Japanese Sharpening Stone Heaven: Narutaki Toishiyama

Provisional digital edition

Edition note

Original pages 1-7 were not supplied. The cover, title page, copyright, ISBN, authorship statement, and any other missing front matter have not been reconstructed or guessed. This provisional edition begins with printed page 8.

This EPUB is a page-aligned reading edition assembled from the supplied DOCX and the OCR layers of the two scan PDFs. Printed pages 8-102 use a DOCX transcription aligned to the scans; printed pages 103-192 use page-by-page scan-checked PDF transcription. Original scan-page previews are included for every page to preserve access to photographs, captions, tables, and exact layout.

The corrected text remains provisional, and the scan previews remain the visual authority for ambiguous wording, photographs, and numerical layouts. Navigation follows the scanned Chapter X and XI title leaves on printed pages 162 and 172; the printed contents page lists them at 159 and 171.

Preface

Preface

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PREFACE

For the general public, the ability to sharpen tools and knives has evolved more in the last 60 years than it did in the previous 10,000, is this is due to the advanced development of high-quality synthetic stones. Although the age of synthetics began in the late 19th century, little had changed with those composite sharpening stones and razor hones until about 1964 when the possibility of really-really sharp opened to a blooming population of hobbyists and professionals, first in Japan with the development of the King brand stone, and soon after with other choices worldwide. From slow to fast, from fine to beyond fine, the grit components of man-made sharpening stones could now begin to be engineered to excel for specific tasks and even keyed to specific steels. Numerical stone grit designations allowed anyone a chance to easily achieve a specific and repetitive sequence of sharpness. Shaving a beard or a board with ultimate keenness, these professional-grade stones have encouraged industry and hobbyists alike. The more recent invention of the diamond-studded sharpening platform like the Atoma brand has opened the playing field even more so that craft communities worldwide now share more aggressive potential.

Synthetic stones are finer and faster than natural stones. This is not bad nor is it a disappointment regarding natural stones. The differences between man-made and natural stones are not a race to the top, but instead, it is a journey toward excellence. Natural stones offer certain aspects to the physical structure of an edge that synthetics cannot, and this is why an elite group of “sharp-a-holics” still use natural stones for creating that special final personal touch to the edges of their blades.

My intention in publishing this book is to introduce and demonstrate in detail the history and utility of the natural sharpening stones in Japan, and to highlight some of the uses they are called upon to perform. There are two main types of natural sharpening stones mined in Kyoto Prefecture. The awasedo is a finishing stone for chisels and hand planes for carpenters and other demanding edges, and the coarser aoto is for edge preparation and sharpening of all kinds of knives and common tools. Of course, there are different grades and qualities of each of these two types, and the needs and uses for these two types will overlap in utility, but those are the historic classifications still used in Japan.

#4 Kiita with renge

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The highest and most respected grade of awasedo toishi was first mined near Kyoto in the Narutaki district, and their stratification sequence is designated as Narutaki Awasedo. This specific class of sedimentary stone was earlier, as a whole simply called awasedo. Narutaki Awasedo is the modern scientific name for a type of awasedo which incorporates a specific stratification sequence along with its most abundant location. Coined in 1902 by Dr. Tadasu Hiki (1866–1927), professor of geology at Kyoto University To describe for publication, this specific class of sedimentary stones of ultra-fine and regularly stratified stones were first mined in Shobudani valley and eventually in Narutaki near Takao village, Kyoto Prefecture. Slightly different forms of Narutaki Awasedo were to be later mined in isolated locations to the west at Mt. Atago and beyond near Kameoka. A third variation was to be discovered in the south near Lake Biwa and pockets to the northwest in Fukui Prefecture.

Although the designation of awase-toishi had been good enough for hundreds of years (after all, it was in essence just a down, dirty, and dangerous mining product for the sharpening of steel), in the modern era the Narutaki Awasedo name was apropos in a geographic and geologic sense for the scientific community. During the previous 800 years, the mining community had already designated names for describing all of the interior strata of the mines, along with the tools and the whole process of refining and distributing them to the public. Of course, the miners knew the location of the mines because they walked to them every day, but very few outsiders beyond the valley were concerned with the particulars beyond that. In the first half of the twentieth century, two other types of awasedo were scientifically described and titled, the Chuishi naroi and the Aiishi naori, both of which you will read about in later chapters.

The word awasedo has two historic and ancient kanji components. Awase means to match, and do is a phonetic conversion from to (to = do), whose kanji of “to” suggests that the stones were used mainly by togi sword polishers. Thus, it was historically at first the “togi” sword polishers who relied on these stones for providing specific and classic polishing, finishing, and the famously recognized keenness for the correct maintenance of katana swords.

The name awasedo, and more specifically Narutaki Awasedo, are each unique to the Kyoto mining industry and of those mines providing these particular stones. Beyond the borders of a small community of miners, skilled hand tool users, and craft purveyors, the average Japanese person does not normally have a use for this level of sharpening fineness for their kitchen knives or garage tools. If pressed to specify an “in-hand term”, the stones would probably be referred to as tennen to-ishi (natural finishing sharpening stone). I have found throughout Japan that when I go into a modern hardware store of almost any size and ask for an awasedo, they will often need an extra hint or idea for what I am looking for. If I ask for a tennen toishi (natural stone) or show the salesperson the written kanji for awasedo it can help, but even this will often lead to a conversation necessary to confirm the kanji’s objective. Often, they will then kindly bring me to the isle of sharpening stones which ninety-five percent of the time will turn out to be synthetic stones, while the last five percent might offer an arato coarse stone for sharpening shovels or farm tools. Modern large retail stores rarely have natural stones of any description in stock. Fifty years ago, when I first worked in Japan as a carpenter, neighborhood hardware stores would likely have a small selection of natural sharpening stones. But even these would be arato–chu toishi coarse grade, likely leftovers from their father’s old stock. Caches of early-minded natural stones of any description are now a rarity.

Japan’s vast geological history of sedimentary events has provided a wealth of naturally occurring sharpening stones from coarse to semi-fine to ultra-fine. In ancient times, discovering a source of local sharpening stone represented a deed to productivity that might benefit a whole community for decades or centuries, as evidenced by the nagura mines in Shizuoka, those in Arkansas, and the Coticule from Belgium. There are three general grades of tennen toishi natural sharpening stone for tools, all primarily graded on their grit size. The coarsest grade is the ao-to toishi, used for sharpening farm tools like spades and shovels, chip removal in iron tools, cutting edges of sickles and scythes. The middle grade would be naka-toishi, used for knives, professional cutting tools including hatchets, and forestry tools. The third grade is called shiage-to (final) toishi and/or tennen toishi; these are used for the final finishing of knives, carpentry, machinery, and medical or professional tooling. All of those useful stones in Japan fall under the general heading of tennen toishi.

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Writing a book with such a narrow topic might lead one to suspect that the writer will have a tough time filling up twenty, let alone a hundred or so pages on such a subject. I can only guarantee that I will fall short of expressing the total depth of the subject. Fret not readers, as I have faith that the complexities of the subject will not discourage or damper, but instead, it will further your interest in the subject.

#5 Mt. Fuji (volcanic origin) present formation 10,000+ yrs old

#6 Mt. Atago Atago (tectonic origin) 2,000,000 - 4,000,000 years old

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the years I have developed several mentor relationships in Japan with men whom I dearly respect, miners, and purveyors who have graciously shared with me and tolerated my persistent pestering. First I wish to warmly thank the whole Ishihara family clan of Shikimigahara, Kyoto-fu. The late Mr. Yogoro Ishihara of the Ohira mine and his vibrant wife have hosted Emiko and me in the cold of winter and the heat of the summer. It is next to impossible to describe their graciousness. My remembrances to Mrs. Ishihara and your children.

My mentor in Gifu, Mr. Teruzo Yamamoto; a spry gem of a nagura miner and survivor of two cave-ins at his mines, an erect man who weathered 70+ years of digging and hard work including delivering toishi sharpening stone first locally on a bicycle and then from a motorcycle, later by mini truck throughout central Japan after the war.

To Mr. Akira Kato, owner of the Nakayama Mine. A kind soul. He has shared with us tales about his father Masumichi Kato and their family tree. For hiking with us up and around the Nakayama property and showing us not only the mine entrances but also the Toishi Kami (stone spirit) that resides upon their mountain. I drink a smooth smoky whiskey to you.

The late Mr. Hatanaka for his stoutness and perspective, his knowledge and reputation unmatched. To Mr. Eizo Imanishi of Imanishi Seito, a longtime miner family of wholesalers and retailers. He is the real deal. The family of the late Mr. Kiyoshi Kimura, a miner-stone seller who over the years supplied us with grit, grist, and tales. To Mr. Mori of Nagoya whose family owned an aoto mine in Saga. He and his wife are sweet, generous, and authentic in every way. To Mr. Hitomi the chairman of the Kyoto Miners Union, a rare and generous man whose family operated many mines over the good years. To my friend and birthday mate (he is 8 hours older, hint—1951) Mr. Youzou Tshchihachi the Maruoyama mine owner and maybe the most successful proponent of Japanese tennen toishi in modern times. A true lover of the product and process.

And happily, to so many others, every single person without exception that I have met in Japan over these nearly fifty years, who have encouraged and not shunned, have shared and not ignored, have smiled with me and not at me. These, all of these I have found, those of the dirty rough strong hands, who have touched the cherished earth, Thank You.

#7 Sumigashi pattern

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There are those before me who have documented this same topic, hark and I will speak of their inspiration. Thank you to the Kyoto Tennen Toishi Miners Association, every single one of the members who I have had the privilege to meet and spend time with at their yearly meetings in Kyoto over these years. Without exception, all have been kind and forthcoming. Their characters, honed from hard work, are keen to give, kind and forthcoming. Lucky for us, the author/editor Mr. Harunaga Kato, contributor Mr. Kimura Kiyoshi, Dr. Nobuhiro Inomoto of Kyoto Kyoiku University, along with the contributions of the members of the Kyoto Tennen Toishi Association who have composed and published and re-published in 2003 The Charm of Tennen Toishi. This book offers hints of the Kamakura era, obscure information regarding the toishi mine industry up to the Edo, and sketches of the goings-on of the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa Periods. As in all fields of science, in the years to come, just as those have in the past, the future will provide insights and progressively more detailed analysis of these stones. This special book The Charm of Tennen Toishi has opened a window to the infancy of mining and then fills with ever more detail the modern eras of the men digging below, and above the ground. Sadly, this Charm booklet has yet to be fully translated into other languages.

There are two gatherings of enthusiasts that I would like to acknowledge and encourage. The staff and participants of Kezuroukai Japan, and Kezuroukai USA. These two groups of professional and amateur craftswomen-craftsmen are deep with knowledge directly drawn and shared through apprenticeship programs, professional guilds, working on the job, and teaching. The Kezuroukai gatherings contain multiple generations of dedicated and highly trained skilled craft masters, who pass on not only techniques but also the spirit of training and practice.

To single out a few individuals should not diminish the greater group of devotees and teachers who are not mentioned here, and there are hundreds. However, with the risk of exclusion, I will first recognize all of the volunteers at the Kezuroukai of Japan and the legacy of their late and esteemed teacher by trade and by example, their chairman, the late Mr. Kamijo. He was there in the beginning, and it was he and his fellow staff (all teachers and workers of wood) who pulled together the greatest gathering of craftsmen and women that have been assembled in our lifetime. Every one of them is on-site, acting as a volunteer in the true sense of the term.

The Kezuroukai USA’s Karl & Ginger Barris, Kezuroukai USA originator, and teacher Jay VanArsdale. Mentioning just those few names above should not diminish the devotion of hundreds of Kezurouo members in the USA and the tens of thousands of Kez Japan. The Kezuroukai has been “A Happening” in a truly magical sense. It pops up once or twice a year not only in Japan but independently in Europe and the USA. Within 2 or 3 days of these events, hundreds, and I dare say thousands at times of participants have shared the gist, the seed of their core, the passion of their being, and the success of their trials with apparent strangers visiting their cities and in cases their villages. My oldest friend and mentor Matthew Horrigan for his flexibility and ability to gather all thoughts, and scientifically make sense.

With love and respect, I would like to thank and recognize my wife, Emiko Yoshimoto. Her sensibilities to grasp the spirit of the craft guilds, those old-school-always down-to-earth cultural groups of Japan, has opened up for me in so many ways the world of stone and steel. Her family’s craft history coupled with her scholarly bent provides her with a unique background to face and interpret complicated themes while retaining the dignity of the individuals who comprise the past and the present.

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Lore, Early Days, and Mine Sites

Chapter I

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I. LORE, EARLY DAYS, AND MINE SITES

#8 Children's Shrine Narutaki village

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1. Mining the sharpening stones in Kyoto

By most accounts, Buddhism and the smelting of steel using an oxygen-driven high-carbon charcoal-enhanced furnace called a tatara came to the Japanese Islands in about the sixth century. Certainly, earlier cultures in Europe and the Middle East, as well as pockets in Africa, had succeeded in refining iron, but it seems to have been metal smiths from the area of Pakistan to southern India that first smelted high-carbon steel by the injection of extra oxygen into the iron bloom, creating their form of Wootz steel. This knowledge, this technique of making high carbon steel was marched through China and Korea, and finally to Japan alongside the teachings of Buddha. Hints of the voyage from India are found even today where a few traditional Japanese blacksmiths have continued to use an artifact of the written form of the Siddham script called bonji as stamped or scribed bonji characters upon their steel blades.

The teachings of Buddha were to become the nexus of Zen, and it is Zen that was to be the scholarly core or secret language of the educated ruling classes in early Japan. The elite scholars in the middle of the first millennium who went to China and returned with Zen, and the ability to read and write in Chinese were most definitely the ones to spur the smelting and creation of the first tamahagane Japanese native steel. The impetus for making tamahagane certainly was, as it had been in China, to create the Invincible Sword to defend the mysteries and properties of the monasteries of the elite. The swords and the technology to make them were part and parcel of a large shift of knowledge in Japan.

#9 Banded Atago toishi

#10 Hand forged kanna blade

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The business in Japan of digging stones for the sharpening of swords was always a pick-and-shovel industry of small crews working in the hinterlands, and it still is like that today for the handful of mines that are active in the area around Kyoto. Did men dig stones for free? Not in quantity they didn’t. Farmers and hunters may have picked, pocketed, and used the stones they found on the surface for their personal use, but any large-scale continuous below-the-ground digging requires multi-generational organization and skill. There always were survival and profit motives, obligations during times of war, promises made and fulfilled within the Japanese culture as would be expected in any other country. The themes of the emperors and war-lord shoguns pushing the public to perform were certainly the major motivating factors in the development of the sharpening stone mining centers from the 12th to the 16th century when the country was ripe with war. Having the sharpest and strongest (ones that did not break first) swords provided those troops with a great advantage over others.

For Japan’s most recent four-hundred-year Edo–Meiji–Taisho–Showa periods, there were calms between the wars. Although rife with intrigue, the Edo culture importantly allowed for and encouraged the theme and recognition of the conservatorship of culturally important treasures. This trend of polishing katana as “art for art’s sake” rose during Edo to great heights, as men carried katana swords during Edo for the show of fashion, prestige, or as a display of heraldry.

By the early Edo Period, the highest quality awasedo stones from the Narutaki mines began to be released in modest numbers to selected independent craftsmen. Sword polishers continued to be granted the first choice and carpenters called daiku were next in line. Certain truly historically large or pure Narutaki Awasedo stones were too rare and valuable to be degraded through the exchange of money, so instead they might be presented as gifts, cumshaw, to certain prominent master carpenters called miya-daiku who build temples, shrines, and tea houses. With each succeeding Edo administration, the mining and the dispersal of Narutaki Awasedo expanded so that by the end of the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), with its several short but fearful rebellions in Kyushu and Honshu islands, Meiji unveiled the modern era of mining which the Taisho and Showa eras were to further modernize.

From early Meiji, the selling off of sections of the eastern flank of Toishiyama, and the leasing of the west side mountain parcels that overlook and define Umegahata valley to established miners and private investors with professional miners had become the norm. The exploration of mining prospects towards Mt. Atago, and in and around Kameoka in the Taisho (1912–1926) period was spurred by the introduction of electrically powered machinery. Finishing shops in the valley became more common although men still dug mostly under the faint light of carbide lanterns well into the 20th century.

The demands for awasedo regarding the various wars from the Meiji (1868–1912) and especially World War I and World War II had never been greater. All military men carried freshly sharpened daggers, bayonets, and swords for the higher ranks. This encouraged the development of new rural mines outside of Narutaki, and the use of modern machinery and dynamite. From the Meiji period to the early 1950s, more stone was dug in those last sixty-some-odd years than had the previous 800. Kyoto Prefecture was the main source of the stone, but the retail marketplace had always been Osaka as it was the commercial capital of Japan. Because Osaka, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and so many other major cities were so heavily damaged by 1945, and Kyoto was not, a short-lived emphasis on operating the mines spiked. The rebuilding of especially the Historic wooden buildings after the war spurred on so much activity that the mines that were opened skirted depletion. With Osaka in ruins, the wholesaler’s stone stocks there blasted to dust, Kyoto now became the center of the wholesale and retail markets for all kinds of natural sharpening stones in a way that they had not before experienced. With all of the destruction around them, every mine in Kyoto was pulled into activity. Beyond the temple restorations, traditional hand joinery remained in vogue while quick cement foundations fueled the 1960s. As the mines ramped up and became busy once again, it was to be short-lived.

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By the end of the 1970s, any active tunnel digging of the toishiyama mines’ tunnels had been shut down and now the age of surface scraping using heavy machinery began. Not a perfect process, environmental and structural errors were not uncommon. The first few mines had been simply gouged out during the time of “steam-shovels”, and now the era of “bulldozers” descended upon the rest of the mines where the surface was simply peeled open for extraction. Dynamite was also incorporated to speed up the process, which Mr. Yamamoto of Gifu was particularly critical of as he feels that the explosion will leave micro-fractures, even in stone that was not touched directly by the blast. These open pit-type extractions also served to prepare the ground for reuse and urban development and forestation. Homes, schools, offices, cemeteries, and parks were the next to occupy the lands. The awasedo that was harvested in those busy years was mostly consolidated into storage lockups maintained by the miners/leaseholders or auctioned off to retailers.

With the advent of sonar and ground-penetrating radar, their use proved to be of no avail in distinguishing their relatively softer layers as unique. Modern Geological Survey maps do not address the Narutaki Awasedo sources apparently due to the ineffectiveness of finding these small relatively thin-sectioned sediments without physical digging, or maybe, there are no longer any veins of awasedo to dig. The reality that the awasedo stock in the ground was not limitless encouraged the last few miners to stand shoulder to shoulder and form a Union to get a handle on the topic in 1970. They were incorporated as the Kyoto Tennen Toishi Union and although it remains intact on paper to this day, the group has not been assembled since 2016.

The toishi trades were peopled by highly productive, precise, and inventive individuals. Tennen toishi played an important role in the culture and especially the crafts of Japan from the very earliest times. If there was any consistency in the mines it was due to tradition and social structure. Men who live next door to each other, and work in close quarters underground are prone to seek and favor companionship, conservative decision-making, and even superstition.

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2. Discovery and origin of the first Narutaki Awasedo Mine

There is a photo of a hand-drawn Kamakura (1185–1333) era map in the Kyoto Tennen Toishi Union’s book “Charm of Tennen Toishi”. The map permanently resides in the Kyoto University Museum and is dated to the equivalent of the western calendar year of 1230 and is titled to the right in two bars “Jingoji-ryo Ezu, Kamakura” (pictorial map of Jingoji temple territory, Kamakura era). This ancient map, drawn in black sumi ink, shows a portion of Kyoto called the Tamba (Tanba) Region.

The geographical details and the ridge lines of this old map along with its illustrations seamlessly correlate to modern maps including Google’s 3-D and 2-D mapping images. Along the map’s margins are three notations with arrows. 1) Bottom off-center margin is a long-shafted arrow pointing to Shobudani valley that reads “Totori-minaè”, a sharpening stone mine mountain peak. 2) Arrow off-center left margin is pointing to the Jingoji-ryo Buddhist (824 AD) temple complex. 3) The arrow lower right margin text describes the Umegahata village of Takao and the Hiraoka Hachimangu shrine and a scattering of smaller structures of Takao to the direct south of the shrine.

Kyoto city, not on this map, would be farther southeast. The geological details and the ridge lines of this old map along with its illustration seamlessly correlate to modern maps, including Google’s 3-D and 2-D mapping images. The Shobudani pond is manmade and was created more recently as a “water feature” of a pleasure garden for the enjoyment of moon viewing, picnics, and contemplating poems for the elite of Kyoto. The valley was famous for the wild iris that grew there and the word Shobudani translates as the “valley of iris”. The valley with its pond is difficult and can be dangerous to approach on foot from any direction. Within walking and almost sight distance from Jingoji temple in the north, the walking path is hard to find, and when climbing on narrow trails from Hiraoka shrine in Umegahata to the pond it is steep up and steep down. There is also a route from the south beginning at the ancient and wonderful Daikakuji temple but this, like the other paths, is not for the casual tourist.s

You can also walk as we have from Kyoto over the two most direct routes to Shobudani pond and the mine area. The first path is from the east in Takao in Umegahata first up and over the steep ridges and down a rugged descent to the pond. The second is from the south along the steep ridge trails from the Daikakuji temple near Arashiyama as mentioned above. Neither of these hikes is easy. The trailheads are not marked, they are isolated and there are no services available once you leave the paved roads. You will be alone. I have seen very few people over the years in the mountains above.

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Regarding the development of the Shobudani mines and their paths into Kyoto. These mountains are steep and difficult both going up or down and the footing is slippery. Four hundred years ago or earlier the paths and landings may have been improved. Historically speaking there were no wagon roads up to the entrance tunnels of any of the mines. All of the stone was carried up or down the mountain in baskets with ladder-type frames on the backs of men, women, and children from the mine entrance staging areas to workshops in the village or the city. Do not assume that all of these staging areas were necessarily at a lower elevation but only believe that they were closer to a direct path leading toward Kyoto. Every footfall to or from the mine site until reaching Shuzan Path towards Kyoto or Daikakuji is rugged.

I have extensively explored the mountains between Umegahata Takao village and Shobu Pond. All paths leading from the pond east to Takao head straight up the mountainside and are very steep near the ridge, and even steeper and forested on the eastern side down to Takao. In the area near the pond, the mountainsides are honeycombed from the toishi awasedo mining as evidenced by surface tailings, tunnel openings, and generally poor topsoil composition. These soil disturbances continue up to the mountain summit. Each mining property over time encased dozens of undeveloped test tunnels scattered from the ridgeline down towards the valley floor on both sides of the mountain. The footpaths for the removal of the harvested stone over time were spread out at all elevations. There were some easy routes, and some were strenuous for the laborers. From Shobudani pond every stone had to be first carried to the ridge line and then hauled down to Umegahata valley below. Some porters could make five trips a day, so it is said. Local men, women, and children all took part.

Below is an Edo Period hand-drawn map of the Narutaki Awasedo area and the wild Tamba region in Kyoto Prefecture. The distances in this map are exaggerated, but believe me, the actual topography is very complex. The mountains are folded every which way and they are young, so the inclines are steep.

Kyoto Map of Toishiyama Area, late Edo period

A. Narutaki B. Totori C. Omuro Ninnaji D. Umegahata E. Takao Jingoji F. Daikakuji G. Atagoyama

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3. Honma Family History

The document below is based on the extractions from a family archive of the Honma clan and was originally written in Japanese. The dates may not be completely accurate because it was written 800 years after the event took place. It appears to be reliable enough regarding the Honma family’s involvement in the toishiyama discovery and the development of the Shobudani mountain mine sites in those early times of history..

During the reign of Emperor Shomu (701–756), the ancestors of the Honma clan were known to be hereditary village chiefs of Umegahata. When Jingo-ji temple was built in Takao around 781, the village became a part of the temple territorial estate; since then the Honma family was devoted to the temple duty for generations until the later years when Jingoji fell into ruin.

In 1180 Honma Tozaemon, the head of the family of the time, reached for the position of guarding the Gosho (emperor’s residence) in Kyoto. After three years of service there, he was promoted to the hokumen-no-bushi, which is a samurai guard position stationed at the north side of the palace of Joko (retired emperor), and he received his samurai name, Honma Tozaemon-i Fujiwara Tokinari, and he was allowed to carry a sword like a samuri.

In 1183, Kiso Yoshinaka (1154–1184) marched into Miyako (Kyoto) after the battle against the Heike clan; his presence in Kyoto was disturbing and it offended the court. When Yoshinaka burned down the Gosho’s Emperor’s palace, it forced the young three-year-old Emperor Gotoba and his grandfather, Goshirakawa Hoou (retired Buddhist priest), to escape to the Hojuji temple along with his army of monks. When Honma Tozaemon heard about their troubles, he suggested that they should move further away from Miyako to a safe hiding place in Shobudani, a valley securely guarded by the tall mountains beyond the Ogurayama mountain. Goshirakawa soon moved to Henshoji temple outside of Kyoto in Saga for a while, and meanwhile, Tozaemon went to the Hiraoka-Hachiman-gu, a shrine in Umegahata, and he asked the villagers for help. The villagers gladly offered their labor, food, and any other necessary needs to build a safe and isolated residence for the emperor and his group. The young emperor and his grandfather were secretly moved there.

During the years (1183–1185) when the other Genji clan, Minamoto-no Yoritomo (1147–1199), fought against his cousin Yoshinaka, all the villagers in the Umegahata valley prepared for the war. They were armed with swords, spears, and other weapons. It is said that even the hoou (retired) Goshirakawa sharpened his own sword. Tozaemon at this time came up with the idea of finding good sharpening stones for them to use. He remembered a place in Shobudani..

#11 Renge & Namazu on Uchigumori stone

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4. Emperor Go-Toba

After gathering stones there, he offered them to the army of Yoritomo for testing them and he received good approval from them. He then went back to Shobudani and arranged for workers to start digging. The stones were distributed among the court’s army and the word got around among the samurai classes that they were excellent. He asked Bunkaku (Jingoji’s head priest) to give a good word about the stones to Shogun Yoritomo, and the sword sharpener of Shogun was sent to the mine for inspection. He was impressed with the quality of the stone. Since then, Shobudani was officially recognized as a stone mine. Yoritomo defeated his cousin and so he became the Shogunate, the first Shogun. In 1190, Tozaemon was granted the title of “Nihon-toishi-shi Toryo” (the sharpening stone mine chief of Japan) and for honor, he received the samurai sir name with permission to carry two swords together.

Between the Nakayama and the Okudo mine sites, in the lower first quarter of the Narutaki Toishiyama ridge is a gentle swayback that hosts a walking trail between Umegahata valley and the broader valley of the 9th-century Daikakuji temple with its 8th-century Osawa-no-ike moon-viewing pond. This prehistoric game trail and shortcut between valleys have been maintained these thousands of years by the local population and so it is considered to be an ancient public free and clear right of way. The path skirts the coolness of a wooded glen and beyond the bamboo harbors the mausoleum of 91st Emperor Go-Uda (1267–1324) (reign 1274–1287). The Imperial family connections to the Daikakuji valley date to the 9th century, when it was used by Emperor Saga Joko (786–842) (reign 809–823) as his hermitage. The Osawa-no-ike pond was dug at the time of Emperor Saga on his instructions following the principles of feng shui, and the later temple of Daikakuji incorporates a portion of the emperor’s earlier palace in the main hall.

