest in all aspects of Japanese swords/swordsmanship and among other things has been an amateur swordsmith and an accomplished sword polisher. He was introduced to the art of Japanese sword polishing by the late Tatsuo Akiyama and is also an instructor at the Guelph School of Sword Arts. His website is here.

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