I’m not really interested in hamon and much prefer hada. Hamon is the temper line, and hada are the grain from the folded steel. Hamon is for show and hada is for stength. Not quite that simple but close; war blades don’t have flashy hamon.
So a blade is made from 2 types of steel, with hard cutting steel jacketed between softer, cushioning steel. Rigid and flexible. It is pretty easy to get a visible hamon (the wavy white line) if you just use natural stones that cut one metal more than the other. It’s boring. And hamon-centric blades were just for show anyway.
Hada. That’s where it’s at for me. Folded steel.
The hada are more prominent in war blades where function was more important than form. They are a remnant of the steel being folded, beaten, folded, beaten, to crush out the impurities.
Polishing for a basic hamon is easy but finding a hada; not so much. You have to work for hours and even then… it’s a maybe. You start with the stock removal and shaping, but once you get onto the detail polishing you’re looking at a good few hours more.
And even then, you don’t know until then end what you’re going to get. ‘Maybe this blade is the one that wasn’t folded’ you think, as your 30,000 grit-equivalent natural stone starts to … wait… and there it is.
Just like polishing epoxy, or a mirror, it’s not clear until the end. That last little step is just as big as the first one. The clicking over into enlightenment. The trauma response.
Polishing a blade is like that. And it’s so easy when it’s easy. You just relax and flow. But a single errant newton in your fingertip and it’s all for naught, back to the start. That doesn’t matter though; these blades are a process without a goal.
But I find the parallel nice. Here I was rubbing myself (ha!) and it just was… not quite working… and then… 1:75,000,000 aripiprazole and there’s the hada.
The tatara bloom. The AI trained on captive data. The grain in the steel. My art, even. These are all things you just never see, and in fact could never exist, unless the process was allowed to complete.
Maybe the pain and the suffering was necessary. Maybe the traumatised trees are the most beautiful after all.
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