The location of the Mausoleum of Go-Uda overlooking the valley frames for me the destined intimacy between the culture of digging for Narutaki Awasedo in the hillsides above, and the class of the elite in the valley below who used the stones in peace and war.

Emperor (Tenno) Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192) is the grandfather of Emperor Go-Toba whose father was Emperor Takakura and whose mother was Fujiwara-no Tamako. Go-Shirakawa became the 77th emperor in 1155 and retired in 1157. Some retired emperors lived to advanced age, and almost all of them in that era chose early retirement, often after just a few years of ascending the throne, following what their ancestors had discovered before them: that they had more political influence and fun as a retired “Joko”. The status of Joko translates as a priest, a Buddhist monk who is allowed to freely move about, often with his private retinue of trained and armed soldiers.

On December 22, 1178, Emperor Antoku was born; his father was Takakura, who is the son of Go-Shirakawa Joko. His mother was Taira-no Tokushi of the Taira clan. Antoku ascended as emperor at age two in 1180 as per his grandfather’s wishes. Antoku’s cousin, Emperor Go-Toba, was born on 8/6/1180; his father was also Takakura, and his mother was Fujiwara-no Shokushi of the Fujiwara clan. Go-Toba and Antoku shared the same grandfather, Go-Shirakawa Joko. Playing politics, the retired Go-Shirakawa Joko, even though his grandson Antoku had already been seated as the emperor, decided to declare grandson #2 Go-Toba as a second simultaneously reigning emperor at age 3 in 1183. So now there were two child emperors, and they were brothers by the same father. Each brother oversaw their army, which of course had different commanders and independent intentions.

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These two grandsons were being manipulated by their grandfather Go-Shirakawa Joko who found that political influence can come from mixing up the Imperial system like it was his toy land, pitting one clan or generation over another, or in this case two grandchildren. It was not long, in 1185 when the battles for the regal seat had turned to the sea to settle the puzzle of who would rule as a child emperor.

After chasing around the island of Honshu, a showdown between the armies, and now the navies of the two child emperors and their manipulative adult parents and grandfather came to an end in the terrible narrow coastal waters of the Shimonoseki Straits, where Kyushu island and Honshu island are less than a mile apart. A place on the map where the waters of the Pacific Ocean and the Inland Sea of Japan merge and mingle as torturous whirlpool waters, where sunken ships reside. It began on land but ended in the sea as the agents of the Minamoto clan in ships surrounded those of the Taira clan; did the grandmother of Antoku choose the dignity of her suicide and the drowning death of Antoku in her arms; followed immediately by the honor suicide drowning of Antoku’s mother. Thus was the chapter of the duplicity of the child emperors resolved.

During this intrigue, Emperor Go-Toba was encouraged to leave Kyoto after it was invaded by a rival Minamoto-no-Yoshinaka. Emperor Go-Taba and his grandfather Go-Shirakawa Joko were encouraged to seek safe shelter after Go-Shirakawa’s Kyoto palace was burned to the ground. It is rumored that Go-Shirakawa Joko was led to a hiding place along with his retinue of monk soldiers into a valley near Mt. Ogura, beyond Arashiyama. He was later advised to go deeper into the mountains, possibly to Umegahata or Shobudani, which is more isolated. It is suggested that within this time frame the child emperor Go-Toba was introduced to the Narutaki Awasedo stones discovered earlier by the Honma clan. This encounter appears to be, if the dates are correct, a bit extraordinary.

Minamoto-no-Toritomo assumed the title of the First Shogun in 1192. An articulate warrior, he was also a visionary that melded the present with the projected future. He died in 1199.

Emperor Go-Toba himself chose to abdicate in 1198 and in doing so assumed the title of a Joko. As a young man, he took on a sequestered status and practiced, and excelled at a host of classical arts and crafts. Spending years writing books, mentoring poets, inventing forms of poetry, and hosting poetic events. He was a “Leonardo” of sorts, so varied and advanced were his talents and interests. Go-Toba Joko also expressed and exercised his retirement status by attempting to influence the politics of government and society, and he did encourage a coup of sorts and was sequestered for his actions. An outspoken critic of a certain very popular religious cult, Go-Toba Joko faced some consequences, but it seems he had the best interests of the country, so this constraint was soon relaxed.

His intense interest in swordsmithing is widely proclaimed to have spurred on the singular era known as Japan’s Golden Age of Swordsmithing. While politically banished for a time to Oki Island off the coast of Okayama prefecture following a coup d’état, he began to regain his influential status and Go-Toba Joko created an atelier hosting a rotating community of the most celebrated swordsmiths and weapons craftsmen of the era. At this private retreat, a blacksmith workshop village where by invitation the most talented hamono-ya (bladesmiths), togi-ya (polishers), the builders of tatara smelting kilns, and weapons experts of all kinds gathered in a sequence over several years as Go-Toba Joko set a stage for the scientific study of tamahagane steel and the internal dynamics of the tatara kiln, sword making and a whole host of other associated crafts.

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Go-Toba Joko, I believe—and this seems logical—that with his early experiences gathered in Kyoto, beginning as a child, to blooming as a young intellectual, it was he, the artist and poet, that introduced Narutaki Awasedo to the world to facilitate the highest aesthetic expression of kasumi hamon. He is certainly credited to be a man of style. Not the finest blacksmith, but a man of expression, which is the theme of kasumi hamon patterns.

He certainly had his choice of Narutaki Awasedo while in exile on Oki Island, and later at his atelier in Kyoto, and I propose that his collection of Naurtaki Awasedo might have been the spark that ignited the aesthetics of the “Golden Age of Sword Smithery” and its emphasis on kasumi hamon. If anyone had access to examples of the legendary pure white shiro-toishi of the Nara era, and the whole spectrum of its brother the Narutaki Awasedo from Kyoto, it would have been him. If one figure was singled out as the inspiration for figural hamono polishing in regard to that blacksmith assemblage, Go-Toba with his upbringing would be on that list at the period. His card was on the table.

If only we could look over the shoulders of these famous blacksmiths who worked directly with togi polishers in these seminars. It has been suggested that Go-Toba took part in the composing of kasumi hamon patterns on blades, the quenching of blades, and that he became somewhat accomplished in the craft of the togi. The Kamakura era tamahagane katana produced during this extended episode at Go-Toba’s sequestered estate is recognized within the collector world as the best of the best.

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5. Toishiyama ownerships and mining rights

In Kyoto, the Honami Clan can be traced back to the Muromachi Period as the sword appraisers and togishi sword polishers of katana with direct advisory ties to Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–1490). Serving the elite as well as the connoisseur of finery and weapons well into the Edo period, this extensive historic Kyoto family of artists, poets, and craftsmen for centuries; every father, uncle, and son from every generation concurrently kept a hand in their polishing and appraisal ateliers in and around Kyoto. They are credited with establishing the logical grading standard for edged weapons, designing and establishing documentation practices, and building an archive for advancing those same polishing and restoration techniques that are in practice to this day. Their logs on historic weapons are the world’s earliest tome on the subject and act as reference material for authentication.

According to the documentation of “Kyoto Oyakusho-muki Taigai-oboegaki” (official records kept by the Kyoto bugyo–Bakufu office chief) started around 1717, a notation of the Toishiyama and the Honami family reads:

During the previous years before 1607, Dokin, who was an ancestor of Toishiya Gozaemon, mined the stones which included Yamashiro Narutaki village, also Nakano village, Takao territory, Toganono territory, Umegahata Zenmyo-ji village. Honami Clan paid the fee to him for the stones. In 1607 the Honami Clan gained the Toishiyama mining rights granted by the Tokugawa government. The mines were operated under their exclusive management. Every generation of Honami clan since then renewed their rights. It was recorded that Toishiya Gozaemon (Dokin’s descendant) bought the stones (left overs?) from Honami to sell and paid the fee to Honami Yazaburobei every year twelve unjogin (possibly the current value of 645,000 yen). In 1708, Ondoyama in Hiraoka village was claimed as kinriyama which means the emperor’s court territory, and also other four mines were included in kinriyama at the same time.

#12 Iromono with renge and bands of kiita

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6. Authors Addendum

The Honami Clan at certain times managed the mine sites and this was noted to have been before the time of Nobunaga and possibly, if not likely, back to that of the Ashikaga Shogun reigns in the Muromachi Period (1336–1573), and specifically to the era of Ashikaga Takuji (1338–1357). The Honami were not diggers, and they were separated from the actual ownership of the mine properties. It is recorded that before the Edo period, the Honami clan was granted certain rights from Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) to collect transportation taxes near Narutaki village in Yamashiro Kadono Narutaki district.

A geographical study of the local area “Youshufushi”, written by author Kurokawa Douyu (aka Kurokawa Genitsu) in 1682 or 1686, stated that the Honami clan had been sword polishing for several Shogun since the Muromachi Period (1338–1573), and they used mostly Narutaki-do (shiage-do) and exhausted the mine (at Narutaki), and that eventually the clan declared the Narutaki Yama as tome-yama (prohibited stone mine mountain), and stopped the use or selling of stones to the general public.

According to the book “Kyoto Oyakusho-muki Taigai Oboegakisho” published in 1708, there is a document about the territorial status and the ruling or ownership rights recorded by the Kyoto Bugyo (Bakufu chief office). It is an article about Toishiyama mining rights during the early years of the Edo period. It reported that in 1607, the Honami Koho (possibly Koetsu Honpō-ji) was officially granted the Toishiyama mineral rights. The Honami Clan did not own the mines, but they did possess control of the mines. Their position allowed for that whenever the head of their family changed, the new headmaster of the family clan was required to renew their permit. Toishiya Gozaemon, a miner, paid twelve unjogin (coins) (possibly 645,000 yen in current money) to Honami Yazaburobei every year as stated above; for this, he was allowed to sell any left-over stones.

Beginning in Meiji, the direct ownership of the Umegahata mines and the product belonged to the property owners in Umegahata (Kato was one of the earliest). There is the possibility that the ownership of the Narutaki mines at the southern end of the ridge extended to the Narutaki mines directly to the southeast of Takao for a period. In 1708, the Ondoyama mine site in Hiraoka village, along with the other five mine sites, became Kinriyama (the emperor’s property mountain).

Note: About surnames in Japan before the Meiji period.

From the very earliest tribal cultures of Japan, most people lived in groups originating from their ancestors, so the average person—which was about everyone—did not have a surname unless you were provided one by an official decree. So, in the above naming scheme, by default you would have been known as Jim, son of Frank; or Jane, daughter of Frank. Toishiya Gozaemon is a more recent name that was bestowed to Gozaemon, the guy who dug stones (toishi-ya), in Umegahata, the area of Toishi-yama.

#13 Sheets of uchigumori

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7. A modern perspective of the toishiyama discovery

The northeastern portion of Kyoto prefecture is called the Tamba region. Due to its mountainous topography, this area remains to this day as untamed wildlands, scattered about with tiny villages in narrow valleys, some represented by a few dozen houses—always alongside spring-fed rivers, their farming land reached by paths leading to the fields or further up to stands of timber on steep-sided mountains.

Since the promulgated Taika reform of 645 in Japan, the concept of real estate was at first simple: all the land and sea, the bounty of Japan was under control of a warrior or any powerful landlord, shrine, temples with armies, usually local, and so on—essentially anyone who could defend their lands in battle. These same types of edicts included the emperors or their families, that is if they could retain lands in battle. The royal family was not wealthy or powerful and in general owned no extensive land grants, and they were at first localized. Over time the landlords, who were usually successful samurai, could pay samurai “for hire” who were at times trustworthy to their allies and at times a central government; these men managed the rural politics and economy. The rural samurai and/or their retainers represented a shuffle of gratitude to the particular clan that happened to be in charge at the time. Yakuza, freelance but organized agents, were in many places the only authority that could be depended upon to punish crimes. Their reputation was tarnished, but they did not aim to eliminate all who challenged them; instead, they profited from them.

Farmers did not own the land they tilled. In good times and in bad, if rice or some other means of tax exchange could be provided, the continued use of that land by farmers and woodsmen was stable. In general, the farmers were abused but not needlessly murdered as they were ultimately providers. Through an evolving system, managed with compassion or not, times being ruthless or not, the local daimyo chiefs were the face of the aristocratic lords, religious sects, or organized crime groups. In the Edo period, the Tokugawa Shogunate wisely preserved these open lands of the Tamba region, and this edict remained in effect for the next two hundred and fifty years. The fact that these millions upon millions of acres of open accessible mountainous backcountry remain now as it was so long ago is one of modern Japan’s greatest assets.

#14 Iromono Tenjo Suita

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In the relatively recent Meiji, elected officials representing local municipalities acknowledged some of these wild areas as multi-use parks, watersheds, and public zones that skirted or annexed the edges of those earlier land grants. Many of those properties today provide for hiking and exploration. The Jingoji temple in Kyoto Prefecture independently maintained their lands and allowed a great portion of the western Toishiyama ridge, as well as the Shobudani eastern basin, for cultivation and hunting in a similar way to those same ancient privileges that had earlier been granted to the residents of Umegahata village on the eastern face by the Ninnaji temple near Narutaki.

The Ohira (Oohira, Ohhira) Ishihara family mine was about five miles from Umegahata and out beyond Mt. Atago towards Takao city on the southern face of the Ohira Mountain. There were other Ohira mines on different faces of the same mountain, but the Ishihara family Ohira mine is the forerunner, and it is the very earliest example of a leased Awasedo mine property in Japan. It was in the last quarter of the Edo period that the eastern face of the land, owned by the Shinto Jinja shrine at Mt. Atago, was first leased by the Ohira family, who developed the mine primarily in the beginning for the uchigumori, but the lease was maintained and further developed to include all forms of Awasedo. After the carrying of swords was banned at the end of the Edo, the restrictions on the availability of Awasedo were lifted and the use of Awasedo for the general crafts public took off.

In the early Meiji period, a vast portion of the mountainous Tamba region came under the purview of the various municipal, local, and village governments, and the mining of sharpening stones began to be permitted as a profitable industry in a growing economy. In Umegahata, the mining rights on the eastern face above the valley were sold to private owners who then often leased out the work to professional mining companies. The Nakayama site was the first to be purchased privately as its reputation had preceded it with its public offering. The stones roughly processed from these earliest mines on site were mainly sold to Osaka wholesalers who in turn distributed them throughout the country. This system of shipping stones directly to Osaka consolidators only changed after the industrial hub Osaka was badly damaged in World War II. The postwar years were good for the business of the Kyoto miners and retailers because Awasedo historically was so well incorporated into the woodworking community, and the rebuilding surge in Tokyo and Osaka and other cities required Awasedo. The Kyoto miners experienced a retail opportunity that was usually overshadowed by the Osaka consolidators. Ishihara-san from Ohira Mine recalled his experience to us of taking crowded trains for business trips he made to sell stones from his mine just after World War I. More recently, miners are selling Awasedo for retail out of their homes and shops, à la Imanishi Company.

In the early Meiji period, we know that the Nakayama property in Umegahata was privately sold and the mining rights were assumed by the Kato family, who managed the property but left the digging to a professional crew. As time went by into the modern era, the whole of the Toishiyama mining sites would eventually be divided up and sold or leased as sections. The property lines logically ran, as in the case of Ozuko for example, from at or near the foot of the valley floor to the ridgeline. Looking and walking around the Shobudani pond below it is obvious that mining has been left behind in favor of forestry. The growing of high-quality cedar (sugi) trees and a small amusement park and lake concession are the only examples of cooperative arrangements that have continued into the twentieth century.

The new Meiji-era owners of these subdivided tracts in Umegahata valley were not necessarily miners themselves. Kato Heisuke, a merchant originally from Nagoya, purchased the Nakayama property and immediately leased the mineral rights to a second party to operate the mine on his behalf. All of the rural Tamba mines in the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras and up to the present were and are operated as mineral leases with time-sensitive contracts.

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During all of those centuries, the ridgeline of Toishiyama mountain remained as wilderness, and the wildlands were maintained by and for the use of the residents in the valleys below. Although the mining of Narutaki Awasedo would eventually become a cash product, early on and to this day through leases, all wood, water, and game on both sides of the ridge are first utilized within the villages of the Umegahata valley as community property. In villages throughout Japan, the principle of community access to their neighborhood natural resources is still common.

Not all aspects of the Tamba or the Narutaki area were peaceful and profitable for the local citizens. These same wild open areas to the north and mainly east towards the Sea of Japan were for centuries ripe with bandits who preyed upon the traveling merchants or anyone else who walked this most direct route from central Kyoto to the seaside town of Obama. Battles and wars were not uncommon from the Heian into the early Edo period, and those freelance fighters who served did so not only to defend but also to procure control over land and goods. Lower-class samurai could boost their status and enrich their position by fighting with weapons that they had provided, and certainly, some of these part-time warriors came from the hills and valleys around Kyoto. It is only logical that rogue fighters also were benefiting from access to the deposits of the Narutaki Awasedo sharpening stone.

#15 Signs reading Toishiyama and Nagaoyama tacked up by locals.

#16 View of Toishiyama from the upper reaches of the Umegahata Valley.

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Modern Site of the Shobudani Mine

Chapter II

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II. MODERN SITE OF THE SHOBUDANI MINE

1. Our quest-our journey

For several years Emiko and I asked every person we met from Niigata to Kagoshima who was involved with the selling of awasedo stones if they had ever been to the site or knew where the first Narutaki Awasedo mines could be found. We asked miners, stone sellers, or collectors; no one either knew, did not care, did not want the venture to make a guess, or possibly wanted to protect the spot where the first mines began.

We did however finally receive an encrypted answer from an elderly lady who ran a quiet-little-really old fashion neighborhood convenience store in the hills above the Daikakuji temple that was encouraging. We happened to stop in for cold drinks and some oranges before trucking into the mountains beyond, as we were leaving Emiko coyly asked her if there were any toishi mines in the mountains above the village. She said that she did not know of any mines but that she remembered that someone died up there many years ago from a falling rock, and because of that no one goes there anymore. Further questions elicited no further answers or hints, and she became noticeably shy after her first answer and was now apparently second-guessing the wisdom of her first comment. As we continued up the street, I took a glance back and saw that she was watching us walk toward the mountains. As we came to the end of the pavement the next stretch was a dirt road that soon became a path. We followed this path up along the creek bed. To the left through the trees was a Shinto shrine with a monastery. Right away the path became steeper, fainter, less trodden, and narrow.

#17 Tourist map of Umegahata

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The going was slippery with a type of decomposed rock rolling underfoot. We had no map and did not know the location of any mine site, we only knew that this path headed north toward Shobu pond. After nearly two hours of hiking, we saw the pond. Having arrived along the southern edge below a dam, the western uphill side of Toishiyama rose above us. After a break from the heat in the shade of trees, we followed a logging track leading along and above the pond, and with a gentle incline the road advanced thru a tended sugi-cedar tree forest, and it was an easy stroll. On instinct, I suggested that we go back a bit because we were beginning to leave the pond behind us. Giving up half of our effort by reversing direction then decided to go off track and headed directly up the mountain to the east away from the pond below leaving Emiko behind but within shouting distance. About 50 yards up in the trees, I began to see some evidence under the brush of oddly loose rock in the form of rubble which turned out to be mine tailings.

There were no trails up there, it was all about clawing on hands and knees, taking a yard, and sliding back a foot. I followed the rubble flow at first, but the steep slide area of tailings was impossibly unstable. As I skirted the flow I rose and crested a rise that turned out to be the flat landing area in front of a 5ft high mine entrance dug perpendicular into the mountainside. As I walked up to the tunnel, there was a pounding column of moist cold air spilling out of the mouth—whooshing into the hot summer day. I squatted and entered the tunnel, not having any gear to go past the first 10 feet of the sunlit floor, I just sat down inside taking it all in. The stillness and silence were total and what has been called deadening. There were no sounds or physical movement of any kind from beyond or within, but instead, a steady atmospheric compression to my eardrums which replaced my ability to hear anything. Turning away with my back to the entrance the velvet blackness was overwhelming. Being alone I retreated to further examine the rubble outside that was spread all over the place, jetting out and fanning to the sides from the mine entrance. This was somewhat of a flat shelf, built up using extracted stone and soil representing a staging area where the miners must have chipped the waste stone off from the good toishi layers and dumped the tailings downhill.

I scampered back down the side of the mountain and brought Emiko up with me from a different angle for a second look. She was interested but cautious as we both reveled in the dead of summer rush of cold air from the tunnel while we mused upon the men who might have worked in isolation here those hundreds of years ago, inside where the temperature never changes and is always cold.

After a half-hour of photos, picking up a few mineral samples, and enjoying the view across the valley we headed out, back down leaving behind this hard rock tunnel entrance and worksite. Instead of sliding straight down, we skirted across up-valley along the face of the mountainside to the southeast while generally losing some elevation with each awkward cross-legged stride. It was easier and safer to walk at a diagonal across instead of straight down with the loose shards underfoot.

#18 Shobudani mine entrance.

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We were stingy to forfeit the elevation we had fought for, and as we rounded the mountain face, within a hundred feet of the first tunnel we came to a ledge. We each independently reflexed and took a couple of steps backward. If you have ever shared a moment of danger, one when you and a partner instinctively stepped back and turned to look deep into the eyes of the other, both realizing that you had just avoided a life-threatening incident, like before stepping off a curb— instead stepping back just as a car suddenly rushed by, those last two steps were that moment for us. From then on the stillness and remoteness of our location began to wear a bit more on our nerves. After backtracking we approached the formation from below. From there we saw the undercut and partially collapsed tunnel dug into weakened soils just below the lip of where we had been standing 20 feet up above just a few minutes before. A fascinating landscape but what a mess.

We spent an hour there contemplating the jumbled geology and the different directions and elevations the digging might have gone. The miners it seemed had dug this as a terminal going in 3 different directions. I speculate that the cold air tunnel above at the first opening we found was drawing its breath from this area here in front of us, cooling the ambient warm air as it passed through the interior of the mountainside. This mining complex stretched 30 yards or so from left to right in differing states of digging activity. There were no tunnels that could be entered, but we could see darkness behind boulders and suspected that the miners or some concerned person dynamited their faces to fill in the entrances.

When we left that spot, we still had to descend the steepness of the mountain, and at this elevation change was a challenge. It is harder to climb, but more dangerous to descend. As we now moved laterally, we neared a draw from above, a steep natural drainage chute that certainly would lead to the lake below. Instead of scrambling straight within its banks downward, it was steep, we traversed into, up, and over to the other side into the tended forest, a cedar tree farm where we found some flat ground and took a break. Sitting there we each realized and laughed that we were still shaking a little bit from the excitement of it all.

To leave the valley behind we followed the logging road with the idea of climbing up to the top of what I now felt comfortable with calling the lost Toishiyama ridge. The first footpath from the logging road that we found heading up we took, and we climbed and climbed until we could see the cresting of the path with blue sky beyond from over the ridge. Our upward path ended at a ridge trail that branched off right or left and within a few yards saw a narrow path that aimed down the other side and into Takao. We were tired and lucky for us the path was to emerge below in the valley at the backside of a cemetery. A bit awkward, being from out of town, but with no priests in sight, we slipped by the temple only to later find out that this path was the beginning of one of the mountain’s “public access” routes.

The next morning at 6 o’clock, with food and drink we hopped an early bus straight to Takao and got off in the center of Umegahata valley. From looking at maps overnight we knew that none of the streets went up and over the ridge from this part of the valley, so we went straight for the street of the monastery we walked past before, with the narrow footpath alongside the cemetery. Up into the peaceful trees, we quietly pulled ourselves, one short stride at a time up the steep side of the mountain. At the ridge, we enjoyed the distant views that the trees had blocked out the immediate valley below, but now the vistas were wonderful. The path along the spine of the mountain was, as we had just learned on the internet the night before, a portion of the Shobudani Open Source Hiking Course that is for the hiking public to use, so we became “hikers”. First to the southwest back towards Kyoto until we began to lose some elevation to get some perspective, and then we turned around and backtracked to the more north-westerly direction, keeping along the ridge.

#19 Privately tended mushroom bed on Toishiyama.

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All along the pathway were found depressions or sinks with scattered local stone but no sharpening stone minerals or signs of mining. This whole mountain is wildland, difficult to access, and the only indications of recent human activity were to be those centered around commercial cedar tree stands and maintained log-based mushroom beds.

We have learned that along with growing mushrooms and foraging for edible plants, the hunt for boar or deer in season is common. In the years since we first trudged to the ridge, I have only been close enough to say hello to five other hikers. Two couples at different times, and a single person once, who was up there picking wild fiddlehead ferns.

#20 View of the distant Mt. Atago beyond the Toishiyama range from Daikakuji valley in the foreground.

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2. How far

Mentioned in the booklet, The Charm of Tennen Toishi (CTT-pp11), is a reference to an Edo Period publication “Nihon Sankai Meisanzu-e” 1797 Pictorial Book of the Special Products of Mountain and Sea of Japan, the Smithsonian Library has a digital copy online, type in the Library search:

https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/nihonsankaimeisv1shit

One quote in this book that interests me refers to this late 18th-century description of the location of the Honyama toishi mining area. “To-wa oujo go-ri-o hanarezu” (the toishi mine is not far, 5 ri (1.5 mile / 2.5 km) from the Emperor’s Palace). This ancient Japanese measurement of ri is from the Chinese li which varied slightly from era to era but it generally hovered around 1 ri = 0.3 miles. This 5 ri distance using this description brings us from the Palace up to near the foot of Shobudani valley at Narutaki village where the two closest awasedo mines the Kitsuyama & Mukaido were active in the late 18th century along the face of Ondoyama mountain during that later Edo period. And, this book is the earliest mention of a numerical distance of an awasedo mine site to the north within the Kyoto basin. This book was published before the Nakayama and the other famous mines were discovered. This quotation does not pinpoint where the mines were, or the name of the mines, but only that it is the distance to the mountain area from the Imperial Palace. I do not know by which method their distance was based; as the crow flies or by footfall.

As a destination for the modern traveler who might wish to visit Japan and quickly taste the character of the Narutaki Awasedo mining area for the first time, the above description of walking the 5 ri would provide you with the entrance to Umegahata valley. And if one wished to visit the most ancient source of awasedo, and walk around the Shobudani valley pond area this could be a one-day affair if you were quick about it. To experience the rugged and weathered landscape, providing the full impact than walking to Shobudani pond from the city center on dirt roads and paths near Ondoyama, might take a few tries. But I guarantee that it will enhance your appreciation of the work that went on there those hundreds of years ago. Below are hints as to how to find the pond, But be aware that this is an entrancing commitment, and you and likely to turn it into a protracted experience.

