The art of Japanese sword has taken years or even centuries to become the beauty of what it is now. If there’s anything more that brought harm to the art of the Japanese sword apart from the demands of battle or the stress of time, it is lack of education, lack of respect, or could be both.

The art of Japanese swords is synonymous to the art of Japanese sword polishing. The meticulous process of restoration, maintenance and sharpening are best summed up in an art called Togi. Togi is known to be the art of Japanese sword polishing. It is entirely opposed to Western style of polishing of utilizing belt grinders and lastly buffing wheels to attain a mirror polish. Western polishing takes only a few days, weeks or months o master. Togi, on the other hand, is an arduous process of ten years to gain an apprenticeship under a Togi master in Japan.

A decade long-study of Togi is necessary due to the definition of polishing for the Japanese sword. Togi is more than achieving a good finish or to remove rust from the blade. A 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” and determined 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 restore the original poetry of the blade so that it can be appreciated by future generations.

Unskilled and incorrect polishing ruins that poetry of the blade which devalues the sword. The extent of devaluation can be a staggering worth. A sword originally valued at US$20,000 was drastically reduced to being worth at best US$2,000. The owner decided to save by paying less for polishing and commissioned a polisher whose skills were less than ideal for such blade! Is it worth scrimping on $500-1,000 on the polishing job if $18,000 is lost on the value of the blade?

Polishing is essentially done to properly restore an antique katana blade but it calls for an experienced and qualified polisher to do the job. A new sword, fresh from the forge, offers more metal surface to work on thus errors can generally be corrected without inflicting too much harm on it. An old sword demands more expertise on polishing as it only has lesser room for maneuvering, in turn, lesser room for mistakes which are proven fatal to the sword.

It is then a good idea not to permit anyone to touch your antique blades unless they are experienced and well-versed with Japanese swords.

For signs of chips on small sections 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. When you only polished the chipped area, a big, ugly dip in the edge would form where it is narrower than the rest of the blade.

A Japanese blade only has a limited amount of hardened metal capable of holding an edge (this is demarcated by the temper line), you are actually lessening the life of the blade every time you polish it. 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. A whetstone is acceptable for inexpensive western knives but certainly incorrect for Japanese blades.

Leave the task of proper polishing to the hands of a trained polisher since proper polishing is so critical to both the function and life of the blade. What you see in the movies is fiction and is not an educational video on how to properly polish a sword. 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!

Japanese swords are polished by placing the sword on the stone rather than the other way around. The rationale of this is the amount of force you can apply. Such force lets you remove a great deal of material quickly when it is required. Sufficient force is needed to bring out visibility on the blades of Samurai swords which I only achieved form the way the stones act on the different hardness areas of the blade. You cannot create the same effect with any other method since stones tend to behave differently when used sword-on-stone vs. stone-on-sword. The difference between effects is most obvious using the last stone, the uchigumori, when used sword-on-stone. The uchigumori makes forging grain and activity 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. Additionally, the stone on blade method is much slower and can tend to scratch because you cannot apply the same amount force resulting to uneven polishing to the entire contact area as with stone-on-sword. In the second stage (mentioned above), it is thus necessary to use small flakes of the stone (generally thumbnail sized) as a small “finger stone” that fits completely under your thumb instead of the large block used previously. It is only in this way the pressure on the stone can result to a completely even and constant. You don’t want the stone to cause scratches on the blade of the sword.

Japanese swords are meant to preserve rich cultural heritage. Any attempted alterations could remarkably bring down the value of Japanese swords. I couldn’t emphasize more how training and experience are necessary when polishing. The polisher must have confidence in what he’s doing. There is no room for half hearted and uncertain strokes. The stroke must be even and constant. If polishing ends unsatisfactorily, the shape of the sword will end up unclear and even the finest stone can badly scratch up a blade.

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