#21 Suita with namazu and goma

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Running through Takao village on the eastern side of Toishiyama is a narrow winding uphill two-lane mountain road that splits the Umegahata valley east and west. This road represents a truly ancient pathwayoriginally called the Shuzan-kaido which is now designated as Kyoto Prefecture Highway #162. The Shuzan Kaido leaves the Kyoto basin at Utano village as a paved and widened 20th century road for autos, busses, and trucks. For the better part of 1500 years, the Shuzan was a footpath that was Kyoto’s main trade route to the Japan Sea and China. The root of the Shuzan road is represented within Kyoto’s modern city limits as Shijo Dori-Street in Kyoto and this street led to the Kawaramachi Nishiki fish market 400 years ago in the Nishikikojo neighborhood along the Kamo River about ½ mile south of the Imperial Palace. This extremely large fish, produce, service, and everything related market presently transverses many streets, alleys, dead-ends, and whole city blocks, has weatherproof awnings and lots of small alleys, now all squeezed into modern restraints in size and scale. This market dates to some of the earliest days of Kyoto. The market was located, by design, to reside on top of a recognized underground aquifer with natural springs of unusually cold water. The other end of the Shuzan Kaido ends at the Japanese fishing port of Obama on the Sea of Japan, which has served as the main source of Kyoto’s seafood for centuries.

There are two possible walking routes and one driving route that will bring you from the Nishiki market at Kawaramchi near the Emperor’s Palace in Kyoto to the Shobudani mine area, or you can take a city bus to the town of Takao in Umegahata valley. The first route I call the Takao route, the second the Daikakuji route, and the third the Ozaki route; a hike which now requires an automobile or motorcycle to travel upon that leads you past the Ozaki mine site in upper Umegahata valley where it then loops down by entering a toll road with a toll gate. From the gate, backtracking a bit, you will drive down to the Shobudani basin and pond. The first two routes require a good bit of stamina, climbing, and hiking skills. After leaving the fish market near the Emperor’s Palace both the Ozaki and Takao utilize the Shuzan path for the first half of the route. The Daikakuji route on the other hand leaves the Palace and heads directly to the city limits north of town near Arashiyama and into the mountains beyond Daikakuji Temple. From there, a series of isolated dirt paths generally follow the ridges to the north out to Shobudani pond.

I have used satellite technology to measure the three potential routes between the Palace and the fabled Honyama “original” mine site in Shobudani valley, the valley of the iris.

The modern Ozaki route leaves Kyoto on the improved Shuzen (Hwy 162) road and continues upon paved surfaces right to the edge of Shobudani Pond. For the Takao and Daikakuji routes, the first half is along city streets but the second half leading to the edge of the pond is based as close as possible measuring along the trimmest lines on Google Maps following the series of articulated jointed switchbacks and a trail that ascends and descends many times as you walk back and forth from point A to B to C to D right up to the edge of the pond.

I have tried to factor the 3 path routes with their countless turns and inclines along these very narrow beastly one-man trails, by utilizing satellite imagery, and not as the crow flies, I have concluded the distances from the Palace to the isolated mines in the graph below.

1ri = 0.31miles or 0.5km

Shobudani lake via Ozaki/Shuzan-Narutaki-Palace= 6.47mi./10.42km/2.6ri.

Shobudani lake via Takao-Narutaki-Palace= 5.87mi./9.44km./2.4ri

Shobudani lake via Daikaku-ji-Narutaki-Palace= 5.89mi./9.47km./2.41ri.

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In traveling on foot through these mountain routes, it is not truly accurate to say you are simply walking. For instance, to go between Shobudani pond directly over the ridge to Takao, it is climbing all the way, first up and then directly down into the village. Not a foot or a yard of level ground. I can easily walk on flatland at a pace of 2.5 miles (3.2 km) per hour but scrambling up and over a ridge at angles of 45 to 60 degrees vertical, the distance traveled climbing between Shobudani to Takao on a map per hour slows down to almost zero. Climbing this route, the distance measured by satellite is only 0.6 mi when going to Umegahata valley but to climb over the ridge itself and then scramble down to the pond can take up as much as 2 hours of hard ascent and perilous descent efforts on crude paths. The difficulty of the vertical contour makes the route shorter on a map but more time-consuming to cover because of the climbing from one valley floor to the other.

These hikes left me with the impression that the distance, as quoted during the Edo Period of “less than 5 ri” in the book Nihon Sankai Meisan-zu-e, was a guess or estimate because it is difficult to measure the exact distances when you switch back and forth while climbing and descending. Not an easy computation and leaving answers to questions such as was the original measurement based on the “footfall” rather than the “as the crow flies” throws a curveball into any computation. But all in all my conclusion is that Shobudani pond, with its hidden valley, is the site where the Narutaki Awasedo was first dug by the residents like Honma Tokinari or his earlier clan members.

Below is a 1936 topographic map showing Shuzan-kaido Path from Ninnaji to the Takao Jingoji route.

A-Ninnaji Temple, B-Takao Jingoji, C-Shobudani Pond, D- Hirosawa-no-ike Pond

#22 Shobudani pond (C) to Kyoto (A) topographic

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3. How high

Years ago, the owner of the Ohira mine Ishihara Yogoro-san brought Emiko and me up to his then-current mine site which was about halfway up the mountain. After spending our time at this his most recent workings, before we headed down, he asked me if I wanted to hike further up to where two earlier mine tunnels of his father’s and grandfather’s era had been dug.

The current owner of the Nakayama mine, Mr. Akira Kato, the son of Mr. Matsumichi Kato took us from the bottom of the property to the most recent mine entrance that his father had dug; the Mizu (water) mine in the 1960s. This Mizu mine tunnel is about 100 feet above the Omuro River which runs along the valley floor, and this entrance was abandoned soon after he had begun digging because of water infiltration. The next mine further up the hill was the prolific Sakura-cherry tree mine which produced the great portion of the Nakayama stone that you or I might own. This mine I would estimate is 150 feet off the valley floor and dug straight into the mountain. In production before WW2 until the middle 1960s, the mine was in the sweet spot of the honkuchi naori (true mouth-entrance of the stone structure) of their property and this mine did not fill with water. He told us of another test tunnel at the same elevation but around to the side that was not productive because it missed the heart of the naroi toishi mass. Next, we trudged towards the ridge but well before reaching it, we stopped at a plateau where the bulldozers had removed the topsoil thirty years earlier, revealing layers of aka-pin, tenjo, and hachimai toishi. Akira-san said that he did not know of any higher diggings above this altitude.

All along the Toishiyama ridge to the northwest, you will find the rough evidence of the four most famous successful mine’s abandoned tunnels near the ridge, as rubble and scattered shards of awasedo left by bulldozers in the twentieth century. The same is clear at Ondoyama mountain where the Narutaki Mukaida top section was lastly scraped flat, the good stone hauled and the waste pushed over the sides, there now resides a large cemetery. The road going up to the Ondoyama cemetery was later lined with 1960s homes and apartments of upper to middle-class Kyoto.

#23 Murasaki (purple) streak in kiita

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4. Some Cautions

In the Meiji Period when mining became prosperous, each mine site property included tests and developed tunnels that eventually were scattered from the ridgeline down towards the valley floor. Some of the productive tunnels that may have had endearing designations are now lost. The footpaths for the removal of the stone spread out laterally at all elevations. There were some easy routes and of course, more strenuous routes for the laborers to pack the stones along. There were stem routes for the vertical movement up and over the ridge and down to the valley floor, and lateral paths for reaching out sideways to steep sections. Local labor carried trimmed stone from the mines for finishing in the workshops below. Mr. Kimura of Kyoto as a sexagenarian demonstrated to us how sleds running downhill on raised wooden skids were used along manageable vertical routes in the old days before electric motorized tow lines. The twenty century saw buckets running on steel cables using gravity with guide ropes and simple hand breaks to pace the speed on manageable vertical routes in the old days before electric motorized tow lines. The twenty century saw buckets running on steel cables using gravity with guide ropes and simple hand breaks to pace the speed going down the mountain and to pull the bucket back up. Eventually, gas-powered wenches for retrieving the buckets would be used to generate electricity for lights in the mines although carbide lamps were common into the 1950s. Until 1920 all stone chipping and saw work inside or outdoors at the mine entrance by hand and that was to soon change too.

The Kyoto toishi mines are somewhat unique in that all the product is moved down the mountainside to be processed and promoted, instead of being raised from below the surface as the vast majority of mining and recovery models follow. These mines, digging deeper past the awasedo into the mountain, or deeper vertically into the ground will only yield more bedrock or chert as the awasedo is finite and rare.

#24 Backside of iromono-chipped with kanazuchi-hatchet

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The greatest advice I can give is to not be too casual and tempted into going off-trail, especially downhill into areas heavy with ferns, especially on the eastern-Takao side of the mountain no matter how pretty or passive they look. You will certainly be overwhelmed by the extreme overgrowth of ferns as they always lay like a sheet of green and always lay with gravity downhill. Once you are in amongst, your ability to move back uphill against these 4 to 8-foot fans will be next to impossible. You will be tempted to just go farther down because the retreat going up is so difficult. Gather your senses and turn around and retrace your descent even if you have to get on your hands and knees to do so. If you persist in your descent, you may curse yourself afterward. Because it is nearly impossible to see ahead of your position unless scanning the track from your hands and knees, and even then, you can only see five feet around you. The fern-shaded camouflaged cliff faces and mine shafts are the most dangerous up in this area. When and if you do come close to the valley floor and hear the traffic close below you, it is just as likely that the soil under your foot will eventually give way to an engineered cement retaining wall that drops into someone’s backyard. This fall may be lethal. All of the Toishiyama on the Umegahata side is private property and is inhabited near the valley floor. The property owners have engineered these vertical walls as buttressing against the mountain. Nearing these 10- to 40-foot-tall walls, the topsoil underfoot at the edges are suspect and this is just one of many dangers to keep in mind. You and your partner will be alone, rarely have I seen another person up there to help you if you are in trouble. Always rely on good judgment. The names of the mines Nakayama, Okudo, and Oozuku, all represent private property managed by the landowner who is the mineral leaseholder. Their properties do not necessarily begin right at Highway #162 on the valley floor as Oozuku does, but all do extend to the ridgeline to the west above the valley. These rough and remote mine sites are private property, and you enter at your own risk as a trespasser. There are property lines, often just a single wire strung from tree to tree heading up and downhill. Because the eastern face of Toishiyama is private property, the recognized “public right of way hiking courses” generally follow the ridgelines separating Umegahata and Shobudani valley. You can access this hiking course legally but the path is hard to find. Many may know but few will speak and locals will risk being rude instead of giving directions. The road leading down into Shobudani basin Hwy #162 is the Arashiyama Takao Parkway and it is a private road, you cannot walk alongside or upon this road, there are no sidewalks of any kind, and no bicycles are allowed. These “hiking courses” in the woods are public right of way while the Arashiyama Takao Parkway is a private access toll road leading to a private concession.

Japan’s history is thick with an agricultural tradition of accessing the natural resources of the mountain lands as did their grandparents before them. Mushroom hunting and gathering of medicinal and edible plants, lumber, and hunting operations were maintained as private products on public land scattered about using the honor system. The mushroom beds you may find to this day along the paths look like neatly cut and stacked logs and represent in many cases years of care and tending. You may also stumble across some small shrines in the most remote places, usually in the form of little piles of stone constructed as a platform or shrines in front of jutting monoliths, sometimes with a roof of sorts. There may be trinkets about which are amulets and should not be disturbed.

Although I have walked the ridgeline alone, it is not a good idea. So, bring lunch and a friend and have a couple of something to drink. The views beyond the pond are charming.

In the area down near Shobudani pond, the mountainsides are honeycombed from mining as evidenced by surface tailings, tunnel openings, and generally poor topsoil composition. These disturbances continue up to the mountain summit. All caution should be taken when hiking on and around Narutaki Toishiyama. Do not travel alone. Do not enter tunnels. Do not go off the paths and stay away from cliff faces. I have seen the results of recent earthquakes. In 2014 I was at the ridge at an open pit, and the same site four days later after an earthquake. Quite a few slabs of stone fell in the duration onto places I had been standing earlier that week. Earthquakes happen in Japan every day of the year at one location or another, Toishiyama included.

Below is a link to a website that shows a portion of the Shobudani Hiking Course that may be somewhat useful. This walking/climbing/hiking course is just one of several that ring the Kyoto basin, and each represents the modern health and heritage trend in Japan of getting away from the cities to enjoy the beauty of the islands. It is not about visiting the Shobudani toishi mines, but instead, the map is a guide to enjoying the outdoors. The map does not recognize the mine or their locations, the actual finding and discovery of those sites must be left to your motivation.

https://www.yamareco.com/modules/yamareco/detail-1586371.html

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Modern Mining Rights and the Beginning

Chapter III

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III. MODERN MINING RIGHTS AND THE BEGINNING

#25 High up looking down the Umegahata valley from Ozaki

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1. Narutaki Awasedo

The Narutaki honkuchi naori Awasedo is a specific class of stratified stone that was discovered and first mined from the mountainside that rises above Shobu Pond and later extracted from the steep face of the same mountain on the opposite Umegahata side above the villages of Narutaki and Takao. This awasedo type of stone formation was discovered and mined in two other semi-altered forms within a 20 km square area to the northwest of Kyoto, and sporadically along the fringes of Lake Biwa. There are no reports of this particular volcanic sediment formation in these sequential layers appearing anywhere else in the world. The unique geological footprint of the 80-layer honkuchi Narutaki awasedo sharpening stone terrane is as a “field” of stone that includes with each awasedo layer a welded inches-thick magma-based iron-rich skin called the kawa-hada on the top side of the awasedo, and on the backside or bottom of the awasedo is a slightly thicker mass of rough unconsolidated waste of minerals including clays called gokudo.

The bedrock and the thousands upon thousands of low buckled ridges that represent the Tamba region including the mountains around Toishiyama and Atago are not themselves volcanic formations. Those mountains and their crumpled ridges instead represent oceanic Jurassic radiolarian chert accreted onto the Eurasian continental plate over the last few million years. This oceanic chert base in turn hosts upon it those relatively shallow 45 ft / 18 m thick portions of Quaternary 1.4- to 2.5-million-year-old volcanic sediments mentioned above, products of a retired and now quiet volcano of the past. This whole accreted continental shelf is capped with various quantities of Neogene 1- to 2-million-year-old volcanic tephra and soils.

The Toishiyama volcanic deposits each average 30 to 45 feet in thickness and are irregularly shaped in circumferences, such as any natural freshwater pond, in shape and scale might provide a template for the sediments to accumulate in. The volcanic awasedo complexes are buried as they lay and follow the contour of the mountainside under several meters of non-marine precipitated chert called kiba, all under more recently accumulated soils. Geologically, each of these 80 awasedo layers and their co-parts represents sequences of individual volcanic pulsations of unique wind-dispersed rhyolite dust as evidenced by the fact that although each of the layers of awasedo has a similar sequential structure each layer has a slightly different chemical composition. The binding similarity from one awasedo terrane to the next, even miles away, is that the silica content of the bedded stone is volcanic high-silica rhyolite as defined by parameters set by the United States Geological Survey and the Japan Geological Survey. These formations of honkuchi awasedo in Kyoto are intimately similar to the awasedo found in the western Kyoto prefecture near Kameoka called aiishi awasedo. The difference between the aiishi and the honkuchi is that the aiishi naori will have an average of 60 individual layers instead of the honkuchi naori 80 layers. The chemistry of the two types is so similar that the differences between the two might be most easily explained as two sides of the same coin.

#26 Jumble of leftover Okudo

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Within this same rugged territory is a third version of the awasedo sediments referred to as Chuishi Awasedo. The chuishi does not have an individual layering scheme but instead, its post-stratigraphic form is that of one large mass of comingled awasedo minerals, the result of a slumping event. So instead of a 60-layer cake as at Maruoyama or 80 layers at Narutaki, the mass of chuishi naori has a physical form suggesting a loaf of bread that rested uncomfortably bulging-inclined on the steep surface of Atago mountain near the peak.

The chuishi mass is wrapped in a meter-thick skin of iron-rich gokudo conglomerate which acts as a wrapper or a bag. The harvested stones from the chuishi are often cut to gigantic sizes, or any shape or size as large as you like because, within the interior of the naori, there is no front or back or sides of kawa skin to restrict the direction to be cut.

Natural sharpening stones with unadulterated sediments such as the Honkuchi and Aiishi will have chronographic structure that runs age-wise from the kawa skin bottom to the youngest up. The most useful high-performance stones will have the least amount of variation in the inclination of the strata. Here is an extreme example of an irregular grain sequence. I bought this stone as an example to show what an extreme geologic flaw can look like.

The awasedo in the two photos above is a troubled sharpening stone. It appears that the volcanic sediment settled on a pre-existing form creating an inverted bowl. Awasedo stones do have a top side and a back side, the way the sediment lays affect their performance. This stone does not easily cut steel even though the silica and aluminum oxides are in place. The microscopic arrangement of the gravity-driven accumulated silica and aluminum oxide sediments will determine the stones cutting qualities and abilities. As a rule of thumb, it is always better to sharpen with the natural grain. The natural inclination of the sediment for our purposes will represent the kawa skin back side of the stone resting on a table or in a stone holder. Grain direction is especially important when honing or forming critical-edged tools like razors. Sharpening on bias-cut stones, or stones such as #1520 and those stones from Mt. Atago, that have jumbled or crossed grain patterns will require some trial-and-error testing.

#27 The top surface of awasedo 1520

#28 The back and side of awasedo 1520

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It is the Honkuchi Awasedo that are the star players out of the three types of awasedo. In ancient times only the elite had access to awasedo, the low ranks of soldiers were left to shift for themselves with locally sourced common, often coarse Arato stones for general sharpening. The excellent types of awasedo stones continued to be used after the age of hand-to-hand combat had expired, and they are still the only abrasive stone accepted and used by professional togi sword polishers for the creation of the lovely contrasting light-reflecting aesthetic qualities of the historic swords. Top-notch awasedo from Narutaki is trusted for its consistency of grit size and grain pattern, and togi are keen to shy away from potentially toxic stones that leave rogue scratches.

Kyoto was and still is to a great extent, a city of wooden structures, and because of this, for 1100 years the city struggled with the fires of war and destruction from earthquakes. The rebuilding after every disaster always depended upon the readiness of carpenters with their sharp tools. With the seat of government in 1603 having been relocated to the Tokugawa castle town in eastern Japan of Edo, those same mines at Ondoyama, Shobudani, and along the Narutaki ridge were pressed upon to provide the sharpening stone media for the tools necessary to expand and build what began as a backwater outpost on Edo Estuary into the political and economic center it was determined to become. Edo however, poised on a bay proved to be even more fire-prone than Kyoto had been, in part because of the strong Pacific Ocean’s onshore winds. Tough living conditions and the hurry-up roughshod building booms in certain sectors of Edo provided ready kindling for the many hundreds of fires that were recorded over the 250 years of the Edo Period in Tokyo.

The Edo Period 1603–1868 provided for a certain relative peace, and this allowed for a re-evaluation and control of the Kyoto mines based on business and investments rather than political concerns. In the preceding decades, the building and repair in Kyoto and other important cities had demanded sharpening stones for boosting the craft trades. These relatively peaceful Edo times coupled with an early form of the privatization of the mine properties allowed for a “squeeze” in the production of the Narutaki Awasedo mines which were being tossed back and forth as pawns, so much so that the mines were closed from time to time. Some claimed, for good reason, while others chided in, that the closures were engineered by the Honami sword-sharpening clan themselves, as they had the most to gain.

Although there is some mention that the rural Honma clan, a very ancient Umegahata family, was still involved in the mining aspects during the late Momoyama and early Edo period as miners, it was to be the Honami clan that would eventually control the ticket of grading and the funneling of all of the products from Narutaki through their hands. This was to be from the dawn of the late Edo period and up to and into the Meiji period. Honami having been the premier sword polishers and appraisers for the elite classes in Kyoto had ties to Narutaki that date back no less than two hundred years to the Muromachi Period. The clan’s professional abilities to grade rare stones, and therefore to accurately tax the stones as individual products spurred on a commercial structure that encouraged the further development and a modern survey of the Narutaki area. The Meiji era began with the opening up for private ownership of all of the mine sites along Umegahata valley. The site of the Narutaki Mukaida and Kizuyama mine on Ondoyama mountain and their neighbor of Nakayama had been spoken for and held closely by the elites of Kyoto into the late years of Edo. The up-valley properties of Okudo, Ozuku, and Ozaki maybe had some “discovery” mining activity in mid-Edo, although it was not until Meiji that any of these farther-out mines were documented as operating full-time.

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Nakayama was the first mine site to be financially settled (sold as opposed to rights granted) in Meiji. The property, already having been in production and highly regarded for its stone quality, was keyed up by the Honami clan as an important property in much the same manner that the two Ondoyama sites had been. The Honami clan, ensconced at Nakayama by mid-Edo, had their ties and interests in managing the mine tamped down by other interested parties who were predicting a new type of free-flowing open economy not so heavily based on the “who you know” model. In the early Meiji, the rights of the ownership of the Nakayama mine, lock, stock & barrel were once and for all transferred to Mr. Heisuke Kato. He and his mine manager Toshima Sakichi began to develop a model of private ownership that would soon be applied to a portion of Ondoyama as the Narutaki Mukaida mine to the south and eventually in the north at Okudo, Ozuku, and later to the farthest out Ozaki site near Jingoji temple. The second portion of Ondoyama on the Kizuyama side followed this model soon after. The digging and the commercial dispersal of the stone at Nakayama were to be the modern template of toishi mines all over the Tamba area to the northwest of Kyoto.

The owners of these newly deemed private lands in Umegahata, and those of more distant mines, hired experienced contractors to develop the mines with a blend of professional crews and local labor. Leases provided taxes and employment for the local rural village coffers as the east face of Toishiyama mountain was in their jurisdiction. The Toishiyama complex of mines was the earliest track to evolve as a commercial private rural mining property in Kyoto prefecture, and this encouraged the largest extraction of Narutaki Awasedo stones yet. It took a few years to sort out, but in early-mid Meiji, the Narutaki Awasedo finishing stones of Toishiyama were beginning to move directly into the craft sectors through retailers.

In Meiji 5th-1872 the old territorial system for the whole country changed. By law, this vast Tamba region north and west of Kyoto Prefecture was now under the control of the National Treasury which led to policies encouraging new mining sites to be explored for all kinds of products, and mining now became purely commercial. Larger cities and prefectures with towns like Kameoka were allowed to lease mineral rights held in their municipal jurisdiction. Private land owned by temples and shrines in the old system could now create mineral-rights leasing schemes managed by the Prefectural “Toishi Toryo” Chief Mining Officers who licensed “Oyakata” private production expert mining managers. This same early Oyakata system that had been proven efficient at Toishiyama now extended to and was expanded not only for the leasing but the purchase of rural properties all over Japan by miners.

In Meiji (1868–1912) the Tamba region burst with a multitude of newly opened stone mines of all sorts. In this age of discovery, science partnered with the wave of capitalism and industry that swept over Japan. The aoto and nakado general-purpose middle grit stones could also be more widely harvested and marketed to the general public as the tonnage from new mines increased. During Meiji when the major mines in Umegahata fully passed into private ownership, Kyoto city emerged as the main wholesale outlet for both Narutaki Awasedo as well as all other lesser grades of natural sharpening stones. Kyoto produced the stone and developed a retail and delivery system at the same time. From Feudalism to Capitalism with the stroke of a pen (ink stamp), the rush to modernize the cities of Japan began with the ability to buy and develop private property.

After the rush of the Meiji period had passed, the Taisho period (1912–1926) unfolded with the miner’s access to electric power saws and lights in the workshops down in the valley. This was revolutionary and the mining of tennen toishi in general and specifically that of digging Narutaki Awasedo multiplied unabated. From the Showa (1926–1989) era as international opportunities emerged and demands for stone were serviced at the mines by the introduction of gas motor-driven drum-type winches with friction hand brakes to move the buckets up and down the steep mountains. From woven rattan shoulder porter baskets of old to modified 55-gallon drums on cables, the economy of mining flipped. Curious though, most miners continued to rely on their trusted and cherished carbide lamps for working in the mines well into the 1970s.

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From the twenty-two foreign and domestic wars that Japan participated in from 1868 thru the great depression and two world wars, vast amounts of abrasives from the earth tested the depth of the warehoused old/stock of awasedo. Each military conflict encouraged the demand for more from the mines of the whole list of finer and coarser stone types. The Second World War for Japan realistically began the day they entered into the Japan/Sino war in China in 1935. The enormous war effort drew upon the Awasedo for use in machine shops, all forms of laboratories, surgeries, etc. Families of ranking officers strove to provide their sons with freshly polished katana for battle, and every man of every rank carried a knife sharpened with awasedo. In war, even airplane pilots represented their family’s heritage by carrying a short tanto sword tucked alongside them in the cockpit. From hand-dug to dynamite and bulldozers, more stone was pulled out of the mines from 1890 to 1945 than had in the previous 700 years. A few of the Toishiyama mines including Shobudani had played out in the early half of the Showa period. These wars are not a subject that is warmly reminisced in Japan, and in all of the conversations I have been a part of in Japan, the wars were not remembered concerning the fighting, but instead of the sacrifice. The 1930s depression hit the West and it hit the East just as hard. Modern machinery and open pit digging after WW2 exhausted the sources of the great ultra-grade Toishiyama Narutaki Awasedo stone. The closing of one mine after another was a silent formality, all that was left for the future by 1960 resided in storage houses scattered around Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo.

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2. Digging in earnest

The sides of awasedo #29 from the Meiji period made with two-man saws called tsurunoko were used to dress the sides of the awasedo. The cutting edge, (in poor condition here) was maintained with files, and the handles were covered with some type of wood, maybe cork. It is a pull back and forth saw with the stone being cut outside of the mine while sitting on the ground or in a shop.

During the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras, the manual labor of operating an awasedo mine followed a system of command. Previous to the Edo period there would certainly have been some similar teamwork regiments, but we have little written history to enlighten us on the subject. Japan has a reputation for favoring apprentice and journeymen relationships, and centuries of government edicts restricting casual movement tended to create tight local groups. Working underground favors familiar work ethics, and working with your family and neighbor’s takes those responsibilities one step further. All of the workers at the mines followed their seasonal time-sensitive duties regarding the planting and harvesting of rice. The cash payment from the work in the mines was for many a welcome opportunity.

I was told by several locals of Takao village that during the Edo, Meiji, and early Showa up to 1/3 of the population of men, women, and older children in the Umegahata valley worked at least part-time in some manner for the mines. The Shobudani pond basin did not possess an established proper village so men from Takao and the villages on the eastern side of Toishiyama ridge hiked to work and home afterward. Working in the rural-farther-out mines like Mt. Atago some of the miners slept inside the mines, had parties, and gambled when stuck inside by bad weather. The mines certainly had an on-site culture, and it was probably not all work after hours.

Below is a worksheet breakdown of Meiji-era mining crews:

Oyakata - the owner of the mine operation

Souketorinin - a chief manager

Banto - a manager

Kashira - a chief man who finds and develops any new mine entrance, and he is the explosive handler.

Shikomikata - an exploratory mine handler and digger of the newfound vein.

#29

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Arahito (rough laborer) also called Zurikaki, is a laborer who scrapes off a waste part of the raw stone.

Fushin-gata (construction worker)- a laborer who digs a tunnel and installs a wooden frame shoring into the side of the mountain, and the engineer of the trolly rails.

Ishiguchi- a chief miner, a rock hitter, a handler of the dynamite blast, and the maintenance of the mine (guchi/mouth) entrance.

Mizuban- a laborer whose job is to empty incidental water from the mine interior.

The physical work of moving the roughly trimmed stone down the mountain was done mainly by women and often children using ladder-type backpack carriers mounted with wicker baskets to hold the stone. The workshop on the valley floor where the stones are cut to standard sizes is the hikiba saw shop.

Hikibakata (sawyers) use two-man saws called tsurunoko that shape and surface the stone for wholesale.

Dogugata (blacksmith) makes and maintains the hammers, chisels, saw sharpening, and maintenance of the mining equipment.

Kikaikata – a machinery maintenance mechanic in modern times, and user of the rock drill, compressor, bulldozer, dump car, etc.

The development of the Honkuchi Narutaki Awasedo mine begins as hand-dug exploratory tunnel. These will either discover the seam of awasedo or be abandoned at a certain depth if the mineralogy associated with awasedo is not found. The digging system goes something like this. The kashira chief miner chooses the spot and gives instructions to the fushin-ga who sets up the general digging system into the side of the mountain, digging at a slight incline angle to facilitate the removal of the tailings. Mr. Ishihara of the Ohira mine told me that all of the test and working tunnels would begin to be dug at a 10% or greater degree upslope. Rubble was removed with baskets, then by carts as progress proceeded. The rough waste of breccia, chert, and unconsolidated stone is wheeled out and dumped below the mine entrance as tailings. Dynamite in this phase is not used because it dangerously weakens the mass of breccia stone comprising the rock that lays below the soils, jeopardizing the structural integrity of the mountainside above this outer entrance. The interior of the mine is dug out with sledgehammers, wedges, and bars.

At the very lowest elevations, to locate and chase the 15-meter thick awasedo naori, an entrance tunnel can run as deep as 100 meters into the mountainside before the awasedo is located. Up near the ridge, the Awasedo-naroi sediment can be found peeking out, exposed, or within just a few meters beyond the composted soils.

The first hint of having located the Narutaki Awasedo nori is when unconsolidated volcanic sediment of precipitated chert-hornfels mixed with clay (kiba) is found which represents the outer layer of the outer wall of the naori sediment complex. Digging through the kiba will open the door to the maishi gokudo, the mineral layer that encases the individual unique layers of awasedo toishi. Finally, by digging beyond a volcanic waste layer called tsuke, composed of hard black, brown-red iron-rich minerals and when you smell sulfur (ensho) you are in and now digging into the awasedo.

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The tsuke with the ensho is porous, and the miners are always looking for water seepage and the smell of sulfur as a signal and guide that the toishi nori formation is near. The miners found that following the water, it can indicate the direction of the semi-porous toishi naori formation. The aiishi awasedo naori strata at Maruoyama to the northwest out beyond Kameoka near Yagi at Ochi has a stratification of 60 layers possessing five group types of stones, and these are similar to the honkuchi nori’s (80 layers) in their sequencing, but the variety of types in the aiishi naroi is not as complete as those of the honkuchi naori. Each of the 5 aiishi nori strata bundles can have up to 12 or fewer separate layers that represent individual volcanic sedimentary events. The aiishi sediment bundles are; hon-tomae, tenjyo-tomae, shiki-tomae, nakashiro-suita, and honshiro-suita. The mines discovered in the northwest Tamba region tended to have slightly softer stones than those from Umegahata which is an indication of compaction, including factors such as mineral particle size. Because the Maruoyama only digs at the ridge line, it is assumed that as the mine harvest moves to the lower elevations, they will be digging into an area of harder stones.

In the chu-ishi naori mines like those at Mt. Atago, the toishi stone is found as one large mass—without those divided into separate layers as mentioned earlier. The tsuke-naori outer wall when found will often have a bulging bag shape called nori, and bulged nori can suggest a rich deposit. The miners think of this as a “bag of gold”, a lucky find that can have many paydays. Simply finding the tsuke does not indicate which part of the body of the nori they are going to dig into. They might first, without realizing it, reach and open the bag up near the top or from below the equator of the form. Acknowledged by the miners is that, if the tsuke is bulging, it will generally be more pronounced along the equator or lower half walls. Once they find and puncture the chu-ishi naori they can dig and dig into the awasedo for months until they come to the inner surface of the opposite wall of the bag. When they do, they can dig up and down and all around since there are no structural layers. It is documented that dynamite has been used with some profit in the chu-ishi naori to bring down the ceiling of good awasedo toishi.

Each mine property of whatever naori will include many test tunnels and multiple developed tunnels scattered high to low sometimes indicating the age they were dug by measuring down from the ridgeline towards the mine’s tunnel. The productive tunnels often were assigned endearing designations. The footpaths for the removal of the stone to the valley floor workshops outside the different tunnels can spread out laterally at all elevations or just simply lead up or down the mountainside as stem routes. Some were easy routes to walk and others were more strenuous and dangerous for the laborers. Local laborers moved the stone down to the valley staging areas, and some mine operations used sleds running on wooden skids for moving bundles of stone down to the valley when possible. The twentieth century provided buckets on steel cables using gravity with simple friction handbrakes for moving the awasedo stone down the mountain, and gas-powered drum wenches to retrieve the buckets. These same motors would run generators to light the mines.

By following the seam—the layer of the toishi to the very back inner wall of the naori strata, the miners will have created the beginnings of a gallery. From there on when following the awasedo they will be digging left and right and up before they dig down to advance the scope of the gallery beyond the original entrance. This hollowing out of the mine includes leaving structural natural stone pillar formations when necessary to maintain the integrity of the ceiling. As the tunnel complex progresses, and the point is reached where the awasedo is cleared out at that elevation, a second entrance will be decided upon at a higher or lower spot.

At Mt. Maruo, the Maruoyama’s first tunnel is documented to have been, and I have examined it to be so, at the highest elevation where the awasedo seam was first found protruding into the open air. Their digging scheme is based on good ole country-boy logic, they would not dig blindfolded but instead were able to measure and calculate before starting the second tunnel by just following the first seam. Their second tunnel was placed below the first so that the second tunnel would break through to just below the lowest floor of the upper gallery, thereby creating after punching through the ceiling, the beginnings of a 30 or 40-foot-tall combined gallery. The third entry in the future obviously will be dug below the second entrance, but Tsuchihashi-san and his son have not begun to do that quite yet.

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The representation of a fully mined-out awasedo complex will be one of a multi-storied empty warehouse that was designed to be built on the side of a hill where the front and rear walls will follow the slope of the mountain and the floors will can’t at an angle. Some pillars or floors will remain to provide structural integrity, but each new gallery will be below the entrance of that previous opening and each new entrance would be triangulated that much further away from the core of the mountain. The ceiling remains but they will seem to have been heightened when in reality, the floors had been lowered. The interior of the warehouse will be approximately 45 feet/15 meters from the interior door at the edge of the naori to the back wall (the thickness of the awasedo layer), and each room will be 30 feet or more in height. The width of the room will have been determined by the sedimentary content of the naroi product that was removed as it had laid upon the mountainside. The only hint of this large interior complex from the exterior slope looking at the mountain will be an entrance or two, or more of scattered mine waste tailings of shards dumped along the face of the mountain.

The extraction process will continue down toward the valley floor. Historically the exhausted mine galleries were abandoned as they sat. Few were secured with doors or even blocked in with waste stone. Nor were they shored up structurally after the toishi was removed. Instead, they were left as hollow-out caverns, susceptible to internal failure and subsidence as was sadly and embarrassingly experienced on the sides of Ondoyama mountain in the 1960s to a group of luxury (with a view) homes.

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3. Mt. Atago

6 5/8ths x 3 1/8 x 2 3/8 inches thick or 22cm x 8.3 cm x 6.3 cm thick and 6 lb 2oz or 2.8 kg.

Mt. Atago is considered a sacred site, and it is the highest peak in Kyoto prefecture, about midway between Umegahata and Kameoka. There are ancient paths to Atago from several directions because the mountaintop has a Shinto shrine, so it maintains a small pilgrimage to walk there. The Ishihara family maintains a shrine and a vermillion tori gate just behind their house, and this tori I was told is a trailhead from the north to the high peak of Atago.

The chuishi mine sites at Atago were dug from the second to the fourth quarter of the twentieth century and the time-sensitive mineral lease options were for a specific geographical location just to the north of the peak down along the flanks in the shadow of the mountain. The very top of Mt. Atago was not carved up, but during the search for awasedo, the peak did logically serve as one of the transit points for the triangulation survey below in mapping the internal lease boundaries for the Atago mines of Takitani and Daruma.

Takitani (Takidani) was the first mine in the active years of the 1940s through the 80s at Mt. Atago, where the naori layer is one giant mass whose stratification does not include separated and distinct layered sediments. The awasedo naori was buried below the peak inside of a sub-ridge that was shaped like a pillow or a loaf of bread. There were over the years several leaseholders, some digging at the same time from opposite directions towards each other. The men of course dug as quickly as possible to get into the center point where their lease ended, or maybe even cheat a little bit by digging further into naori. Of course, each group would claim a breach of contract blaming the other company for digging too far. But once any stone was removed it was too late for the opposing group to prove the amount of material lost on their side of the ridge. The diggings were so rich they complained but in the annals of hard handwork like this, the grudging parties did not lose traction for long and moved on.

The second phase of Mt. Atago was at the Daruma mine and this was in the same area but a bit farther from the peak. From the 1950s tons of awasedo were taken from the Daruma bag-shaped strata, and finally, in about 1980 the Imanishi company got bulldozers up there and carved a rotenbori open-pit mine operation. The naori sediment was so massive that Imanishi continues to this day to sell Atago awasedo from their stone shop in Kyoto fifty years later.

#30 An example of a typical awasedo stone from Mt. Atago.

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4. The Regal Sites

The Nakayama property sits apart, isolated from those other famous mines to the north due to a low dip in the ridge between it and the next northern-Okudo tract. By passing through this sway-back, walking upon it as a public path you skip along a charming ancient dirt trail that ties the valley of Umegahata to the valley of Daikaku-ji temple and the beautiful Osawa-no-ike pond. 1,500 years ago, this path was even then well used and in even more ancient times was likely a game-path. Now after a rain, while walking along it you can find and pick up shards of ancient pottery poking through the dirt. Halfway down the backside of the path as you leave the bamboo, you pass to the side of the mausoleum of Emperor Go-Usa (1267–1324) set hard against the mountain within a wooded glen above pond. It is always cool there near the pond, even in the dead heat of summer. You cannot see a direct line to the actual mausoleum because it is tucked away behind a wall, but it is thrilling to be at the gate, so close to such an ancient artifact. Across the valley from Go-Usa’s tomb is the tomb of his great ancestor Emperor Saga (785–842), who spent a great deal of his life in this valley. It was he who designed the large Osawa pond as a moon-viewing feature where there was none. A small portion of the original Daikakuji temple remains, a room from this early palace. The Daikakuji valley hosts many tombs of historic figures; so much so that every New Year’s Eve, Daikakuji is featured as one of the three most venerable sites to visit in all of Japan on this the country’s and culture’s most celebrated holiday. Is it just a coincidence that Daikakuji is so near to the Nakayama, Ondoyama, and Shobudani mines? I would like to think that it is not. But in any case, the closeness creates a sweet spot in Japan for me that I visit over and over again. It might be for you too.

#31 Mausoleum of Emperor Gouda 1267-1324

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The story of Japanese natural sharpening stones for tool use is inherently tied to the cultural history of the land, its people, its conflicts, and the evolution of the wonderful world of Japanese crafts that we know and admire which began to congeal into an organized and prosperous country around the 5th century, just as Buddhism first appeared on the islands via Korea. The Buddhist teachings had orally traveled from the area of Gandhara, which we now call Pakistan, in the written Sanskrit form, through Afghanistan, India, through China, and Korea before reaching Japan. In those same times, the crafts and techniques of smelting steel were also brought to Japan. The evolution and refinement of the Japanese sword would directly correlate with the availability and the discovery of the abrasive materials needed to sharpen, shape, and polish them. Certainly, the age of steel encouraged investment in the discovery of domestic sharpening stones. I would suppose that the earliest of the foreign blacksmiths who transferred their steel techniques would also have included the topic of abrasives. Japan earlier had its own “bronze era” culture but the difference in sharpening bronze swords is very different from that of a hardened steel blade. Did the Korean and Chinese blacksmiths bring their sharpening stones? Probably so and if they did, I am sure that the stones were inspiring.

I have not been successful in unearthing any historic records regarding Narutaki Awasedo stones earlier than the Heian Period (794–1185). The mining of stone even in the 20th century did not warrant very close study or documentation. The miners, who knew the ins and outs of the mining endeavor, were not inclined to jot down the whole story from their perspective beyond the few anecdotes that mention their successes and failures.

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5. How it ended

From a modest workforce manned by part-time farmers/miners working with hand tools, digging intermittently between local skirmishes here and there through the Kamakura warring period (1192–1337), the mining was always by small operators with crews of a dozen or so men and predominantly along the Shobudani side of Toishiyama ridge. Taking into account and including all of the past harvest of Awasedo from 1192 and into the structured centuries of the Ieyasu Tokugawa and his successors in the Edo (1603–1868) Period, the volume of product dug in those 676 years pales in comparison to the vast amount of awasedo unearthed during the combined 77 industrial & war years of the Meiji (1868–1912)–Taisho (1912–1928) to the Second World War’s end in 1945 in the Showa Period. In the early 20th century, all of the Toishiyama Awasedo mines were contributing to the various military efforts Japan had committed itself to be in, and by 1975 all of the historically important seven mines along Toishiyama were depleted and closed down.

Japan’s population in the year 1200 is estimated to have been around 6 million. In 1300 about 8–9 million. 9 million by the year 1400. In the year 1600, an estimated 16 million residents were inhabiting the soon-to-be “closed, cloistered” country of Japan. The first years of the 1700s found Japan had about 25 million residents. In 1800 the population growth had slowed somewhat and was approximately 30 million adults and children. From the early industrial & war era of 1900 when Japan’s population was a reported 44 million, just half a century later in 1950, it had nearly doubled to a population of 82 million. These facts help to explain how the demand for supplying a finite natural stone product to this island nation in the first half of the 20th century depleted all of the famous mines and why the mine entrances were closed forever by the 1970s.

In Japan, wars always included a sword or an edged weapon of some sort. If you had a sword or spear you could fight and gain some booty. Sending your son to war carrying the family’s finest fully polished-sharpened katana was a matter of pride, and by doing so they would imbue their son with the spirit of their kami-God. Parents would arm their eldest son with their most treasured, truest, and purest and therefore their most powerful weapon. And with this, they were certain he would return, and even if he did not, he would have passed on with pride. Even jet-fighter pilots tucked a shorter tachi sword by their side in the cockpit of their plane, and some planes were even designed with this “honorable” weapon in mind. From one domestic or international war to another, the stress on the stone mines was enormous. Many of the Toishiyama mines supplying the finest stone had been depleted by 1920, and by the 1950s the older famous mines had been dug out, blown out, or bulldozed dry. The greatest extraction was during the Taisho and Showa Periods (1912–1945). It was to be the wars and the war industries that stripped the mines to the bones and not for the artful use of these unique beauties which, as it turned out to be the only stones on earth capable of maintaining the historical katana residing in museums.

#32 Iron-rich but silica poor kawa on the back of awasedo

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Toishiyama Mines

Chapter IV

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IV. TOISHIYAMA MINES

#33 Close-up of rubble at Nakayama

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1. Mine Ownership

The land ownership of the awasedo mines in the Kyoto area requires a certain amount of background and some imagination to even just begin an understanding of the situation that evolved from the Muromachi to Edo, Meiji, Taishi, and Showa Periods. Japan’s laws and rules, regulations, and politics during those years shifted so many times that the only stable feature of the economy was everything rural was negotiated.

While the government offices at all levels changed or were eliminated from Shogunate to Shogunate we can only assume so did the theme of ownership of the Awasedo mines change. It would be convenient to assume that once a mine site was developed, the guy that dug would just continue to operate it, but apparently, that was not the cut-and-dry motif. The first mines began in the early Muromachi period, and the product of those mines certainly was reserved for the elite, and their military agents governed the mines on their behalf. The Shogun ran the show, they were the head of the military and they had the most to gain. The emperor from era to era was out of the picture.

In the Azuchi-Momoyama period, documentation is wanting as the intense wars prevented the niceties of the minor elite or peasants (diggers & farmers) to be recorded. I think that we can comfortably assume though, that any shift in management was military-driven and that a multitude of mine entrances in and around Narutaki was opened and in production, likely even at Nakayama.

I think it is safe to say that the management and dispersal of any valuable sharpening stone media moved through the “good old boy” system in Muromanchi and the intense battles of the Nobunaga daimyo era which bled into the early Edo period. In the first quarter of the Edo 1603 to 1650 or so, this was when the bounty of the country began to be more carefully appraised by the stable Tokugawa Shogunate. Political peace allows for back-door familiar deals. In late Edo and early Meiji, a certain kind of socialism took hold in Japan that allowed for a period where the miners and the landowners lost a sense of control over their already established operations. It appears that the land along Toishiyama ridge if a property was leased out to an independent miner, he owned the contents of the mine but not the land itself. In other words, mineral rights were leased, and because the stone product was finite and specific within a location, any further owner-operator agreements were potentially off the table once that particular mine tunnel or complex was dug out.

In the early Meiji period, I think that the simplest rule of thumb to work from is that the landowners or the managers of the properties were less likely to be diggers themselves but still they called the shots.

#34 Manganese Dendrites, not fossils

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2. Ondoyama

Narutaki-machi is a neighborhood in the northwest Ukyo ward of Kyoto and it represents the entrance to Umegahata valley. The main road passing through Narutaki village is the ancient Shuzan Kaido, now called Hwy 162 which begins in central Kyoto and ends at the Japan Seaside in the town of Obama. At the entrance to the Umegahata valley in Narutaki is what is left of a mountain named Ondoyama. Not a big mountain by any standards but it stands alone and this is where the Narutaki awasedo stone had been dug since at least as early Edo period and probably earlier. Where the rural Shobudani mine discovery was made in the narrow hidden Shobudani valley, the mining rights were a sanction of the Jingoji Temple. And it was the Honma clan that had worked and supported the Jingoji’s properties for many centuries. Ondoyama mountain on the other hand, in the Narutaki-machi village area, the lands were under the auspices of the Honami clan.

Within sight to the North-West of Kyoto are the Narutaki/Ondoyama properties. For me, this is a 2-hour walk from the Imperial Palace or a bit closer if you walk from the Nijo-jo castle of the Shogun.

The mini-mountain hillside of Ondoyama in the outskirts of Narutaki village, some of which is now populated with modern homes, has at the valley level a major hospital complex, and at the top a cemetery. A mining complex on the east side of Ondoyama in the Meiji period was dug out as the Mukaida mine, and a chief miner was Kichiemon Kimura. With a large crew from Meiji to Taisho, their main mine entrances were the original Hon (original) Mabu, the Suita Mabu, and the Mizu (water) Mabu. It is reported that they mined lots of big (oki) pieces and oki-harvests of all kinds of awasedo including pure white-shiro habutai suita, large tomae in big quantities along with some soft stone, and hard plate amber-colored toishi.

During the Showa years when the father Kichiemon retired, his son Ichiro Kimura became the leaseholder, and the mining operation was handled by Mitsuo Yamada. After WWII, Sueharu Taniguchi, and the familiar family name of Hitomi Matsuoka along with Chunosuke Yamamoto were head chief miners. In the end, reportedly a pump was used to remove mizu (spring water) from the Mizu Mabu tunnel which also

#35 The west side of the Ondoyama

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yielded a large harvest. In the early Showa with 50 to 60 workers, oxen-pulled 2 carts a day down the mountain, and once a tatami size (3 x 6ft mattress size) Narutaki Awasedo was also hauled down the hill on a cart by oxen.

After WW2 the Narutaki Mukaido was re-opened and although they reportedly had to again pump water from the mine, at times they hit large rich layers of top-grade stone. The mine at this time was operated by a consortium of experienced miners, Sueharu Taniguchi, Hitomi Matsuoka, and Chunosuke Yamamoto.

The Kizuyama mine at Narutaki was along the western face of Ondoyama overlooking Hirosawa Pond below. The names of their tunnels were; Hon Mabu (original mine mouth), Inari Mabu, and the Hentai Tobi Tsuru (abnormal flying crane) mine, a reference to that nearby Hirosawa-no-Ike pond. Kizuyama was managed in the Showa era by the mineral rights owner Tonokoya and his co-owners Yasuo Hirabayashi and Jinemon Yamamoto. In later years the miner Tarobei Namikawa first dug and then flattened the crown of Ondoyama in preparation for the Buddhist cemetery. He used open-pit rotenbori technique modern equipment which was a model for Ishihara & Hatanaka when they closed the Nakayama mine in late Showa.

Ondoyama mountain with its modern cemetery on the table-top surface, the east-south-east slope is peppered by forested homes awkwardly sitting along 2 steep streets while to the west hosts small cleared bulldozed land representing a portion of the site of the Ondoyama Kizuyama Mine. A great portion of forest remains on Ondoyama but the land is extremely steep. The Hirosawa pond below is to the southwest. When Emiko and I walked up to the top, out of respect, we introduced ourselves (with business cards printed in Japanese and English) at the cemetery office and asked if we could look around because we were interested in the awasedo mining that happened there. The head of the office said, please feel free to look around and take any stones as samples as long as we are careful. We did walk around a bit. I tromped off and down a few yards from the plateau, and I did pick up samples, but in truth, the going was so steep and slippery with the loose rock I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to rummage around any further.

The picture here #36 is a view from the cemetery on Ondoyama looking north with the Toishiyama mountain seen in the background.

According to reports the stones from Narutaki Mukaida in Ondoyama were often colorful, often large, and always very fine and they should never stain steel because of their absence of (shun-shun) saltpeter-potassium nitrates.

The larger stones that Kimura-san mined were by all standards, enormous. The photos below #37, and #38 are of the Fukuoji Temple in Utano, Kyoto at the foot of Ondoyama. This temple is the recipient of several important awasedo examples that because of their provenance and character are considered to be historic relics.

#36 View from Ondoyama cemetery looking north at Toishiyama

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The photo (below), #39 is of the famed “Hensho” Narutaki awasedo toishi shown by the priest of the temple. The boomerang-shaped stone is not the largest awasedo toishi to come out of the Naurtaki Mukaida mine, but it is one of the most cherished and it has resided at this temple for nearly one hundred years.

For over 60 of those years, it hung mounted on the center portion of the tori gate at Fukuoji shrine seen in the upper left photo before it was moved indoors to a glass case. The stone was dug in 1924 and donated to the Jinja temple by Kichiemon Kimura. The stone is endowed with poetic calligraphy by the monseki (priest) Ryruoho Takamasa (1856-1926) which reads: “Hen-sho” translates to The Light That Shines And Reaches Every Corner. This toishi is recognized to be in the shape of Honshu, the main island of Japan. It is 150cm long-50cm wide, 5cm thick, and weighs 150kg or about 330 lbs. We are seeing the stone here essentially as it left the mine site. It was not sawn or shaped and the mellow ocher-colored kawa skin is natural. This stone was never intended to be used as a sharpening stone.

#37

#38

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At this same Fukuoji Jinja Shinto shrine, in a side garden is a large piece of Jurassic radiolarian chert #40 (right) which has an endearing pet name of Gota. This relic weighs about 500 lbs and it is the same type of Jurassic accretionary radiolarian chert that is the bedrock of Kyoto and all of the islands of Japan and much of the world.

The photo below left #41 is of a wonderful shrine carved into the Jurassic chert near the valley floor just at the edge above and out of reach of the river. The final photo #42 at the right of an exotic curly radiolarian accretionary chert found right down at the lowest point in the valley at the edge of the modest Omura river which you can see peeking below.

#41

#42

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3. Visiting the Nakayama Mine at Toishiyama

The Nakayama mine is well documented in part because it was so successful. From the Meiji to Showa the mine was active and was operated by the same family. The first owner Heisuke Kato was a Nagoya city merchant who bought the property as an investment and his mine manager was Sakichi Tojima-san. Japan was in a boom period and buildings were still framed and finished in all wood, so the trades were active and using hand tools with blades sharpened with awasedo.

In the Taisho era, Heisuke’s son Heijiro Kato took over ownership, and his mine manager was Heigoro Hatanaka of the Hatanaka Toishi Company. The business during Taisho was domestic but because the country was at war from time to time the mine was active seven days a week.

In the early Showa Masumichi Kato ran the property, but again not as a miner, his manager was Hideo Yoshida who modernized the mining and also opened one of the more significant tunnels the sakura-ma-fu or cherry tree mine. This mine had rail tracks and the entrance was much nearer to the valley floor and operated from Showa 8 to Showa 20 (1933 to 1945) when Naonosuke Kimura took over as the head miner and also the seller of the stone. Naonosuke Kimura mined the stone for Masumichi Kato and Kimura’s family was allowed to sell Nakayama awasedo out of his home/shop in Kyoto near the Nijo Castle even into the late 20th century.

After the second world war, the Kita (north) mine was begun on the northern side of Nakayama Mountain overlooking the highway and Takao below. There was a steep road leading to it from near the Sakura that eventually crumbled and is now gone. The Kita mine managers were Watanabe and Kawai, and the stone from it was Iromono colorful and very marketable. It required a large production by the miners and the location was complicated by the naori sediment structure and the river below, so it was soon closed.

About Showa 40 (1965) the Mizuma-fu mine entrance, actually an inclined hole, was dug by Tetsu Imagawa and his crew. Eventually named the Mizu Mine because after significant digging was begun water (mizu) began to seep into the chamber and shaft. Kato-san and Kiyoaki Nakagawa attempted to set up a pump system but by the 1970s the mine was shuttered.

In Showa 56 1981 the Hatanaka Toishi company contracted to mine the property by bulldozers in exchange for the stone product and the rights to the name “Nakayama” for sales promotion and the ink stamps for the duration. Ishihara from the Ohira mine and Hatanaka drove bulldozers and each received payment in the form of Awasedo stone from the Nakayama property.

#43 Nakayama tenjyo suita with Karasu

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The following article was mostly written by Emiko, about our visit to the Nakayama Mine based on her contemporaneous notes and observations of this visit on an incredibly lucky day. The photo above is of a Nakayama karasu stone picked with permission by the owner of the mine.

On March 18th, 2017, we took a bus to Takao from the Kyoto station, and after taking the wrong bus by mistake, finally we arrived at our destination. While walking around the valley, I spotted a hand-written sign of homemade Kuzu-mochi for sale, then my stomach told me to follow the sign. When we finally found the lady standing by the small table by the busy street, she sold us two pieces of omochi steamed rice cakes for 200 yen – well worth the homemade mochi wrapped in a leaf of a wild kuzu plant. It is a traditional custom this time of the year to have omochi raped with kuzu leaves, the first leaves of the spring after the snow. My mother never brought me to pick those leaves in my childhood, but I remember that I helped my older girlfriend’s mother to pick leaves and made omochi together. For me, it is a very special treat to remind me of the past in Japan.

As Alex and I stood there eating, I asked her about the toishi business around the area. She said that she is married to a family who owned and operated the Okudo mine in the old days. The mine was now closed. When we asked her about the Nakayama mine that we were looking for, then she offered to take us and introduce us to one of Mr. Kato’s relatives, Fujiwara-san. Just about that time, across the busy street, another older lady appeared in our sight. She was her neighbor. The two friends were talking back and forth about her omochi business of the day. We crossed the street and the omochi conversation continued between them until the toishi mine subject got sorted out from their topics, they huddled and suggested that Alex and I should follow her friend to meet Fujiwara-san. We three walked up the street to the home of the daughter of the Kato family, Fujiwara-san. Our new friend pushed the doorbell but no answer, then she quickly suggested that we should go to another relative of the Kato family nearby.

Down the street, we arrived at Kato-san’s house of Fujiwara-san’s brother Akira-san. She pushed the doorbell, and after a quiet minute or so with no answer, then a woman’s voice through the intercom was heard. Our new friend answered back to the intercom, “I am your neighbor, and brought somebody here. They want to know about toishi-yama”. There was a moment of hesitation and silence at the other end, and then she said, “Wakarimashita”, which means “I understand”.

We waited for a few a minutes and chatted with our kind guide in front of the closed gate. Before too long a man in his senior years and the average height wearing his casual clothes came out of the house and showed up at the gate. From across the gate still closed between us, I started to explain the purpose of our visit here. I told him, “I understand that there used to be a toishi-yama in this neighborhood, and we would like to know about its history”. I handed him Alex’s name card for the introduction which is a must etiquette of Japanese business routine. (hint, carry introduction cards in Japan) He looked at it – there was a little bit of confusion and mild guarded look on his face which is probably common showing to the total stranger off the street. But, that look did not last too long, and he was getting interested in us. He spoke in English to Alex. He gave us his business card. It has his name and contact information. His name is Mr. Akira Kato. He told us that he retired years ago from his career at a chemical company in Tokyo. He said “Now!”, with a smile, “I will show you the old mine up there”, and he went back into his house. When he came back again outside, he already changed his clothes and shoes and he began to lead us on that very journey that Alex and I had waited desperately for years.

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Right away, Kato-san took us to a big commercial-looking building only a few dozen meters from his house. He said that his sister’s family built this factory after his father Masumichi Kato closed his mine many years ago. We walked into a large busy workshop and then out to the back door. This factory building stood right up tight against the hillside behind. As we walked outside to the left through the gate, then after we walked passing over a lot of rubbles and scrap wood (almost like a junkyard), he showed us a ruined and fallen shed. He pointed his finger over there (the shed) and said, “That used to be a workshop where they processed raw sharpening stones, chiseling them with a hand tool called a ‘fuigo’.” There was nothing left to see, except the roof of the original shed. Next, he said that there was a mine entrance right behind the shed that was closed and sealed not too long ago.

This mine was called Izumi-kou (Spring mine-entrance) because after digging deep they hit a freshwater spring that flooded the mine hole. Kato-san said that they tried to pump up water from the mine hole, but it was impossible, so the mine hole was permanently sealed-closed for safety. The family now sells the water to a business nearby for their irrigation system. This was the last mine tunnel that his father had dug.

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It was hard not to notice how agile Kato-san is as we moved up the steep mountainside. In his 70s, he said that he climbs up here pretty much every day for exercise. Soon we came upon another shed that was built for the workers to take a break, eat, smoke, and rest. This shed sits directly in front of the earlier mine tunnel Sakura-kou, a cherry tree entrance.

This shed still contains some factory items inside and also there were sets of metal wheels for the carts in the back where we could see the mine entrance which had been neatly sealed with the tightly stacked stone wall. Kato-san said that his father always had 4 to 5 workers inside this mine, and the same numbers of the workers were outside trimming and moving the stones around. He was there every day, but he was not a mine digger himself. In a way, he wants to emphasize that his father had never been a laborer at the mine site. Kato Akira-san also mentioned that his manager Yoshida Hideo had commercial mining experience, and it was Yoshida-san who chose where to dig the next holes on the hillsides here. Yoshida-san was the Nakayama mine’s ishiguchi kashira (chief miner). The photo below shows the helmet which has the writing of “Sho-honyama Toishi Saikutsujo” (Mining operating factory of Sho-honyama Toishi) with the Maruka trademark his father used.

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The 3 photos #51, #52, and #53 are of kawa samples picked at the Nakayama mine site, and below of an earlier now depleted Edo period mining area at the Nakayama where they dug down following the seam.

And the photos below show the leading to a close-up of the Nakayama kawa at the cliff face after it was laid bare using heavy equipment in 1981 by Hatanaka Company.

#53 Nakayama classic kawa on ocher ground.

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#56, #57

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Above are examples of Nakayama kawa skin with the colors of burnt umber, ocher, and crystalized crackled black iron on the mountain wall left mostly bare after Hatanaka and Ishihara were finished with the bulldozers.

After this conversation, the indefatigable Kato-san invited us to walk further around the mountainside, and within a short distance, he pointed out an unusual natural chert rock formation jutting straight up and out of the ground. He called these rocks their Toishiyama Kami-sama (mountain god), and how this formation was worshiped like a shrine, and once a year the miners would celebrate to pray for safety and prosperity on the mountain. This moment was very emotional for Alex, and as Kato-san and I walked away from it, Alex remained alone behind us for a little bit.

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#60 Nakayama Toishi Kami-sama

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From this point, we walked up on the loose and slippery rubble-strewn path to a machine-formed prominent ledge overlooking Umegahata valley, and Kato-san showed us an open pit where he allows a small company to dig once a year in the top layers of akapin. He did not know what the fellows used the stone for, but he has been allowing them this access for quite a few seasons. Akira-san also told us that there were two other mine entrance locations that his father had dug, one he called Narutaki, and the other he referred to as Kita or North tunnel. The Kita mine he said was located on the northern side of Nakayama Mountain and that there was a steep road that crumbled and that it is now gone. The Kita mine managers were Watanabe and Kawai and they hit a rich vein of iromono colorful stones which were a big hit for the wholesalers who came up and bought toishi.

While at this higher elevation, we took a short break and he began to explain that his family was originally from Nagoya and that their family name can be traced back 15 generations into the Edo Period. Although his family-owned and operated the mining at Nakayama since the Meiji period, his grandfather Kato Heisuke at the same time operated another family business in the Kawamachi district in Kyoto which he implied was not necessarily a toishi business. His grandfather lost that business in the city during the 1930s economic depression and this is when the family began to exclusively operate the mining business full-time in Takao.

Kato Akira-san began to speak in some detail about his father Kato Masumichi-san, and how, as the head member of the Kyoto Toishi Miners Association, took that position like a CEO would operate. His father was the owner of the Nakayama Mine, but he managed it as a business executive, not as a digger himself. He hired a crew to manage the mine in the same way that his father Kato Heisuke had done in Meiji and Taisho.

During Showa he said, his father began to sell the stone stock to a limited group of men who were miners and wholesale consolidators, they were invited once a month to come up to buy stones. Hatanaka-san and the owners of Bouoku company, Kuramoto, and Imanishi companies (and I understand that there were other invitees) would come up to buy stones. Just that small group and each was offered a pile on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. During late Showa, he said that his father decided to privately contract out all of the mine operations and business to Hatanaka Toishi Co. This included the mining rights, licenses, copyrights, company logos, ink stamps, equipment, workstations, and all the digging locations. This happened after Akira-san himself had already moved out of the valley to further his education and eventually work in Tokyo. With his own professional life, he never really did participate in the mine operations after that.

A modest man, Kato Akira-san asked us to please visit his home at a later date to meet his wife, which we did. We drank whiskey and chatted about life in Tokyo, but mostly about golf. When we did ask about

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the future of stone mining, he did not offer any information other than to say that the homeowners’ associations around the valley were working together to encourage legal actions to make mining impossible to resume. I do not have the impression that he was interested in the mine or the mountain in one way or the other and was just set on enjoying his retirement. When leaving we promised each other to keep in touch.

#63. Three mine entrances were dug at a reclined angle in the Taisho to late Meiji.

More photos of visiting the Nakayama mine site.

#64 Work Shack

#65 Doing a bit of clean-up

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#66 Kato-san and Kamisama at Sakura mine

#67 Inside Sakura mine shack

#68 & #69 Exterior of the same shack

#70 & #71 Large discarded pieces of volcanic gokudo waste.

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#72 & #73 More gokudo that is not suitable for sharpening stones

#74 & #75 above, Odd pieces of weathered Nakayama toishi are scattered around the private property.

#76 & #77 Odd weathered awasedo that is weathered and soft.

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More photos below of rubble and bits and pieces at Nakayama.

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4. Okudo Mine

The Okudo site became private property in the middle Meiji period as the government took few years to sort out how the stone mines in the area would best suit a modern scheme of operation. The mine was successfully operated by Yamamoto Chubei from the Taisho into the early Showa period, and their mine produced su-nashi suita, white suita stones without ‘su’ micro holes. After World War II, mining was succeeded by Watanabe Genzaburo and later by Watanabe Genjuro.

Okudo sits right in the central portion of Toishiyama’s eastern face between the Nakayama and Oozuku mines and the property extends from the ridgeline down to within sight of the Takao Elementary School which is a three-minute walk off the highway. The mine’s commercial access has always been from the Shuzan Kaido road in the village. At the ridgeline where the property is at its highest elevation of 280 meters, the Shobudani Hiking Trail runs along its western boundary. The whole property now is pretty much dedicated to tree farm of cedar trees.

The very early days were not well documented, but the property did open in Meiji with the Hon Mabu original mine entrance in the NE section of the property’s ridge exposure. Toishiyama has a pointed peak and that is where the Hon Mabu was. What is left of this highest mine site are just remnant shards scattered in an area that was carved out with bulldozers in the 1970s. To the south of the peak is the Nishi Mabu or western mouth as seen in the photo left #88. This is a more rugged narrow section of the ridge edge and very steep with 70% incline leading down to Shobudani pond. Right as you approach the extraction site you come across this large jutting cliff of softer pink and light-colored Akapin strata of Narutaki Awasedo. This cliff is a very dangerous situation and the overhanging stone you see in the photo is weak. I took this photo by running under and snapping the shutter and then running out. The cliff is about 20 meters high and under this section are scattered shards of awasedo in different states of decay.

#87 Weathered Suita at Okudo

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The area at the cliff will certainly have changed from this photo #89 (left), every time I go up there the rock on the ground looks different as pieces of stone fall regularly. My YouTube account has a couple of videos I made up there around 2015 and from watching these I can distinguish how the area has been shaken up and changed.

The remainders of the open-air mining here are the dangerously pockmarked fields of tunnels. All of the mine tunnels at this elevation recline downwardly, do not enter them. If you do enter, you will immediately feel the surfaces become slippery from moss and slime, and you have to assume that all of the tunnels are filled with water. The risk of drowning is high. They are extremely tempting but can end as a watery grave for adventurers. Going in and down can be easy, but climbing out is always more difficult.

In the Taisho and early Showa periods, the owner Chubei Yamamoto hit the jackpot with rare Oo-suita (big-suita) blocks and ata-suita (thick) pieces of desirable su-nashi which is suita without gas voids. The massive stock of suita established the reputation of the Okudo mine as a supplier of large and excellent quality stones. There is no need to expect that you can go up there and bring home a free and wonderful piece of suita, all that was taken decades ago by the frugal miners.

At the Okudo’s base of Toishiyama in the valley at Takao village, you will find the bold environmental evidence of heavy machinery open pit rotenbori mining using bulldozers. This is where the Okudo Mizu Mabu (water mouth) mine site from the 1950s flooding event that affected the Takao elementary school below with spring water happened. The miner Mr. Chunosuke Yamamoto was forced to make repairs to the school’s foundation at his own expense when the ground began to subside. This lower portion of the hillside above the school is now a farm for growing cedar trees amidst the rubble and remnants of decomposed and weather-beaten rock that crumbles in your hand.

This huge slab in the left photo #90 above (notice the round copper 10 yen with the blue arrow pointing for perspective at the upper left-center) is an example of a once-solid slab that absorbed the forces of machinery and fifty summers of rain whose moisture has frozen and split the rock with each succeeding winter in photo #91.

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#90 & #91

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5. Oozuku Mine

Of all of the mine’s sites along Toishiyama, the Oozuku has the most interesting geology. It was the sleeping giant in terms of output from the five major mine properties along the ridge. The mine was operated by Kato Kojiro and the stones were sold by Kato Jutaro (neither of whom is related to Kato of Nakayama).

In the early Meiji period, this Oozuku Kato family owned a toishi-ya (sharpening stone store) in Osaka and was very successful, so much so that the family was in a good position to buy one of these historic properties. It was Mr. Kojiro Kato who developed the property and operated the mine through Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa, and after World War II, Mr. Harunaga Kato continued into the late Showa. The mine was known to have 20 workers during the early Showa period and was in operation up to the early 1980s although Mr. Kato continued as one of the charter members of the Kyoto Miners Association into the 1990s. He was the main contributor to the publication of The Charm of Tennen Toishi. His family retains the site to this day as private property.

The ridge at Oozuku reaches 980 feet above sea level and it runs generally north to south. The mines boundary markers are single metal wires strung from the floor to the ridge with a few old cloth rags tied here and there on wire to guide the bulldozers as they ran up and down from the highway to the ridge until the 1980s, about the same time that many of the other mines were left scraping the bare ground. Mr. Kato Harunaga at this time ordered the use of bulldozers to open a continuous rotenbori open mine swath in a very steep ravine leading from the ridge down to the valley floor to extract awasedo. This was to be their Ura Mabu (backside mouth) and it was famous for its iromono colorful tomae stone and hard asagi toishi. Their rotenbori was a successful formula for harvesting awasedo, and it did have the added feature of obscuring and filling in a great portion of their earlier and temptingly dangerous tunnel openings.

The Oozuku mine property is unique in that its land had two lateral ravines running parallel to each other from the ridge down to the valley floor, creating a tongue that nearly reaches the highway below. This tongue between these two gullies is somewhat geologically unique in Umegahata because it was found to be laden with awasedo that could be accessed by digging laterally, across the face of the mountain between the south and the north. One of the tunnels, as reported by Harunaga Kato, is 1300 feet long with front and back entrances of what he called the Dai Mabu. From the interior of the mine, they could expand and follow the awasedo naori layer up or down the mountain face. This tunnel is the source of Oozuku’s harvest of razor-grade hard gray asagi along with karasu, iromono tomae, and many forms of suita. Imanishi Company was and still is one of their retailers and a great deal of the ink-stamped stones in the marketplace today are from the Dai Mabu.

#92 Hand-powered saw marks on the side of a suita

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6. Ozaki Mine

The Ozaki mine is the youngest and northernmost awasedo mine along the ridge of Toishiyama. In the Showa Period, as an open-pit mine, Masumichi Kato, the leaseholder was able to drive in scrapers and trucks right off highway 162. The mine was easy to manage from the beginning, and because all of the awasedo stone was near the surface and so no tunneling was necessary. Shoto Ueno was the manager of the mine which was only open for a few decades. The majority of the stone was sold to the Hatanaka toishi company, some went to the Booku company in Kyoto. Their major product was suita and tomae, and some of the suita harvested was in large pieces but not thick pieces that were called “Yachi no ishi” or stone of Yachi. The stone was hard and very good for nomi and kanna. The whole area where the Ozaki mine was, has been repurposed as a cemetery, and several commercial establishments and tree farms now take up the whole of the mini valley.

#93 Kezurokai contestant honing while squatting on the floor.

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7. Visit the Ohira Mine

Climbing

In 2009 Emiko and I were invited to walk from the base of the Ohira Mountain up to the most recent mine entrance with the owner, the late Mr. Yogoro Ishihara of Saga Shikimigahara. This article is about that visit and his family.

The Ohira mine is spoken of in The Charm of Tennen Toishi to have begun mining earlier than 1815 in the Edo Period. Their mine is famous for its uchigumori for sword polishing and all types of suita, especially the suita with red-flower patterns called renge. After the Meiji restoration, they began mining all types of awasedo stones. The Ishihara family line of mine operators on record began with Ishihara Yohei, his son Ishihara Yonosuke followed, and unfortunately, Ishihara Yogoro was the last. When the mine operation was at its peak, there were 40–50 workers.

As I said, several years ago Emiko and I had a chance to visit the Ohira mine at the invitation of its owner Ishihara Yohei of Shikimigahara, Saga, Ukyo-ku, region of Kyoto. He was, until his passing, the last male Ishihara family member to operate the mine. In speaking with him he remembered his grandfather working at both ends of the process, at the mine and down in the valley at the workshop, and how busy they were with many employees. The Ohira mine site with all of its entrances is documented to the early Meiji, and likely into the late Edo era, with four generations of the same family. The Ohira is about 3.2km/2 mile to the west from the peak of Mt. Atago and maybe 15 km / 9.5 mi. from the Imperial Palace in Kyoto as the crow flies.

The mine has supplied tomae and suita awasedo for use with nomi, kanna, kamisori, and especially for touken-sword polishing, the ‘ji-togi’ sequence for polishing the base jigane metal of the blade. After Meiji, they dug high-grade iromono bright colored awasedo and asagi of the finest character that could be used for tools and continued as well with certain grades for swords and weapons. Their mine is also famous for #95 Ohira renge, its intense renge pattern suita as seen above as bright plump red renge iron-rich floral spots.

#94 Leaves of uchigumori

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The mine property and the mountains around it are owned by the local Jinja Shinto shrine while Ishihara holds a lease for the rights to the mine for an annual fee which he told me was a modest outdated sum congruent to his father’s era. The Ishihara clan also makes donations, and they also help to maintain the Jinja Shinto shrine associated with Mt. Atago. One of the few trails to climb Mt. Atago begins almost in their backyard.

According to Ishihara, in the busiest years, they had 5 to 6 teams of workers rotating inside the ishiguchi (mine mouth) with 3 or 4 men making up a team. At the height of production, the Ohira dynamite shack employed 5 or 6 two-man teams of hibiki-saw workers using tsurunoko (two-man bow saws) who cut to shape the stone at a station just outside the mine entrance. Including the workshop below in the valley, they employed a local force of up to 40 to 50 workers. Most if not all of these workers were local men and women, parents and grandparents. The valley workshop is modernized and located adjacent to the Ishihara family’s 250-year-old house which can be seen from the mountain mine site. He told us that all of the miners were local and each maintained a crop of rice from year to year. Part-time farmers/part-time miners.

Having known Ishihara-san for a few years, he graciously offered to show us the mine. Picking us up at the Kameoka train station we drove into the hills towards Mt. Atago along roads that eventually became one-lane dirt tracks ending in a deep valley. He asked us as we got out of the car, to promise not to tell anyone where his mine is located to circumvent trespassers. He had some problems before.

The three of us entered a waist-high trail-less wall of brush (camouflage) and began to climb a steep path up through a lovely hardwood forest of large old wild native chestnut trees. He showed us along the way how to grind the spikey outer shells off the nuts as they lay on the ground under the sole of our shoes. The smooth shiny chestnuts now minus the spikes, we picked up a couple of dozen off the ground which later that day Mrs. Ishihara roasted for us to eat. Simple roasting releases their meaty punch of toasted goodness.

Out of the heavy woods, we began the steeper climb. Ishihara-san pointed out to us this shallow tunnel seen below and explained how exploratory diggings like this one are the main method of searching and tracking the awasedo layers from the top mountain down. He said they have dug many others at all elevations to figure out where they would re-discover the layer of sedimentation presenting the exterior wall of the awasedo naori sediments. Ohira Mine photos left #96.

Dynamite shack.

Bucket on cable for running rough stone down the mountain to the road about 300 meters below.

Current owner of the Ohira mine Ishihara-san, 5th generation of the same family to own and operate the mine.

Half way up Ohira mountain, a narrow unmarked path to discourage trespassers.

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We had a chance to rest here and chat with Ishihara. He said that neither he nor his father had received any training or schooling in the mining trade. The same holds for their employees, and he claimed that whatever they knew about mining came from his grandfather. Ishihara, assuredly a capable man, modestly summed it up when he said that, “all he knew was that everything about mining was hard and tiring and that he did not have very much time to relax”.

After more climbing and finally striking flat ground an opening in the trees, a pile of mine tailings, the telephone booth size dynamite shack, and a shelter break/tool room all on a relatively flat 40 to 60 feet wide staging area announced our arrival. The gear needed to run the mine culminated with the bucket and cable system directly anchored—Test tunnel above into the mountain itself. I had only seen photos of these winches, and in person, they appeared more modest than I expected. The bucket system required a lever-action friction break at the top to control the bucket speed down the mountainside, and a gas motor in the shed on a pulley for the retrieval of the empty split 55-gallon drum. And that was it. Up until the 1930s the Ohira mine, as all others depended upon human power to move the stone down to the valley floor on the backs of villagers wearing ladder-type backpacks holding the pre-shaped stones in baskets. Men, women, children, and the residents of the valley all benefited from this cash coinage enterprise coordinated to be in the off-seasons of rice planting and harvest. Cash had always been rare in rural areas leading up to the 20th century.

Realizing that forty years of pick-work and hauling out the ceremoniously extracted awasedo stone and tailings created the ledge we were standing on, it was impressive. Portions of each cart full from the mine’s interior contributed to this ledge and brought home to me hints of the work that had gone on before us. The dynamite shed with a couple of wedged props holding the door closed noted the remoteness of the site and the general honesty and lack of mischief in these mountain villages.

Ishihara-san said that there had been a few people who have come up here uninvited, but he was not too concerned and that he was more troubled that someone might get hurt. After hearing this I suspected that the dynamite shed was empty. We did not go into the mine because, he said, his day worker had not delivered the fuel for the generator to turn on the electric lights. He has just one worker now and this younger fellow spends most of his time in the village at the Ishihara workshop. He asked if we wanted to climb further up the mountain to view the earlier mine entrances, but we

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politely declined. The owner here was obviously in better physical condition than we were. The scene here was so pleasant. It was sunny that day and he pointed out his village in the distance with Atago beyond Photo #99 (far left) and how easily uchigumori is here right off the ground #100 (left). Truthfully, I was contented to shuffle around the outside of the mine entrance, kicking and picking through the litter. Ishihara-san pointed out to me some gray uchigumori scraps on the ground and showed me how to carefully knap the layers using his penknife. To me, every little scrap looked so useable, but evidently, his discerning eye had taught him otherwise. There is waste in making these pieces thin, so you need to start with a pure piece of uchigumori toishi. The next step after separation is to sand each piece by hand until they are paper-thin like those in the last photo here. Finally, a layer of mulberry paper is applied to the back of the stone and pasted using true authentic urushi. Throughout this process, there is waste and broken pieces.

In the 1980s the Japanese Government Office of Cultural Antiquities approached Ishihara for an inventory status report on the Ohira mine’s potential ability to supply the museums of Japan in the future with uchigumori polishing stock from the Honkuchi naori strata of his mine. Uchigumori is one of but a small handful of polishing media imperative to create, maintain and replicate the exact specific polish of the ancient katana and other bladed weapons of historic Japan. There is no substitute for uchigumori. The Government is keen to ascertain how much of this stone remains in the ground because this stone is, and they feel always will be, an integral component to completing the historically correct restoration and maintenance of samurai swords. Because there is no substitute for the natural uchigumori stone, the essence of the katana will at some point be in jeopardy. Steel ages as does everything through oxidation. Even in hermetically sealed environments, the national treasures are at risk.

During our hike to the mine, it was so comfortable, but he did mention the snow in the winter, the 80% humidity in the summer, the bears and snakes, cave-ins, crushed fingers plus everything that needs to be hauled up and down the mountain side. All of this he has dealt with since a teenager. In his grandfather’s time, there were more employees to match the demands of the growing economy.

Photo #99 (far left), #100 (left).

The final product #101 above by professional togi sword sharpeners polishing (not sharpening) the surface of the sword to create a certain watery look to the jigane wrought iron.

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Their house is in a quaint village that has changed little in two hundred years, where men and women use their hand tools in the same way their ancestors did. Adjacent to the Ishihara home, right outside the door is his rice field, an often-photographed setting that is on the roster as a Designated Natural Treasure. He and everyone in the village grow rice. Life should be so simple.

#102 Group of 4 photos of Ishihara property in winter (2010).

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Note

The Ishihara-san family is a member of the Kyoto Miners Union, and at the time he was the oldest active member still working at a mine. I have sorted through thousands of stones in his shop and I am lucky to have had a few from his grandfather’s era. Blessed with five daughters though no sons, the family will continue to help maintain the Mt. Atago shrine and tori at their own expense. They lease the mineral rights from the Shinto temple, all pretty much on a handshake agreement. Only time will tell regarding the mine. Directly behind the Ishihara home, there is this vermillion urushi lacquered Tori #104 of the local temple, the post #105 reads Mt. Atago 4km with an arrow.

Not all roads lead to Atago, a shame. Lucky for me that this one did.

These same chestnut trees which were upright and healthy when we visited, are now the mangled guards of the mine, uprooted they lay on the mountainside blocking all access to the above complex. The typhoons of 2016 hit central Honshu especially hard and there was something about the alignment of the canyons leading to the Ohira mine site that concentrated the winds to whip through and essentially knock down a great portion of the forest on that side of the valley. The mine is now closed as the owners have determined that the cost to rebuild the site would outweigh the income derived from the harvested stone product.

After speaking with Mrs. Ishihara recently, I was left with the impression that the family is resigned or at least comfortable with the status of the mine site being closed. Her late husband emoted a Gentle Giant persona and I have yet to, nor do I ever expect to meet another happy productive couple quite like them.

#103

#104

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8. Hatanaka-Ohira Suita

The Hatanaka Toishi Company in Kyoto was the leading consolidator and wholesale company in the 20th century until the death of its owner Mr. Teruhiko Hatanaka in 2011. Their massive turnover from their retail outlet in the center of Kyoto of the finest grade stones allowed Hatanaka to be one of the select few main buyers from the Nakayama mine. He kept close ties with all of the mine owners, and this would lead to his eventual lease of the mineral rights for the Nakayama mine in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, Hatanaka and Ishihara of the Ohira mine were hired to use bulldozers to scrape the Nakayama site clean of the last vestiges of good stone. Ishihara of the Ohira, Hatanaka, and Kato each ended up with piles of Nakayama stone resulting from Open Pit Mining.

This classic Ohira shiro suita stone #105 (left) contains all the elements that make the Ohira mine famous for its shiro (white) red-renge suita toishi. This Mohs Lv 4.5 hard pure white body is loaded with veins, clumps, renge in red and purple, and fields of golden yake that run from the front to the back of the stone. There are also areas of brown buff yake that are not toxic to steel on the lower portion of the stone.

#105 (top), #106 (far left), #107 (left)

The above are photos #108, #109 of Hatanaka-san and his shop (2009).

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9. The Active Maruoyama Mine

At the isolated Maruoyama mine out beyond Kameoka near Yagi, the stratum of awasedo is called the aiishi naori, translated as the “meeting of the naori” which specifically refers to the meeting of the Yagi aoto terrene with the previously unknown Yagi awasedo mineral terrene. The Tsuchihashi family were originally aoto miners on an adjacent property where they had discovered in the late 20th century the edge of an awasedo stratum that abutted their actively working aoto mine strata. So, they arranged to lease the mineral rights on this newly found awasedo property. The aiishi awasedo naori has similar structural elements to the honkuchi naori layering, but the sequencing of the aiishi layers is shuffled and there are fewer layers. Because the mine is so young, the exact layering is still being discovered.

The Tsuchihashi family patriarch, two generations ago, began digging with a pick and shovel following the fault of the protruding awasedo naroi just below the windblown rain-exposed ridge.

This northern-facing discovery (Hon Mabu)-original entrance is rough and dramatic and it represents the awasedo naroi seam at the top of the mountain just as it plunges and slides between the more recent breccia and the ancient radiolarian chert core of the mountain. When entering this rugged path from the north you are sliding down on the bedrock of ancient chert under a massive exterior block of the awasedo naroi sediment layer. This slide down into their mine is a slip-and-slide affair along an irregular un-improved and little-used dark path. They do not use this path for their industry, but now only as a display. The hollow is so narrow that while squatting and sliding I would have touched the ceiling in places with my head if I had not bowed down. By following this down you will eventually enter the current and very extensive gallery which was tunneled and carved from the opposite, south side, of the mountain.

The southern exterior of the mountain has two chiseled front entrances into the large Maruoyama awasedo mine gallery, one that was begun in the 20th century and the other in the 21st century. The first opening from an earlier generation is now found to be 30 feet above and 20 feet to the right (east) of the more recent mine entrance below. The upper entrance is no longer used because of the drop in elevation to the gallery below. Each of these two entrances leads into that same large hollowed-out great hall and this is how the digging will proceed until the floor is dug out too deep to conveniently remove the contents by having to walk-up a steeper ramp. This is the same procedure of mountain tunneling at the ridge top when

#110, #111 Inside pictures of Maruoyama Mine

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surveyed at Okudo, Ozaki, and Nakayama. These now all present a collapsed crater at the ridge line after the bulldozers were called in to rob the upper peak area diggings of any last vestige of useable stone.

The Maruoyama being a newer mine is dug at the highest elevation possessing a slope angle approaching 80 degrees, this allows for the possibility that the naori also appears on the opposing northern side of the mountain, and it does jut out and this is where their first entrance was dug. Tsuchihashi-san has left the ridge as natural, they only have mined the meaty southern side however which at the same time preserves the structural integrity of the complex. The older mining sites along the ridgeline of Toishiyama like Okudo still display tunnels below the ridge on both the backside facing Shobudani lake and the front-facing Takao village but these never pass through the mountain. The Oozuku at the ridge may also have had entrances from both sides up at the ridge but bulldozers have scraped the area down to bedrock, so it is hard to tell what was going on up there years ago.

#112. This building above is a private shrine on the Tsuchihashi property.

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#113, #114

#115, #116

#117

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10. The operation of the toishi mine

At the dawn of the modern Meiji era, all mining rights were politically connected as the modern conceptual framework of free and clear private property was not fully developed. The men who worked inside the mines were a mix of experienced miners, farmers, and apprentices. Outside of the mine, those shaping and moving the stone were craftsmen and day laborers. In the awasedo mines of Toishiyama, the residents of the valley made up the majority of labor both inside and outside the mine tunnels. Because of the multigenerational proffer nature of the Umegahata mines in their backyard, a labor force was already in place. Men and women worked at various stages, and children were raised to accept participation as a community standard. I was told by a grandmother that for all those hundreds of years leading up to the 1950s, over half of the valley residents worked in those five major mines along the ridge in one capacity or another when they were not in farming or harvest season. The payment from the mine owners would have been in cash/yen, and for a family of workers in a rural setting, this was a real opportunity in a community of farmers who not too many years ago had paid their taxes in rice and bartered with other farmers for other products.

The men working under the Oyakata, who could be either a property owner or the holder of a lease/lease owner has hired his So-uketorinin/head manager consulted with the Banto/operating manager in overseeing the ishiguchi/stone mine mouth entrance. The Fushinkata/construction workers did the main interior digging and shoring of the wooden framing, and laying trolly rails, all working as best they could with carbide or whale oil lamps in the pre-industrial eras. The inside of the mine was managed by a Kashira/head chief conducting the Arabito/rough laborers in moving the stone products including waste in baskets or by pushing trolly carts in and out of the mine.

Teams of Zuri-kaki/scrapers chipped the waste gokudo iron-rich chert-based interlayers off the raw toishi leaving a partially shaped unfinished stone for the kara/two-man team who used these push-pulling odd-shaped bow saws called tsuru-noko at left. The cutting teeth chip the stone instead of cutting smoothly. The Tsuru-noko left #119 is for smoothing the sides of the cut stone, and the noko (saw) below has a thinner blade and it actually cuts and shapes/sizes the toishi. The rough grinding-like teeth are on the post ends, and the two handles would have had cork grips like on the upper left.

#118 An example of namazu in filling fissures in awasedo with water-borne intrusive minerals.

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The fushinkata were kept busy in the mine’s interior gallery, expanding its width and depth, and height. After the ceiling was established the mine’s interior was increased by digging the floor down, and the sides and back wall out. Because the naori laid upon the mountain contour as a sheet, the digging progressed by passing thru and cleaning out each successive (generally vertical) layer beginning at the akapin, next to the tenjyou followed by hachimai, senmai, tomae, aisa, namito, hon suita, and shiro suita until they hit the back of the interior wall. With each layer, latterly deeper into the mountain, each new gallery they dug was lower down the slope towards the valley.

All of the Toishiyama mines along the ridge, including the Shobudani side, have the same Narutaki Honkuchi Awasedo naori. Although each mine will have had its version of thicker or thinner, broader or deeper, or missing layers of one strata layer or another, it is the layering scheme that defines the honkuchi naori. At alternate elevations along the face of the mountain, different entrances would be opened that led into the same general stock of stone. These subsequent entrances were dug as stages of attrition. Any new entrances allowed for ventilation and eased the evacuation of the stone. The interior of the sides of the mountain was essentially hollowed out as the miners did their duty to extract every last bit they could safely manage and in doing so left behind what has turned out to be, as evidenced in and around the Narutaki neighborhood below the cemetery, a very unstable mountainside.

In any mountain-side setting, with slope angles in the 50 degrees range and steeper, having two or more entrances into a gallery, whether staggered or not along the face of the mountain is expensive to manage because of the extensive thickness of the soil and overburden. Shoring up breccia is difficult, and shoring soil and clay is more so, and expensive. The mid to high-elevation entrances are more cost-effective in those regards if extensive tunneling is needed, at the lowest elevations near the valley floor and the Omuro River, there still is to this day awasedo that could be removed, but any digging below the water table is a technical challenge to overcome. Many have tried, but all have failed in the Umegahata area at these lowest properties within 200 feet above the valley floor.

The Toishiyama ridge’s geology is that of an anticline nappe; a thrust-formed ridge fault of folded oceanic Jurassic radiolarian chert basement. The more recently Neogene-Quaternary accumulated sediment of these nappes is represented at the mines of Mukaida at Narutaki, Nakayama, Kizuyama, Takayama, Okudo, Oozuku, Shobu, Ozaki, Shinden, Choshirou, Gosenryo, Shiroto, Tendo, Tsukinowa, Sannodan, Osugi, Ikinochi, Ashitaniyama, Oochi, Yuge Hattyo, Oono, Ohira, Yagi, Maruoyama, Kouzaki, Miyakawa, Inokura, Chira at Kishimigahara, Ohira at Shikimigahara, Hakka, Okunomon, Aiwadani, Takashima; and likely more others.

#120 picture left top shows nata (a hatchet). Below that is a hatsuri, a chipping hammer for nicking smooth the back of stones surface coupled with a maul for crush-reduction of any waste.

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At Mt. Atago, a chuishi naori mine, the naori sediment appears not so much as individual layers but instead, more like a conglomerate, described by some as a mass of stone in the shape of a bag, hence the name Daruma as in “like a bag”. There, at Atago, ceiling expansion was sometimes practiced but it required scaffolding. In some later mining, dynamite was known to be used to pull down the ceilings at the Mt. Atago mines so they could gather the stone after it hit the floor. The naroi of Mt. Atago, being a bag-shaped naori has all of the 40 to 80 types of awasedo layers intertwined in a somewhat homogeneous form but minus the intertwined gokudo division layers. Consequently, the grain of the Chuishi naori at the microscopic level from Atago is not as regular and directional as the Honyama Awasedo stones.

From whichever mine they were working at, it was the arabito mineworkers who were in charge of pulling the disengaged stone from the mine interior to the rough rock processing station outside the mine entrance. All waste was left at the mine site, simply dumped over the edge creating an ever-growing manmade ledge below the exterior mine entrance that only enlarged with each bucket or cart of waste. The work of the arabito was important for the owner as they kept the flow going from the interior to the exterior to the stone cutter/shapers station outside. When a new tunnel entrance is dug the first several or tens of meters are a waste product to be dumped until the awasedo was reached. First the topsoil then poorly sorted breccia sediment. All of this was moved with shovels, rakes, baskets, and buckets. Deeper into the mountain and once inside the naori carts were used to move intact slabs of awasedo to the outside where the saw and chisel crews shaped odd slabs into rectangular products.

In the earlier eras, the mines were dug high up near the ridgeline, while in the more recent 20th century the mines were dug into the mountain at lower elevations; and these required deeper interior tunnels to reach the awasedo strata and steel tracks to run the carts sometimes hundreds of meters. The

#121 Valley of Kameoka

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mines employed a blacksmith called a Dogu-gata to make and maintain all of the carts and tracks and the metal tools at a workshop on-site or in the valley. He would make hammers and chisels, sharpen saws, and he would maintain the carbide lamps and anything else made of iron and brass.

At Atago there was a dangerous narrow road, a shortcut leading to the Kyoto basin below that was carved out by the miners for moving the awasedo stone directly down to the valley floor instead of hauling it north-west the long way through Kameoka. Likely this eastern road began as a footpath below the shrine at Atago’s peak above. There is also a faint road that leads to Atago from the north side that is safer but leads away from Kyoto.

There were no roads at Toishiyama to any of the mine entrances because the slopes were so steep, and the soils and bedrock were so undependable. There were a few mines that incorporated forms of a handmade gravity-powered sled system that ran down on wooden tracks. But by necessity, nearly all stone products were moved at one stage or another to the valley below on the backs of villagers wearing ladder frame-type packs holding the stones in woven baskets. Men, women, and children, mostly residents shared in this cash coinage opportunity generated by these local enterprises timed and coordinated to be operational during the off-season for rice planting and harvesting. Cash in rural areas was rare and welcome before the 20th century.

The photo at left #122 and the three pictures below #123 are “shoiko” (a porter).

Photos Courtesy of the Sakamoto family, Please do not copy these photos for any use.

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The fee paid to the porters for the portage of stone from the mine to the workshop was calculated using a tally system that took into account the number of cut and sized pieces that each porter decided to carry on that particular trip down to the workshop below without overshooting his or her limits as to what they figured they could handle.

The stones being chipped and sawn to a specified dimensional formula up at the mine entrance fit specific needs to suit the wholesaler, the retailer, and the final user. The numerical grade sizes 100, and 85, 65, 45, 35, 25 at the mouth of the mine represented, in theory, the number of that stone size, that a full-grown person can carry down the hill. For instance: 100 pieces of the #100 smaller stones, 65 pieces of the medium, or 25 of the larger stones.

The finished stones were sent to the wholesaler in carts from rural paths to city streets, to whom the size numbers would now also reflect the consumer’s size, shape, and needs. Whether shaped and sized for a knife, sword, tool, razor, gouge, scissors, or any other myriad of uses, their sharpening character, and their grit qualities were factored in before cutting to shape and size at the mine. The miners recognized and worked with the wholesalers to provide certain sizes with certain qualities for certain purposes. Excellent top-grade stones of all sizes are recognized and set aside at the mine for the razor and medical grade (the finest gritted) stones before any numerical size reduction was made. Being frugal, the miners would not cut up a huge extremely fine stone to make smaller ones. In short, the finest grit stones in the largest sizes were always expensive and might even be set aside at the retail level for particular clients. A porter could easily haul 25 pieces of the larger grade 25 stones, or 100 of the smaller grades #100 stones.

Traditional stone grades and dimensions

Grade | Dimension or larger
#25 | 218x78 mm
#35 | 205x75 mm
#45 | Thin 205x75 mm
#65 | 195x70 mm
#85 | 180x63 mm
#100 | 160x58 mm
# razor | 136x82 mm
# extra big | 230x80 mm or larger

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Geology

Chapter V

Printed page 88

V. GEOLOGY

#124 Radiolarian Oceanic Bedrock Chert

#125 Tenban maishi terrestrial chert

#126 Kiba hornfels chert

#127 Gokudo

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1. An Extract from the book, “The Charm of Kyoto Tennen Toishi”

The Charm of Kyoto Tennen Toishi

The Special Product is Only Produced in Kyoto

Research of the origin in its sharpening quality

Origin

1) History.

The partial translation below is from the important geological portion of the Kyoto Miners Union Association booklet, “The Charm of Kyoto Tennen Toishi” (CKTT), and it will act as starting point for this section on the geology of the Narutaki Toishiyama Awasedo.

It is not the author’s intent to fully translate this booklet, nor to take credit for the book’s information now or in the future, or to diminish the publication in any way, but instead, to illustrate in the following few pages, the closest and most accurate assessment of the pertinent facts as recorded in CKTT regarding the geology of these very special sedimentary stones. Following this translated overview assessment, you will find a few pages of my thoughts on the geology subject.

I would like to specifically thank the members of the Kyoto Miners Union and especially Mr. Hitomi, the chairman of the Union for his cooperation and guidance in the matter. It is my sincere hope that at some time a professional translation of the CKTT booklet in English will be completed. The photo above #128 is the dust cover of the book. “Kyoto tennen toishi is a silent backbone of a traditional craft.”

Pg.25 (CKTT)

Two hundred twenty-five million years ago, yellow sand carried by the westerly winds from the old continent of Pangea, was accumulated on the bottom of the ocean bed – aeolian dust (it’s different from the origin of the radiolarian soft clay ooze).

1. Period. It was created two hundred twenty-five million years ago during the Mesozoic Triassic Period, it was the time when dinosaurs appeared. The sediment accumulated on the pillow lava created by volcanic eruptions under the sea.

2. Location: it started first in the deep ocean water near the equator, several thousand kilometers away from the Japanese islands. (near Hawaii at the mid-ocean hot spot)

(In the book there is a picture of the stone’s surface with a trace of a fossil formed 2,000 meters under the ocean.)

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8. Formation of the Toishi Strata

A) Honkuchi Naori

B) Chuishi Naori in Atago and Takidani

3. Deposit Sediment: growth of the sediment accumulated one millimeter per one thousand years, very slowly at mild speed – formulating a basic element for a good sharpening stone with abrasion resistance.

Kawa-Hada was formed by the precipitation of heavier iron mineral Fe₂O₃, and then it was formulated between the Kawa and the Hada in sequence to create slate-type layering.

The toishi layers were created in a mild environment while the Gokudo (similar but coarser) was created in a turbulent atmosphere. The Gokudo layer is full of impure elements, and not good for sharpening.

4. Movement: the tectonic plate traveled several centimeters per year toward the old continent now called Asia and it took approximately 50 million years to reach the eastern edge of the continent.

5. Strata: the strata layers were formed when the sediment mass made contact with the soft radiolarian ooze (chert rock) near the old equator. A chert (flintstone) can be identified differently by its location and quality. I. kane — a chert layer that holds the toishi layer in between. II. kiba — a chert stone cap layer that breaks into a sharp horn shape. III. maishi — a chert layer covering the top of toishi strata.

6. Fossil: Conodont is a calcium phosphate tooth-shaped organ of an animal less than 2 mm long, and has a color of black or brown, and a horned or comb shape. It can prove the age of the stone as the Mesozoic Triassic period, and so it guarantees a good quality sharpening stone. (There is a photo of a conodont shown in the book: the picture was offered by the Stone Appreciation Club. The sample was collected by the members when they visited the Oozuku Toishi mine on May 14th, 1994. One of the club members is Mr. Takui Fujiwara who is one of the chief staff of Masutomi Chigaku Kaikan Earth Science Hall.)

7. Trench: approximately the Jurassic period, 200 million years ago, when the plate was sinking deeper, the toishi layer portion was detached from the strata body, that separated layer (ophiolite? author’s interpretation) then landed ashore, while the tectonic plate sunk beneath the Eurasian Plate. The bottom portion of the tectonic plate is gone and cannot be examined now. At this time a conglomerate stone mixture called meara is a type of shale mixed with mud and gravel.

It was formed far away from the original strata of conodont soft mud. The toishi layers are formatted in good order. The upper parts of the strata contain kiba layer stone (hornfels/chert) which is hard and breaks into sharp tooth-shaped pieces and the very top connects to the maishi layer. Because the strata layers are also with straight-grain gokudo between the clay layers, there are no harsh effects on the quality of sharpening stones by the chart layers. The toishi stones at Umegahata and Ohira have well-lined and tight layering strata. Aiwadani and Takashima’s stone strata have layers in good order, but the hardness is uneven.

The sediment here was formed very far from the source of radiolarian ooze. The toishi layers are surrounded or wrapped in layers of clay and gokudo and reside in a form like a ball or a bag. They do not have the

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C) Aiishi Naori in Hideriyama, Ashiya, Maruoyama

3) Granite penetration, the metamorphism of the toishi strata – one hundred million years ago.

4) Recrystallization of toishi stone layers – seventy million years ago

individual gokudo or kane between the layers of toishi. The chert has less influence but the toishi tends to be soft. Pg. 27 (CKTT)

This sediment was formed closer to the source of the radiolarian ooze. The toishi layers and the kane layers are separated by thin layers of gokudo that lay repeatedly, and this causes some influence on the straightness and tightness of the toishi layers.

By the underground intrusion of granitic magma, the toishi layers burned at 50 – 300 C. degrees Celsius and got softened (the source rock of toishi is dark gray color and hard, not suitable for sharpening). When the toishi source rock was cooked by the high heat of the granitic magma, it became softer and better for sharpening because the iron element in the stone layer was oxidized by contacting air, and sulfur was burned out. The remnant sulfur became potassium nitrate and the part without oxygen became a black charcoal plate.

When the sulfur is removed, the dark gray color changes to blue. The more that oxidation progresses the color of Awasedo becomes yellow, white, and or red (it resembles the changes in the colors of conodonts).

In the mine area where granite rocks are exposed to the ground, the sharpening quality is low because the stone was cooked by the high heat – the northwest rotation of Shiga prefecture.

A period of recrystallization of the toishi stone happened when the rock formation was submerged several many of meters in water and the high pressure crystallized the rock.

The crystal grains of the toishi can be seen distinctively all lined in order at 20 to 40 degrees diagonally on the stratified surface when a thin section was examined using a polarized light microscope.

The description of “me” grain, standing up can have a good sharpening quality. The grain laying down flat or at right angles to the strata can make inferior sharpening quality.

(This ends the translated pages 25, 26, and 27 of the Charm of Kyoto Tennen Toishi)

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2. Formation of toishi strata

The pillar graph of the strata sequencing

The arrangement of the layers of the sediment as they appeared when the mines in Kyoto were in production.

There are three unique sedimentary bedding patterns in which Narutaki Awasedo are found:

A. Honkuchi (Honguchi) naori (original mouth structure), has very good, organized layers.

B. Chuishi-naori (middle stone structure), has no organized layering.

C. Aiishi naori (meeting of the stone structure), includes two well-organized sediment structures managed by an actual geographic demarcation zone where two unique sediment structures converge: one of awasedo (fine) and the other of the more average chu-toishi (medium-middle-coarse) sediments that were traditionally used for sharpening shovels, chopping knives and so forth.

These three locally recognized sedimentary architectures were known to appear sporadically, roughly within a 20 km by 5 km band running SE–NW emanating from Takao village near Kyoto.

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A – Within the Honkuchi-naori master group are found: eighty (80) unique layers of well-sorted and geologically organized toishi. This master group contains 7 types of organized layers of identifiable minor groups that are listed below:

4-layers of tenjo suita (uchigumori, shiro-white) 8-layers of hachimai 48-layers of tomae 4-layers of aisa (karasu) 8-layers of namido 6-layers of hon-suita 2 to 3 layers of shiki-shiro suita

Each of those 80 layers or types of distinct toishi stone layers are sequestered, harbored by interlaced layers of alternate iron-rich volcanic mineral layers of either atsu (thin) kane or (thicker) gokudo. These two types of layers do not affect the toishi layers but instead help to seal-in the toishi from any outside influence of conglomerate breccia, chert, or intrusive waterborne minerals.

B – Within the Chuishi awasedo naori strata group is found: One (1) monolithic master stone structure, that suggests through color and patterns a previous system or disposition that lacks sequential layering. This single bulk of awasedo in situ is the idiosyncrasy of the Chuishi naori sedimentology, unique when compared to the neatly stacked sequestered layer formations of the nearby Honkuchi and Aiishi complexes. The Chuishi, if taken as an abnormal variant, suggests it to be the result of a dispositional diagenetic event. Instead of the multiple sequestered layers of awasedo, the Chuishi mélange appears as a monolithic flattened ball or bag shape, an ovaloid. What is missing are the individual deposits of the gokudo, atsu, or kane that are found between the awasedo layers in the Honkuchi and Aiishi structures. The bag of Chuishi are layers of clay which in turn are covered with gokudo (iron-rich minerals) which itself is within breccia and volcanic sediments of that era. There are varied characteristics of inherent particle fineness and coloration from one naori to another Chuishi naori area within the general location at Atago. The awasedo stone product of this naori is considered to generally be slightly softer when compared to the honkuchi or aiishi naori.

C – Within the Aiishi naori type master group are found: 60 independently structured layers of unique toishi stone organized into 5 major groups, those layers being:

12 of hon-shiro 12 of naka-shiro 12 of tenjo-tomae 12 of hon-tomae 12 of shiki-tomae

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3. Alternate Hypothesis

By the author

In between each of those 60 independent layers of unique toishi stone in the Aiishi naori structure is inches thin layers of a waste product called atsu kane, a flint type of hornfels chert, and a thicker kane layer that has helped to isolate each toishi from another toishi layer. This kane intra-layer isolates each toishi layer in a well-organized structure. The term Aiishi naori translates as “the meeting of the layers”. This Aiishi naori lays upon the mountainsides in much the same way as the honkuchi naori; each has a multitude of sheets laying following the contour of the tectonostratigraphic terrane. The Hideriyama, Ashiya, and Maruoyama mines are the only documented examples of this Aiishi naori, and it is now only the Maruoyama company that is digging into these sediments.

It is my opinion that the Awasedo-type stones are of a recent origin, possibly as young as 40,000 years.

I never really felt comfortable with the theme that these wonderous and lively stones, so fragile and timid as they protrude the surface at the ridgeline or lay closely behind the soils of the valley floor, were ascribed an age mainly by their association with the (Ar39/Ar40) argon tested 225,000,000 years old thousands of meters thick oceanic radiolarian chert bedrock beneath them. The Narutaki Awasedo is distinctly different from the Jurassic chert in every way as you with the Franciscan Assemblage in California, whose minerals also have been argon tested to be Mesozoic (252–66 mya).

(During the Japan Sea Opening (JSO) event, the back-arc region was filled by voluminous volcanic rocks associated with marine formations) [Yamaji 1990])

The sediments of the Kyoto Valley and Lake Biwa basins have been certified thru core samples by the JGS-Japan Geological Survey and the oil companies of Japan as representing vast amounts of Neogene 23 to Quaternary 2.5 to 1 mya volcanic sediments. All of these geologically “young” volcanic sediments rest comfortably upon the ancient oceanic Jurassic radiolarian chert bedrock which is an ancient extension of the Eurasian continental plate.

#129

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Neogene Volcanism

The Neogene period witnessed the shifting, colliding, and rifting of the tectonic plates, and this represented the formation of the Japanese Sea Opening (JSO) and the birth of the Japanese archipelago. The Japanese islands developed from a rising shelf of an eastern portion of the submerged ocean floor that included the Korean peninsula. This most easterly extension of the Eurasian Continental Plate (ECP) began to detach (rift) during the early Miocene due to the presentation of a usually thicker portion of the subducting Pacific Oceanic Plate (POP). At this time the rifting of the continental mass was further influenced by the subducting thinner Philippine Sea Plate (PSP) that was sandwiched between the thicker Pacific below and the Eurasian Continental Plate crust above. This triple junction thickness at this collision zone encouraged a fracturing of the ECP. The result of the collision was three-fold: advanced rifting of the ECP thus the early development of an easterly trending volcanic front; the beginnings of a slow counter-clockwise rotational movement of the detached north-east (NE) extension of the ECP island arc crust; and the eventual clockwise rotation of the south-west (SW) extension of the island arc. These events were to be the beginning of the creation of the Japan Sea in the early to middle Miocene, and the formation of the curved shape of Honshu Island.

Era | Period | Epoch (start mya)

Cenozoic | Quaternary | Holocene | 0.01

Cenozoic | Quaternary | Pleistocene | 2.6

Cenozoic, Tertiary | Neogene | Pliocene | 5.3

Cenozoic, Tertiary | Neogene | Miocene | 23.0

Cenozoic, Tertiary | Paleogene | Oligocene | 33.9

Cenozoic, Tertiary | Paleogene | Eocene | 55.8

Cenozoic, Tertiary | Paleogene | Paleocene | 65.5

A consequence of the drifting of the detached portion of the European Continental Plate in the early Neogene was the stretching of the lithosphere and asthenosphere between the continent and the Japan Trench. This thinning of the earth’s crust allowed for the development of a volcanic front in early Neogene that began in the area that we now refer to as central Japan while the oceanic floor was more or less flat. This volcanic front naturally would migrate easterly towards a transform fault in the fore-arc region representing the Shikoku Basin leaving behind volcanic sediment, as the three migrating Oceanic tectonic plates continued their subduction under the greater ECP.

At this same time, the detached NE portion of the island chain that earlier had drifted east now reversed course and began to tilt and drift westerly in a counter-clockwise rotation. The eventual joining again with the SW extension in central Honshu is recognizable now on any map of Japan as a “patched up” juncture of these reverse curves meeting between the Noto Peninsula in the near north and Lake Biwa in the south. This joining of the two halves was to be the opportunistic beginnings of a fore-arc volcanic front and the development of an enclosed Japanese Sea Basin in the west. This basin was for extensive periods, during Neogene an enclosed fresh water lacustrine marsh-type environment.

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The volcanic front in the SW Japan Arc.

Presently, in Kyoto Prefecture in the SW Arc are found; ([Pliocene-Pleistocene Kobiwako Group, which is distributed around Lake Biwa and the adjacent Ohmi Basin to the SE, consists mainly of thick lacustrine mudstone alternating with alluvial sandstones and conglomerates which are intercalated with more than 100 volcanic beds and up to 1500 meters in total) [Yokoyama 1969; Kawae 1979]).

Interlacing the valleys the low mountains, and the floor sediments of Lake Biwa and other bodies are extensive; ([Sedimentary rocks Age: Cenozoic Quaternary Holocene Lithology: valley floor, intermountain basin, river & coastal plain deposits) [https://gbank.gsj.jp/geonavi/geonavi.php#14,35.03131,135.67589]).

To view a geological map of Japan and especially of Kyoto, copy the above https: use Google to show the coordinates below which will be Kyoto, when at the map site right-click to zoom in to view Kyoto’s geology features and borders. Nakayama and Toishiyama are in the darker gray area directly in the mountains to the east of the Emperor’s palace grounds, click around and with a little bit of effort you will find these coordinates (https://gbank.gsj.jp/geonavi/geonavi.php#135-67372,35.04108). When you do you are looking at the mountains to the west of Kyoto, the little lake will be Shobudai pond, and the Toishiyama ridge is between the pond, and those villages to the east are Umegahata valley. Or, if that does not work, at the end of this book there is a link from a Google satellite that you can use.

In Miocene to early to middle Pleistocene formations in and around Kyoto Prefecture were filled with high silica rhyolitic felsic sediments that were sandwiched between mafic deposits in Lake Biwa and certainly many other local freshwater ponds and lakes. The Kyoto basin is filled to the brim with this sediment, and by following the JGS maps you will see that those sediments continue right up to the Nakayama property. The stratified sediments represented as Narutaki Awasedo including those at Toishiyama and throughout the Tamba region north of Kyoto, are always overlaid with more recent breccia, soils, and sub-soils along with forms of precipitated terrestrial chert. I would suggest that the source volcano was to the northeast of the Biwako basin following a path of wind by which the aeolian lighter sediments passing-on to the south/western region.

(Lake Biwa has a long history from the early Pliocene based on the geological survey and palaeogeographical study of lake sediments around the Lake Biwa Kobiwako Group area. The sediments revealed the paleoenvironmental change and tectonic events at the convergent margin of the Eurasian plate since early Pliocene times 5ma. Deep drillings were carried out in the 1970s and 1980s in and around present Lake Biwa. These core samples showed that the Lake Biwa Basin of sedimentary sequences is about 900 meters thick and that these were deposited in lacustrine or fluvial environments. Recently obtained fission-track age of the tephra layer at the deeper part of the present lake shows the continuous sedimentation of the lake basin during the Quaternary). [K. Takemura, Akira Hayashida N. Inoue, T. Danhara, Masuda Fuijio: Lake Biwa Sediment in Japan; Correlation of deep drilling cores and reconstruction of paleoenvironment during Quaternary, AGU Fall Meeting Abstract]

Note; Lake Biwa is 4 miles from Kyoto, and the lake extends 40 miles beyond that to the north at Fukui Prefecture where a similar form of awasedo is found known as Wakasa awasedo.

The chemical analysis of the several Narutaki Awasedo toishi stones that I have commissioned from Dr. M.S. Shackley proves with conclusive evidence that the Naurtaki Awasedo in Kyoto and Fukui prefectures are volcanic rhyolitic tuff, of high silicate levels (glass-like), and of the type that when energetically ejected as in pyroclastic flows, produce highly explosive events of sub-micron to low micron aeolian dust. These

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The way it stands.

volcanic tuff types, when settling into fresh-water lakes compact as beds that in Kyoto measure roughly 15 meters/45feet thick, that lay close if not directly upon ancient oceanic radiolarian chert bedrock.

The list of awasedo mine sites cataloged in the 1990s of the greater Kyoto area by the Kyoto Miners Association of course does not include the multitude of test sites or minor mines that were short-lived. Many more awasedo sites were explored and some certainly were successful to a degree in the Fukui area, the mountains above Obama, and those around Lake Biwa. The volcanic field of central Honshu represents an organic series of events that benefited some areas more than others depending upon which way the wind was blowing at that period. What they all have in common is their unique chemistry and sedimentation pattern.

The previous 800-year history of the mines, the stones, and the men who dug them remains mainly unwritten in a comprehensive first-hand form. The miners and mine owners were not prone to documentation, and with the mines now closed, shuttered, and empty, and just a few old-timers telling their stories, it will only become more difficult in the future to appreciate the full breadth of their industry, let alone the toil and the dangers faced by the mining communities. The vast percentage of the old tunnels have now been bulldozed and covered shut for safety reasons. A great portion of the most easily identifiable industrial sites have been re-purposed for agricultural use, and the number of stone samples in private collections used for studying their geological and mineralogical origins is as extensive now as it will ever be in the future.

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Chemistry

Chapter VI

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VI. CHEMISTRY

1. A foundation for understanding

Analysis of Stones in Hand

“Looks like dendritic hematite inclusions, another sign that it’s sedimentary and possibly meta-sedimentary. There is an intermediate stage between them called diagenesis where minerals can coalesce during compaction and cementation. This can happen to either volcanic ash sedimentation especially in an aqueous environment like back-arc basins or in detrital sedimentary situations.”

Matthew Horrigan, Faculaty San Francisco State University.

Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (EDXRF) analysis demonstrates that the major, minor, and trace elements for these Narutaki Awasedo natural stones are volcaniclastic, and possess those minerals in such quantities, as to be specifically cataloged as Rhyolitic Tuff. From color to color, layer to layer, mine to mine all of the awasedo in the Narutaki area, Kyoto prefecture fit into the category of volcanic rhyolite tuff. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is the responsible body for developing rhyolite parameters, and although not every country in the world has its form of the USGS, Japan, however, does have such a body. Founded in 1882, the Geological Survey of Japan (GSI), is well respected, especially as a leader regarding volcanism and earthquakes. Japan, the United States, and the rest of the world all follow the same chemical definitions based on the content and percentages of minerals to describe volcanic sedimentary deposits.

The RGM-1 (Rhyolite, Glass Mountain 1) analysis system is based directly on the U.S. Geological Survey Certificate designation for volcanic rhyolite. RGM-1 volcanic stone must have 69%–74% (low) to 75%–80% (high) silica to qualify. These are the same requirements for volcanic high silica tephra-type lava sediments that are used worldwide. The universally accepted parameters for volcanic rhyolite were established in 1951 and updated over the years by the USGS, and these were and still are based on one (1) specifically dedicated pure 300-pound sample of volcanic glass (rhyolite) taken from the Glass Mountain lava flow near Mt. Shasta in northern California.

#130

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Between 2019 and 2022 I commissioned Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (EDXRF) analyses of the major and minor trace elements of the samples in the photos above, #1, #2, #3, #4 #5 to be conducted by M. S. Shackley, Ph.D. director of the Geoarchaeological XRF Laboratory of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The results display the Major Oxides and Minor Elements; all measured in weight percentages using the USGS (United States Geological Survey) universal classification numeric system when comparing weight percentages to TAS graphs regarding the origin chemistry of sample rocks.

Dr. Shackley also supplied a sixth EDXRF parameter RGM-1 S4, an analysis he designed in 2020 for categorizing the Major and Minor trace elements of the Andesite Tuff Sediment of the Arroyo Hondo in Northern New Mexico, for comparison of localized rhyolite (69+ silica) sediment structures.

Sample (1)-photo #131 above, for the chemical analysis, the pure white Narutaki awasedo was EDXRF tested using the grounded-up powder from Narutaki Ondoyama mined stone. This pure white sample is referred to by the miners as “shiro habutai”. Shiro as in white, and habutai as in the soft flat weave silk lining of a bride’s formal wedding kimono which will always be the whitest of the whites. The mineral sediment of this stone is consistent throughout and when the surface is wet with water the surface remains as bright white. The irregular score marks on the sides of the stone are from the trimming of the raw stone at the mining site using an ancient type of 2-man saw called a tsurunoko, a tool design that has not been commercially used in the industry since about 1920. The monolithically pure front-to-back composition of the stone suggests that the sedimentation location was distal from the volcanic source and that the sedimentation process was uninterrupted and in a calm environment.

(1) photo #131

(2)

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Sample (2)-photo #132 is from the Ohira mine. A suita stone with an intense red pattern. The red color is a saturation of tiny mineral groups which in Japan are called “renge” (rhen-gae). The renge pattern in this example is consistent throughout the stone.

Sample (3)-photo #133 above provided the kawa skin material from the back of the stone for analysis. I gathered the scrapings from the sample (3) and Dr. Shackley further pulverized the 5-gram sample just as he had for the preparation with the other mineral samples. All honkuchi naori and aiishi awasedo naori sedimentary stones have a back and a front representing their inclination to the sedimentary process. The back of all stones had kawa such as this sample, but often it was shaved off at the mine or work site. The raw stones were usually moved outside the mine where they are cut and sized and their sides and sometimes the kawa is trimmed so the stone will lay flat during work. Not all awasedo samples leave the trimming process with their kawa skin intact.

Rhyolite sample (4)-photo #134 from the akapin layer at the Nakayama mine was submitted for Dr. Shackley’s examination and its report is in the cart below. This stone was a gift to me from Mr. Akira Kato while at Nakayama. Stone sample (5)-photo #135 is a white Koma grade Mikawa nagura provided by the Sakamoto company, specialists regarding Mikawa products.

(3) photo #133

(4) photo #134

(5) photo #135

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nr = not recorded

The chemical analysis of stones from the Maruoyama mine, commissioned by Mr. Tsuchihashi

The second graph above was commissioned and published by Mr. Tsuchihashi the owner of the Maruoyama toishi mine in Kameoka-shi Kyoto-ken Japan. Mr. Tsuchihashi is one of the last miners in the Kyoto area who still digs. His current mine contains Awasedo, and it is deep in the forest just below the ridge of a mountain. Consequently, because the location of his awasedo is not in the immediate Narutaki area, it is awasedo but not from Kyoto. The same holds for awasedo from Ohira as well as dozens of other mines not upon Narutaki in Kyoto. The silica content is modest in these samples, but the overall percentages still represent volcanic rhyolite sediments.

Graft #1 introduces the results of the chemical analysis of the samples above.

Chemical analysis of submitted samples (percent; nr = not recorded)

Sample | Na2O | MgO | Al2O3 | SiO2 | K2O | CaO | TiO2 | V2O5 | MnO | Fe2O3
Gilmore #1 | 0.95 | 1.00 | 11.17 | 79.88 | 2.94 | 0.045 | 0.507 | 0.026 | 0.008 | 3.29
Gilmore #2 | 2.87 | 0.25 | 6.35 | 74.03 | 5.71 | 0.53 | 1.13 | 0.10 | 0.02 | 8.65
Gilmore #3 | 1.75 | 0.24 | 3.78 | 28.27 | 2.75 | 0.56 | 0.18 | 0.05 | 1.42 | 59.57
Gilmore #4 | 2.20 | 0.00 | 6.71 | 69.94 | 0.00 | 0.45 | 1.24 | 0.08 | 2.02 | 15.15
Gilmore #5 | 0.93 | 0.16 | 16.18 | 75.09 | 5.89 | 0.19 | 0.09 | 0.01 | 0.00 | 0.81
RGM-1 S4 | 4.07 | 0.00 | 13.12 | 73.4 | 4.93 | 1.412 | 0.29 | 0 | 0.038 | 2.22
RGM-rhyolite recommended | 4.07 | 0.28 | 13.7 | 73.4 | 4.30 | 1.15 | 0.27 | nr | 0.036 | 1.86

Chemical analysis of stones from the Maruoyama mine (percent; nr = not recorded)

Sample | Na2O | MgO | Al2O3 | SiO2 | K2O | CaO | TiO2 | FeO | MnO | Fe2O3
Tomae | 2.63 | 1.96 | 18.58 | 61.66 | 2.64 | 1.52 | 0.62 | 3.14 | 0.07 | 2.88
Asagi | 2.55 | 2.01 | 16.73 | 64.02 | 2.84 | 1.72 | 0.65 | 2.38 | 0.09 | 3.14
Suita | 2.25 | 1.84 | 14.77 | 65.64 | 2.88 | 1.64 | 0.68 | 2.22 | 0.09 | 3.42
RGM-1 | 4.07 | 0.28 | 13.7 | 73.4 | 4.3 | 1.15 | 0.27 | nr | 0.036 | 1.86

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The Volcanic samples below were taken in Hokkaido, Japan as examples of silicate stone.

And various other volcanos from around the world: Philippines, Iceland, Mexico, Antarctica, USA.

Volcanic samples from Hokkaido, Japan (percent)

Sample | Na2O | MgO | Al2O3 | SiO2 | K2O | CaO | TiO2 | FeO | MnO | Fe2O3
Mt. Koma | 3.25 | 0.36 | 11.85 | 75.16 | 1.79 | 2.16 | 0.44 | 1.94 | 0.08 | Nr
Mt. Mashu | 4.27 | 0.64 | 12.72 | 73.91 | 0.72 | 3.33 | 0.66 | 3.03 | 0.08 | Nr
RGM-1 Rhyolite Recommended | 4.07 | 0.28 | 13.7 | 73.4 | 4.3 | 1.5 | 0.27 | nr | 0.036 | 1.86

Volcanic samples from other locations (percent)

Sample | Na2O | MgO | Al2O3 | SiO2 | K2O | CaO | TiO2 | FeO | MnO | Fe2O3
Mayon | 3.79 | 0.05 | 13.76 | 76.86 | 4.0 | 0.77 | 0.10 | 1.01 | 0.04 | nr
Eyjafjall | 5.04 | 3.15 | 14.65 | 56.73 | 1.65 | 6.11 | 1.88 | 9.93 | 0.24 | nr
Chaiten | 3.95 | 0.28 | 14.11 | 73.36 | 3.07 | 1.63 | 0.17 | 1.13 | 0.06 | nr
Erebis | 9.0 | 0.87 | 19.73 | 55.65 | 5.61 | 1.97 | 1.01 | 5.36 | 0,24 | nr
St. Helens | 4.16 | 1,87 | 17.34 | 64.39 | 1.32 | 4.93 | 0.60 | 4.51 | 0.07 | nr
RGM-1 | 4.07 | 0.28 | 13.7 | 73.4 | 4.3 | 1.15 | 0.27 | nr | 0.036 | 1.86

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Why These Stones

Chapter VII

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VII. WHY THESE STONES

1. The nature of hardness

The relative hardness of any one natural sedimentary stone is the result of the tenet principles of digenesis: sorting, bedding, and lithification. It is only rudimentary to think that well-sorted beds of ultra-fine material would pack tighter with less void between particles than one of coarser material with wider voids. The energy for mechanical compaction in a natural setting will always be that of a downward force, and logic demands that greater weight per square space will result in a tighter-finer product if all other factors are equal.

These principles help to describe the theme that the accumulated sedimentary terrene of the Narutaki Awasedo, and in all of the various locally bedded structures, began as a horizontal plane of tephra and that this sequence and the repetitive sediment structure from mine to mine in Umegahata (those mines 2 miles to the south/west at Atago and Ohira, and the Mauroyama 2 miles beyond Ohira) are all representatives of the very same aeolian-wind transported volcanic rhyolite tuff material. Their chemical analysis re-affirms this. Ascribing them as gravity-sorted wind-borne minerals settling into freshwater lacustrine templates of pools or lakes is a well-established scenario.

The graft below is my exaggerated explanation as to how gravity over time affects an evolving anticline disposition of terrene nappes to harden up under the demands of gravity. These sediments, which began as inter-layered rhyolites in a level horizontally footed lacustrine pool, along with their iron-rich secondary conglomerate of gokudo, were first deposited in pools of fresh water only to be later thrust into a mountain ridge (Narutaki-Atago-Ohira) circumstance. The graph can also predict the slumped ball mass terrene of awasedo at Mt. Atago as anticline sediment that was forced into an "over-turned incline limb".

#136

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Sedimentary stones can have simple or complex mineralogy. The higher-quality Arkansas Novaculite sedimentary stone has a simple composition with its dominant 95% to 98% silica base. The Japanese Narutaki Awasedo, because of their comparatively modest average 65% - 74% silica content allows for a greater diversity of mineral/chemical components that can include the fast-cutting Mohs 9 aluminum oxides along with portions of the full list of major and minor oxides, a feature that creative arts and crafts proponents learn to relish.

Narutaki Awasedo 3-6 Mohs scale

Arkansas Novaculite 7-8 Mohs

Coticule 5-7 Mohs

Mikawa nagura 2-3 Mohs

The dominant steel-cutting agents in Narutaki Awasedo are forms of silica/silicon dioxide (Mohs 7), commonly observed in percentages of 60% to 74%, with granular sizes of 1 to 2 microns or smaller. The second major component is aluminum oxide (Mohs 9) making up Jnats in 6% to 11% content from stone to stone. The grit particle sizes of aluminum oxide are similar to those of silica. For comparison's sake, the Arkansas novaculite has consistent silica contents at 95% and reportedly up to 97-99% rates. They have very little if any aluminum oxide. The sliding scale variation in the Silica and Aluminum contents of awasedo provides a mnemonic variable element during a sharpening sequence that can over time represent higher craft potentials.

In nature with the awasedo under intense pressure for 2+ million years, the components of silica and aluminum oxide physically meld into a rock form making up the bulk of the stone's mass. With the addition of the mineral potassium (K), as degraded felspar, the integration forms a type of kaolin (clay) called Sericite which is a hydrated potassium alumina silicate KAl2(AlSi3O10) (OH)2 evolve This crystallized structure of aluminosilicate, as in a kaolin nanotube, can repeatedly absorb and expel H2O over again during the sharpening process. In doing so the abraded stone is encouraged to shed grit to be used as a free-roaming abrasive agent. During this the minor oxide minerals, and water help to carry and vacate hydrated swarf composed of oxidized iron and the spent (dull-ineffective) minerals of the awasedo.

Mt. Atago, Kyoto-3,031 ft.; Sea Level.

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It is not difficult to assume that the early sedimentary phases for Awasedo had taken place on a relatively flat plane. While in their most recent recumbent setting along the Toishiyama ridge, a sloped setting, the natural tendency of sediment stone to vary in hardness from the upper to lower elevations within a mining site is common. Diamonds are the arbitrator regarding depth and hardness in nature. Certain amounts of pressure, heat, as well as chemical reactions factor into the diagenesis leading to the results of the Narutaki Awasedo lithification.

Equating a comparative standard of the hardness of a stone felt under a tool or knife; by the shedding of the stone's surface with a diamond-embedded lapping plate by a skilled craftsperson is subjective, but not invalid. There are basic demands placed on the sharpening skills of craft persons that can be defined and translated from one person to another. For Awasedo, because of their wide type of variety, a dialogue defining what is hard and or soft can be developed that is both helpful and pertinent for record-keeping and in discussions with other practitioners. The factors as to why some Jnat stones are harder than other Japanese awasedo can run parallel to the topic of geology.

The weight of a stone in hand can give you a very reliable reading as to the internal hardness of a Jnat. Greater compaction allows for greater mass within a space. A softer stone will feel lighter when jiggled in the hand for the same reason as above. Overlooking the Umegahata valley, the Narutaki Toishiyama ridge of awasedo toishi beds lays upon the slopes. The stones mined at the upper reaches of the ridge were slightly softer (lighter) because of the milder gravitational forces coupled with the effects of oxidation as water percolates into the mine geology. There were no long-term mines developed at or below the valley floor because the water table would flood every attempt. Digging at the mid-elevations above the valley floor was also problematic, the naori layer of toishi sat deeper within the mountainside under tens of meters of unstable topsoil and breccia conglomerate. Because of this new mine structures were always tricky to engineer, and eventually steam shovels and bulldozers were brought in to scrape the soils away to cut the chase by opening a pit-mine situation. The majority of stones harvested at the lowest of these elevations proved to be so extra hard that they required a helper stone, or even a progression of slurry stones to enhance the abilities of the awasedo.

The natural progression of the mining programs from ancient to modern followed the rules of expediency, those being discovery and extraction. The easiest to find was the first to be dug, usually nearer the surface. The historic last stones harvested from Toishiyama required more energy in searching and digging, so by the mid-20th century, the toishi era ended with the grunt and the bang of heavy machinery and dynamite.

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2. The Mohs Scale

The Mohs scale for judging the softness and hardness of Japanese natural stones fits like glove to hand. It is easy to learn, and the equipment could not be simpler or less expensive. A portion of the sharpening community, which uses Japanese natural stones is already using a numerical scale, although the name Mohs is very rarely brought up. The purveyor of Japanese natural awasedo stones in Japan and the West predominantly now use a hardness scale that included levels 3,4,5,6 hardness when advertising their stones. I and many others find it more satisfying to use the numerical along with half designations of + and - for the harder and softer to encourage a closer discussion of the stone's specific qualities. Your deciphering of the scratch depth on the target stone left by the test stone will guide you to a hint of a plus or minus sampling with just a bit of practice. Few Jnats rise above Mohs 5+ or below 3-. Grit fineness is greatly admired, as well as cutting speed, and the hardness factor of the stone as a unit can encourage an intelligent discussion and documentation regarding what stone-to-steel pairing is worth pursuing because smaller grit particles will bind tighter than larger particles. Particle size does matter.

Sharpening enthusiasts will generally use a progression of stones for tuning their hard or overly hard exotic blades based on a grit ladder beginning with the coarser and moving towards the finer stones. With synthetic stones, the manufacturers provide a progressive ladder that ends with the finest grit stone. I am not going to judge the effectiveness of a "highly polished" blade here, not just now. My goal is always to sharpen a blade to an appropriate keenness. Cutting watermelon or beard hair, cutting with the intention and forethought saves time, energy, stone, and steel.

Organic grit from natural stones is a bit of a chase because Jnats have chronographic layers. In a high-quality awasedo, it might take years to wear through one of these visible layers. When buying stones examining the sedimentary sequence is worth some effort. The most valuable stones are large in breadth and depth, pure without voids or irregular layers when viewed from the sides, and from the top an aesthetically pleasing pattern suggests regularity. Coupled with these visuals, the use of the Mohs scale criteria will add confidence to any purchase because the compaction ratio within the body of the stone if the chemistry is consistent, will be reflected with some confidence on the exposed flattened top surface of the stone.

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3. Jargen & Fill

After the 2nd World War Iwasaki Kosuke and his son Iwasaki Shigeyoshi visited the nagura mines in Aichi Prefecture to examine the inventory of the Aichi and Shizuoka Prefecture's Mikawa nagura mines stock remaining in the ground. The Niigata Blacksmiths Union was looking beyond the war years now, and promoting razors and barbering. The stone and steel being so intimate to one another, the future access to the stone was now more than ever a topic because the Sanjo blacksmiths were now gearing up to make European-style razors to compete with the German factories.

Two years later Iwasake and his son would visit the Narutaki area and wished to bring up with Kato Masumichi, from a scientific perspective, the amount and type of raw Nakayama awasedo inventory that was yet to be dug. Iwasaki-san was always intensely interested in how to reach the ultimate type of keenness while maintaining the tenacity of a shaving razor's edge, and the Nakayama and other mines were integral to that end by being the providers of the all-important base stone. They examined the mine geology and conversed with miners and mine owners about the estimated stone In the ground.

#138 Sakamoto Misao, Iwasaki Kousuke, Iwasake Shigeyoshi, Asano Nagayuki, (from left to right, the names in Japanese), barbers school/union member Photo, courtesy of Sakamoto & Company

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The fact is, that the nagura stone type as we know them now, white or ochre, black or gray was originally used as a stand-alone sharping stone by regional carpenters. All the sources of naturally mined nagura including the Mikawa nagura held both high and low grades, based mainly on the theme of their silica content (some Mikawa nagura are up to 95% silica and most are between 80 to 90%) or lack of which also helps to determine their cohesive strength. The stones that we enjoy in these modern times were not fully understood or even known except by a few elites during the golden ages of Japan's building and waring eras in the 12th century and those to follow. A massive awasedo you or I might own now was not available to the average carpenter before the unified early Edo Period. Much more course arato stones were used for bevel formation, and the final polishing or thinning of the blade was performed, often, with a locally sourced nagura of some sort, or by adjusting their sharpening technique.

The stones they used did not need to be white and pretty, but instead just effective. In historic times any local source of quality abrasive stones played a large part in why some carpenter guilds were more successful than others. The most famous carpenter guild in Japan was from Takayama town, Hida prefecture, an area deep in the mountains, rich in ancient timber, centrally located, and just as importantly held a rich base of nagura including what we now call Odori-nagura and nearby the Mikawa-nagura near their territory.

It is widely accepted that certain awasedo stones match up better "cutting-wise" with certain steels. It is almost magic that the human hand can eke out compatibility to such fine degrees. Modern steels are scientifically formulated along close industry standards, and certain brands and models of synthetic sharpening stones are known to work super well with certain steels. Two hundred or more years ago in Japan, steel formulas were proprietary and secret, and bladesmiths did not provide a sharpening stone to the tool user. What the best blacksmiths did was to provide a consistent steel product, that was their job description. It was up to the user of the tool to match up a stone on his terms. Tools hardened and tempered to reliable standards are a blessing if you were a busy carpenter. For those who wore out his shop stones, the challenge for him would be to find that one special compatible that perfectly favored your steel in hand, and preferably a large stone before your old one wore out. He who owned a compatible large stone owned a great asset.

#139 & #140

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4. Application of Sharp

There are still traditional-style homes being built in Japan using post and beam hand-cut joinery construction without nails by carpenters who were brought up in an apprentice/master-student/teacher environment. These builders often operate as a family business. There were up until recently men who could design and build a whole house by themselves using only joinery. No nails or screws or glue. If you look deep enough into the past of these old-school home builders, they will often have family ties to builders of ancient temples and shrines. These men were trained to design, mark and cut with handsaws, fashion with hammer & chisel, and hand plane the wooden friction-fitted joints while working near the floor in simple workshops, or some form of a covered or open-air setting. Hundreds of complicated joints were invented and developed over the last fifteen hundred years by temple builders, and some of these joints continue to be used in traditional homes today.

Is this not a description of crafts at its best?

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The traditional tea house in a handmade manner would have joints so complicated that they surpass my imagination. In an ancient temple, each post and beam, from trim to the foundation in a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine would be jointed at each end, and likely have several if not a dozen of other joints at points along the surface of the stock to tie the frame together. For large projects, there would be untold hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of wood, and on the grandest scale in the old days up to a million joints could have been included in the construction and assembling of these, the largest wooden buildings in the world. Every joint was cut with a chisel or shaved with a kanna whose edges were hand-honed on natural stones to various degrees of appropriate sharpness and geometry to match the task of the edge. The cutting edges of these chisels called nomi were designed to hold up under the workloads of creating joint after joint, hour after hour while still performing sharp enough. It is a different kind of sharpness than that of a hair-shaving razor, although the source of the sharpening stone and the steels are the same. A few of these joinery techniques were certainly brought from the continent before the Asuka (538-646) and Hakuho (646-710) periods. The joints were used in the building of the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, only to be supplemented and refined in the Nara Period (710-794) by regional carpenter guilds who specialized in building shrines and temples, and who competed with other carpentry guilds for commissions. These early clans of builders worked not only in Nara and Kyoto but were mobile so could work throughout Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and eventually Hokkaido.

Just as in modern times, there was a bidding phase for these projects, where competing guilds presented their design proposals. When under contract the carpentry guild would move the crew and materials as needed to the building site and live there, lock stock and barrel for years. Of course, some of the basic frameworks of the building could be built off-site if necessary following detailed plans of parts and pieces fashioned months or years ahead of assembly.

#141 Private shrine at the shop of Maruoyama, #142 in Kyoto, a remarkable miniature tea house.

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The photo above includes just a small portion of the accessory buildings of the Shokoji Temple complex being restored under a metal shelter in Fushiki town, Toyama city-Toyama Prefecture in 2009. What you see here is only the upper roof superstructure of one of the temple's detached minor structures and not the galleries and rooms below. What you are also not seeing here is the nearby Otera, (main worship building) which is gigantic in comparison to this here. For these extensive modern restorations, temporary fabricated 5 to 12-story buildings are built around and over the ancient complex to keep out the snow and rain for what turned out to be, at this temple complex, a 23-year project as the work moved from building to building. These restoration projects require a generation of professional carpenters, and at the same time, as history has shown in advanced cultures, this type of work encourages the younger generation of crafts persons to pick up the old skills.

These competitive processes between the guilds demanded exactness and design qualities based on principles hearty enough for these, the largest wooden buildings in the world to withstand earthquakes, insects, and typhoons. Although more structures throughout Japan have been lost than have survived, by visiting Nara one can readily see examples of the world's largest free-standing wooden buildings built without iron nails that date back nearly to the times of the Western Roman Empire.

The Horyuji Temple site pictured below in Nara has the Goju-No-To five-story pagoda, one of a few and probably the earliest structure in the world which incorporated what was at that time a secret joinery technique closely held by an individual guild that addressed the science of friction and gravity in the use of canceling earthquake vibration. This most outstanding structural inventive design element in the Goju-no-to tower at Hōryūji is what is called "shinbashira". Essentially a sway-canceling wooden interior central post that is set in deep within the stone foundation and extends beyond the roof but does not touch the interior of the building when at rest. During an earthquake or a typhoon, as the tall narrow building shakes, the Shinbashira post will remain independent of the rest of the structure, it will only begin to influence the sway

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of the building in general after certain lateral distances are reached and begin to rub up against the interior projecting post, calming the sway in increments.

This same shinbashira sway post technology is a feature of the modern Sky Tree tower in Tokyo. The shinbashira was a guild secret for 1500 years, and its genius has been proven by enduring enormous earthquakes while other local buildings had failed. The advanced culture of woodworking for this temple and all other wooden structures in Japan would not have been possible without sharpening stones, some of which were reportedly mined at the time in and around Nara. The Nara toishi was probably like the Narutaki awasedo from Ondoyama as the locations are only about 22 miles from each other.

Early sharpening stones for tools like the Mikawa nagura sediment from Shizuoka and Aichi prefecture and Odori nagura from the mountains of Gifu prefecture were domestic to the guilds and used by the local Takayama-based daiku/carpenters to sharpen their blades. The same was true for the building guilds in other areas of Japan as far away as Niigata prefecture in very early times. The mountain sources of each guild's sharpening media were guarded secrets, held within those competing individual guilds. Japan is a country thick with volcanic sedimentary stone; mostly the coarser varieties, but the finest of the fine-gritted stone would enhance the finished quality of traditional craft products, so therefore the finest stones were always coveted.

Modern homes in Japan often still feature an alcove called a tokonoma. In the building of a tea house or sitting room with traditional features like tatami-mats and shoji-papered sliding doors, kaba/clay-masonry walls, subdued lighting, and wood-paneled ceilings are all fashioned with hand tools by special traditional carpenters referred to as mia-daiku. A Showa-era carpenter carried a steel mallet, while now his grandson packs a claw hammer, a router instead of a set of chisels, and a disposable blade hand plane instead of the traditional kanna with its high-grade carbon steel blade that could be sharpened when dull.

There remained demands into the late 20th century for highly skilled woodworkers to build in the old style. And for them, even though the times had changed, the task of sharpening steel on stone remains the same. A carpenter shop 50 years ago often maintained a progression of naturally mined sharpening stones at a sharpening station, and most of the fellows had their "choice" natural awasedo stones tucked into one of their homemade toolboxes. Certain particular stones would be matched and useful for their nomi/chisels while others were designated for kanna plane blades only, and still others only for the certain special

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finishing stage like preparing the surfaces for urushi lacquer, the wood prepared with their very cherished shiage kanna and its ultra-keen blade. Nowadays a framer of houses, as one Kyoto carpenter recently related to me, might have as few as 3 synthetic sharpening stones in grits 1,000, 3,000, and 5,000 in his kit, along with some tools using replaceable throw-away blades. A coincidence that the source of natural stones would dry up at about the same time that mass-produced relatively inexpensive sharpening stones, portable power tools, and the battery-powered screw gun would fill in the void for these workers.

Up until the 1950s at the wholesale level, the natural stone salesmen would travel a route on a motorcycle or train servicing established wholesale and retail clients. These traveling men would stock woodworking shops with fresh stone stock that could be tested by a prospective retail buyer, or by barbers when they had time. At each stop, they would talk over tea and either receive payment for previous purchases from a month before, retrieve rejected stones, or leave a couple more to test. The toishi-ya entrusted the carpenter or barber to test which stones matched up well with their tools or razors. In the days before the 1920s, stones were not ink stamped or labeled by the seller or mine, and so each stone was judged on its own merits and performance. This delivery system worked just fine into the 1950s but struggled in the 60s to be profitable. I worked in a rural town in Japan in 1977 as an apprentice and the shop still had a couple of tool and stone fellows who would stop by with alternate samples of stones to the ones they were picking up, and or deliver saws that had been sharpened. This no longer happens, unless the craftsperson is a recognized master.

Attempts to revive the popularity of natural tennen toishi happened in a quirky way in the mid-1960s as the success of the King 1,000 grit manmade stone, whose naturally occurring red clay came from Tokonami city in Aichi prefecture gained popularity. At this time a Kyoto group headed by Mr. Kiyoshi Kimura attempted to compete with Osaka companies by incorporating the crushed awasedo powder grit into molded forms armed with a binder so they could compete in the higher-priced super fine gritted stone market.

Kimura-san, the son of an old mining family had a science background and he and his partners began to experiment with creating a finer grit synthetic finishing stone. They figured that there was an endless supply of discarded stone left as rubble outside at every mine entrance that was just waiting to be utilized and at a very low material cost. They experimented with vitrification like the King brand, and this did work, but with limited success. The group eventually settled on an awasedo-infused resin-based product that turned out to have excellent sharpening qualities. They began to market the stones to established retailers through a few of the old-time traveling toishi salesmen, bypassing the traditional Osaka tradesmen who by that time had formed a lock on the coarse and medium-gritted synthetic stone distribution.

Mr. Teruzo Yamamoto of Gifu was one of the distributors of the natural product and he explained to me that the set-up cost and the ongoing research of the synthetic resin materials made the product appear to be too expensive in the eyes of the public. The product feedback was encouraging but the profit was low.

The highly popular King product sold back then for hundreds of yen ($10-$15) while the Kyoto synthetic product needed to sell in the thousands of yen ($40-$50) to make a profit. The King brand was a coarser product, but the concept of less expensive was influencing the marketplace as the distribution channels were gripped firmly by established Osaka companies making it difficult and expensive to introduce a new product into an already tight market. These factors led to a cooling interest from Kyoto investors.

The stones were beautiful and these salesmen's sample stones seen below that I bought from Yamamoto-san feel great under the blade. They cut steel easily and create black swarf that just rolls off the

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stone. I judge the highest gritted of these 1960s examples to be in the 6,000 range, but they will polish under light pressure like a 15k stone. Their hardness is between Mohs 3+ and 4.

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5. Need Work

How about the tugging-pulling-bad-almost non-shave razor experience? We who shave with blades are well aware of what not quite sharp enough represents in an edge because our skin talks back to us, sometimes screaming when the razor pulls hair out by the roots instead of elegantly swiping them off our face. The razor might have the ragged Y's where the edge profile represents the overly worked edge which is weak but sharp although the edge soon begins to disintegrate as it challenges your tough beard hair. The "U" shaped edge is the undeveloped not sharp enough edge. A razor with a U-shaped apex if it cuts at all, will glide over most hairs, and tug at others while cutting just a few. Disposable blade razor users solve this state of dullness by throwing away that blade, while with a self-honed razor, it can be re-honed. The difference between a dull razor and the perfect V ultra-sharp razor is measured in terms of microns at the apex of the edge. It has very little to do with the 99.99% of the shiny portion of the razor's bevel that stands out in mass when you look with your naked eye. Honing a razor brings a man to the closest engagement of the finest hand-made mechanical form that he will likely have created in his life. The proudness of this is worth the effort.

Every metal has its limits of coherence and this is good to understand. Adding more strokes on the stone makes the edge thinner but going beyond a certain point will, instead, make it more fragile when a false edge Y form develops. Make it your choice to pick that time to stop working on that stone. Try to discover the moment by examining the blades' progress with your loupe, or even take a shave after stropping it. Once you discover the limits of the steel with that particular stone and you have taken notes after a fresh bevel set you can practically hone that razor on that particular stone blindfolded.

One factor that I always keep constant when sharpening razors, like the drone of a church organ, is my hand pressure. From the bevel setting stage to the final finishing stone, I do not purposely alter my hands' downward pressure. I found that I can mimic the effect of "as more" or "as less" hand pressure, by 1)

#147 Sumigashi pattern in kiita

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Stropping

adjusting the stroke count, or 2) adjusting the stroke speed with which I move the blade across the stone. More strokes will always equal more work, but I found that a slow-speed pushing or slow-speed pulling edge-leading stroke represents the mnemonics of light-pressure movement. It is in our DNA that slow motion encourages the mechanics of a light touch. This can be measured by placing your sharpening stone on a simple household kitchen scale, you will see that when sharpening fast there is a greater down motion, and a slower motion will lead to fewer measured pounds of thrust. Because of the tactile sensitivity of our hands, Slow or Fast will each translate as units of downward pressure. I found that by consistent hand pressure and alternating groups per side by counting strokes from side A and side B I can more easily keep a balanced wear pattern on the steel. Creating a regular simple stroke helps to progress the work in a logical shop smart manner.

The dedicated numerical observation of good successful honing habits provides learning opportunities. If for instance I over-sharpen an edge (remove steel unnecessarily) and I was counting strokes, then at least I know how many strokes it took me to get to that weak over-honed edge state. Under honing an edge gives a type of half-baked sharpness, this can easily happen if you depend upon a previously set and used bevel.

These stages of keenness can act as indicators, and knowing how many strokes it took to create a flat A-side gives me a good chance of sneaking up to the keenest edge when working on the B-side without wasting good steel, stone, and time. Just discovering keenness by accident would be my last choice. With consistent hand pressure and a stroke count formula on the same razor and stone, I can formulate a game plan that can be repeated with less loss of time and material.

If I am incorporating a second stone to remove that first scratch pattern, I will angle that next stone with an alternate direction scratch pattern. The reduction rate (measured in strokes necessary to remove a pattern) using any stone will provide a notation of their compatibility with that particular steel. The coarse 45-degree presentation of the blade further provides a wide non-discriminatory scratch pattern along the length of the blade if the stone is wider than the blade. If the stone is narrower than the blade, some adjustment of the angle by the holding hand angle can help. All successive 90-degree-right angle edge leading reduction strokes on the finer gritted stones that will follow, will jump out in contrast, especially when viewed using a simple jeweler's eye loupe. If I am doubting that any of the test stones are suited to the blade, I can easily backtrack and with a few swipes make a fresh 45-degree or 90-degree scratch pattern for the erasing of the last scratches to begin a new pattern. Synthetic stones are also prone to cut certain steel better than others.

All finishing work is predicated upon the earlier bevel setting stage which is the foundation of razor honing or for that matter, all blade crafts. More steel is removed during the bevel set step, with its coarser stone by necessity, than all other following steps combined. So keeping a good eye on what is going on, and minimizing the formation of an over-cooked bevel set will only benefit you.

(Silica has a major function in developing the structural integrity of biological organisms including higher plants\”)1a 1. Currie HA, Perry CC. Silica in plants: biological, biochemical and chemical studies. Ann. Bot. 2007;100:1383-1389. doi: 10.1093/aob/mcm247. (1b)

(Silicates are found in all parts of the body, not just the skin. And found in all animals and plants, not just horses and cows. It is the single most common element on earth)(Stropping leather thoughts. Pg.1, July 13/2014) Stitchawl .https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/stropping-leather-thoughts.1199769/"|)

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([In higher life forms, silicon is found in tissues including tendon, muscle, skin, vital organs, and blood" (1b). 2. Carlisle Edith Muriel. Ciba Foundation Symposium 121 - Silicon Biochemistry. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.; 2007. Silicon as an Essential Trace Element in Animal Nutrition; pp. 123-139)).

A hanging leather strop certainly does cut steel, but not enough to dramatically alter the full face of the razor's bevel. The edge is fragile and it projects from the greater thickness of the blade, so it will be the portion of the edge that always benefits the most. Proper stropping? Well, that is a big subject. Careful stropping can take you far, and power or speed stropping is not so necessary if your angle "slack" is compatible with the angle of the edge. Favoring a shallow (taut) angle will allow you to sneak up on a keen edge, too slack will rush the process and you might over-shoot the edge which changes the bevel's angle.

When I strop the razor as a right-handed person, I take a boxer's stance, my dominant right hand holding the razor over my right foot forward, with the left hand holding the strop at waist level while my left elbow is tucked a bit around the back of my left hip at waist level as an anchor. In this posture, my body is slightly canted in line with the strop. With my weight balanced over both feet but tending to the ball of the back foot; the far end of the strop firmly anchored to a hook at waist-level doorknob height, I have created an architecture of stability. Being right-handed I place the razor upon the strop that has about 3-4 inches of slack-which in theory should equal the bevel angle of the blade but, favoring neither the edge nor the spine in their touching the leather. Stropping first using the full length of the strop, I count strokes. Toward the end of the session, I use shorter and slower strokes that encourage the theme of lighter strokes without actually having altered the down pressure on the razor.

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6. My Science of sharp

To begin with, the Japanese Awasedo stone is a complex pyroclastic volcanic tephra. A rhyolite sediment product that was aeolian sorted and graded simply by the heaviest particles falling first and the lightest falling last and farthest to the ground. The awasedo beds in Kyoto were mined over a radius of 20 miles and distributed within the most recent two million years.

This aeolian particle fallout feature will help to explain the uniqueness from one layer of stone to another, or from one mine site to another mine. Those masses of volcanic tephra for our purposes will defined by the abundance of the mineral's silica dioxide and aluminum oxide content. Although it is the utility of the whole intact chemistry in use that defines the value of the tephra. The workings of the most apparent abrasive qualities are derived directly from these two major mineral components working in unison, especially when sharpening bi-metal blades like Japanese tools and Japanese razors. Mined as minerals, with roughly a ratio of 4 parts silica to 1 part alumina these two components should not be assumed to represent the overall quality of one stone over another or used to discount the importance of the other oxides. Instead, they are used here only to further define those two most abundant components working in unison.

In any typical mine geology, the deeper sedimentary layers will compact harder, and the shallow layers will compact as a softer product. Hard stone surfaces will seem to feel and act finer although when the particles are analyzed, the hard and soft sediment components will often possess very similar individual-size minerals. In the trades, stones with a less desirable consistency or irregular particle sizes are usually demoted to the sharpening of common tools or farm implements. Only those stones that are medium (Mohs 3), medium-hard (Mohs 4), and very hard (Mohs+ to 6) are traditionally left aside for advanced skilled hand-sharpening duties.

When excellent awasedo sedimentary stones are provided for crafts, their useful qualities must be ascribed by examination and should ideally be tested with your tool blades. And although by the time we

#148 Not a Kyoto sharpening stone but just an example of a silica-rich sedimentary stone.

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end-users get a chance to acquire and use these stones, their inherent qualities and types will have already been sorted out by the critical marketplace, the testing of the stones with your blades before purchase is prudent. Some stones will work better with certain steels than others. This is a common belief and it is valid. The main "working" Al2O3 and Sioz components by weight in awasedo on average makeup approximately 80% of the volume of the stone. Aluminum oxide (Mohs 9) is the hardest mineral in the awasedo, but by volume, there will always be a greater percentage of silica (Mohs 7), and this imbalance is taken into consideration by the blacksmith when designing the base components of a blade.

Awasedo stones when used for abrading steel are pre-hydrated. They are not effective if dry. The absorbed water puffs up the minerals, and in doing so loosens the stone's matrix as the water takes up space giving the stone's surface a 3-dimensional property. The water also aids by carrying away abraded waste metals. The crystallized structure of aluminum-silicate, as in the form of a kaolin nanotube, can repeatedly absorb and expel water over and over again during the sharpening process.

Because the awasedo's most voluminous element overwhelmingly is silica (Mohs-7), this will be the first mineral to touch both the steel and the iron in the sharpening process. The crafting and reduction of the soft iron will be the task for the silica and those efforts will lead to the blade's acquisition of a trademark pebbly kasumi pattern on the softer irons surface. The alumina on the other hand will polish the hard steel of the cutting edge. The proportions of these agents and their influence on the metals is no fluke. But instead, their union is a continuation of centuries of calculations that includes the character of tatara as well as the skill of the kiln master. In the final process, it will be the blacksmith's excellent prudence in calculating to the nth degree the designing and production of the blade. His intentions are often based on his collection of sharpening stones, or in some cases those of his client. All of this drama is wonderfully acknowledged within a historical fifteen-hundred-year context based on traditional master-to-apprentice relationships.

In practice, the sharpening of the bi-metal blade begins with the mass of softer iron of the Japanese blade being physically nibbled by the cutting action of the overly abundant silica dioxide, thus leaving the classic kasumi finish that resembles the fuzzy effects of a desert mirage. Versions of this action will reduce the soft jigane iron but have zero effect in reducing the Rockwell 59-64 hardness steel. On the other hand, the harder-rarer hagane steel of the cutting edges will ideally yield to the harder alumina. So you have two compatible agents, one for soft iron and one for cutting hard steel.

During the blade sharpening process, the modestly abundant alumina can easily cut the hard steel but the alumina must first be sorted out and concentrated in volume under the blade. With awasedo, the sharpening powers of the Al2O3 know no limits, nor hold hostages regarding its ability to reduce steel or to crush the silica to a finer state. The broken bonds of the reduced particle size of the silica will allow for the exposure of the much hardier and still full-size alumina particles to rub the steel. Consequently, a Free For All Sharpening Party begins and the uninvited guest is that of hand fatigue which can casually allow for the alteration/deformation of the blade's ideal masugu-straight and flat bevel surface to weep in the softer iron portions of the blade. When this happens, the vulnerable iron can be haphazardly worn away if hand-skill mechanics do not dominate. This is why I often use a jig to hold a large blade, and why many use abrasive-resistant tape on a spine of a straight or kamisori razor to prevent needless loss of softer iron.

The alumina can easily cut the steel and crunch the free-ranging silica matrix in size to represent smaller micron ranges. This is the nexus of the contrasting kasumi finish. Bi-Metal vs Bi-Abrasive.

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A successful effort when using awasedo should leave a perfectly formed hard steel apex, a perfectly flat platform of the soft iron across the full width of the surface of the blade to the cutting edge. This requires the careful management of as little loss to the softer jigane base iron as possible.

I use and encourage during the final finishing strokes when sharpening all steels, the use of edge-leading strokes. For bevel settings and restorations, this forward push stroke encourages the direct contact of the front edge of the steel to the stone and discourages a dragging type of contact by the softer iron. Think of the friction of applying the brakes of a moving car, the front end bows down to inertia.

In the sharpening process, with edge leading strokes, the steel edge should be the first metal to be challenged. From this moment on it will be prudent to focus on the preservation of the softer iron. A jig can be the perfect addendum to help with this if you are sharpening a tool. With razors, taping the razor's spine with abrasion-resistant tape like Kapton will certainly help to preserve that softer iron.

To a greater or lesser degree, from now on, any needless sacrifice of valuable soft iron loss is dependent upon the skill of the operator. The so-called "good" productive loss to the soft iron comes from the physical nibbled-cutting action of the abundant silica by the operator and 100% of the bad loss is due to the operator's lazy hand skills. All versions of this action will play out for the betterment of the tool in general if the hard steel and soft iron are abraded in compatible ratios. This does not mean for a kanna blade one stroke on the front of the blade and one on the back of the blade. No, you must observe the blades-edge for keenness and always preserve the ura of the blade from excessive needless loss. Sadly this is often not so easy because the iron, being so vulnerable, and the bevel being so wide. Many sharpeners of these blades lazily use the wide surface of the soft iron (knife or tool) as an angle guide of sorts for honing the hard steel. This is a mistake. And when factoring in the huge mass of the body of a kanna blade, the temptation to torque the blade of a knife or a kamisori razor to advance to speed up the work of abrasion is present, much valuable irreplaceable metal often ends up on the floor.

The amount of energy used to perform these requirements will be influenced by the difficulty of abrading the hard high-carbon steel of the cutting edge when working from the omote side. Let me try to explain this 3-dimensional axiom occurrence, in a 2-dimensional sentence.

As the low volume but harder aluminum oxide (Mohs9) begins to polish/refine the hard steel, if the intended bevel angle is not supported firmly in alignment, any variation of the bevel angle misalignment during the presentation will tend to most greatly affect the unit of the soft base iron. When this has happened, I ask you, what will become of the geometry of the blade? Any inadvertent rocking of the blade will add curvature to the face of the blade. Any unusual movement will favor the rubbing of the softer jigane iron on the abrasive component. Mathematics can figure into expressing this deformation action, but simple deduction of this process should suffice and most any person who sharpens by hand will repeat this statement. Just as water seeks the lowest, so does abrasion seek the softest most vulnerable metal, especially when a sharpening jig is not used. But even so, a jig is only as good as the operator.

As the alumina in the stone will attempt to cut the hard steel, that steel must first be reached through the 4 parts volume of silica to give it a chance to cut the steel with the 1-part portion of hard alumina. With awasedo, the volume of silica is commanding the center stage, and in doing so it is encouraging a lopsided form of flatness of the bevel of the blade to a lazy hand. It is at this early stage, with the voluminous silica content to work through-that a useless convex cutting blade profile can begin to form. If you are hand sharpening the blade, and not using a jig mounted to the blade to create and maintain the perfectly flat

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platform bevel, this convexity begins to exist often before you know it, and restoring the ideal angles requires more loss.

It would be perfect if the alumina were to drive the whole process by having full and unfettered access to both the steel and the iron, but the diminutive alumina percentage content in awasedo cannot support exclusive rights to bevel geometry grinding. Or how about using only high-carbon steel to make the whole blade? Well, this was most certainly contemplated over the last thousand years. Prudence is a trait well versed in Japan and the costs of something so rare as tamahagane, useful in all arts and crafts-- building and fighting prevailed.

The two metals work together to cut and vacate the detached swarf, and this does not happen when the swarf is left in situ. As waste between the blade and the stone, lazy swarf will certainly influence the flatness of the bevel face of the blade. After all, the keenness of a blade is a reflection of its perfect, or not-so-perfect geometry.

When sharpening by free hand and holding the blade between your two hands, it is the skill and the hand strength of the craftsperson that drives the project towards perfect geometry. If you have a blade mounted in a jig it can allow you to be free of shaky tired hands so you can concentrate on enhancing the existing geometry. A jig and or handwork can work well, but only because of the genius that the 3 part sharpening method is operative. Stone & Steel and Slurry, each play a role while Water is the arbitrator.

The stone will wear down the steel and it gets sharper, but only if the water softens the stone and carries away the wasted steel in the water. But when the stone gets softer the blade's angle is affected. There is always a sweet spot in the process that is wise to acknowledge.

However, this does not have to be the end of the sharpening process.

If you continue the reduction of metals, if you focus your activity with purpose by flushing or even brushing away the totality of the loose silica grit and swarf, you will with diligence have access to the development of an ultra-flat surface, and it will be formed with aluminum oxides that now have unfettered access to the "edge of the edge" of the blade,

With practice and technique, a Mohs 4-5 hardness level awasedo can be trained to "act" like it is laying flatter if it is immersed in a pool or under running water. The alumina, by its nature, will remain as a physically larger size mineral conglomerate when in a mix with silica because the harder Al2O3 tends to resist fracturing in comparison to the relatively fragile silica component.

With any friction between the alumina and the blade, it is the aluminum oxide that is running the show, and if you can minimize the silica exposure, a burnished, intimate effect will more naturally begin between the alumina and the blade. There will always be some fresh silica grit released from the stone, and for the mirror polishing of the blade, especially at the cutting edge of the blade, the silica swarf needs to be minimized or vacated. This stage is when your skill will make a big difference in working with hard steel. Knowing when to stop and when to strop your razor is important.

If the slurry is not present we have the description of a hypothetical ideal 2-body-honing scheme. Two bodies, Al2O3, and the steel, no swarf. When you flush the stone with clean water, and the surface is free of loose steel or swarf, you are trending in that direction. Just the surface of the stone and the steel. If the bevel is flat vou will have intimate contact between the two, and suction can be felt under the blade face. With more skill and more observation coupled with diligent hand movements, the finest, thinnest apex of

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With Fore Thought.

that steel, created off that stone is within reach. Chattering of the blade on the stone happens as suction comes into play, this will test your hand, but this will be as close to the perfect coupling of stone to steel as these components can offer

The synthesis of the blade from dull to sharp is a process of reduction. The strong always win in the end, and the hard steel in this case is the recipient of the effort.

To wrap things up. The operator provided the kinetic energy, and many of the other oxides did contribute to the sharpening but their roles are mainly supportive in providing the work pattern results.

The foible of the awasedo is also their charm, and why we are not satisfied with owing just one! They are like a thoroughbred horse; four legs, a long neck, and two eyes; neigh - average!? Don't think so!

On the backstretch, awasedo, they got something that goes beyond training, their gut needs to finish cutting steel. And, even if it leads them to last place.

(you can always blame it on the jockey.)

A young soft-spoken fellow bequeathed to me two-thirds of his sharpening technique by demonstration when honing a 60mm wide bi-metal kanna blade. Not a word was spoken as I was watching over his shoulder. His method, in essence, is, to the best of my understanding, an approach to honing that recognizes that with each step of honing, while the cutting steel/edge of the blade is being refined, a certain amount of deformation is happening simultaneously to the flat of the blades omote.

The flat plane of the omote is where opportunistic loose slurry grit and iron swarf accumulate as your fingers are concentrated on pushing down on the cutting edge of the blade. The omote is thus vulnerable to deformation.

This loose slurry, when energized by each motion of the blade on the stone is at this very same time rounding the geometry of the blade's omote, mostly in the area of the softer iron. This fellow's movements indicated to me that he recognized this and designed a system that takes this non-productive reduction of the bevel into account by incorporating a third element, an engineered flat diamond plate too, in mid-stream, flatten his blade to high standards.

It seems logical that by taking a blade 3 steps forward beginning with a 1,000 grit stone, and then taking 1 step backward with a slightly coarser 800 correctional diamond plate to re-flatten the steel omote of the blade, the diamond will in effect re-flatten the omote to close to zero flatness. This is all performed with the greatest degree of hand technique so he does not disturb the blade's edge, (remember this is supposed to be craft) without damaging the steel of the edge. With close optical observation, he repeats this three steps forward-one-step backward sequence with ever finer and finer base stones and correction plate; and with softer and softer hand pressure. He will finally eke out the type and quality of sharpness and flatness he was aiming at.

All of this as you might have already guessed incorporates a succession of high-quality awasedo stones paired with an equal number of machined and dedicated diamond plates, and numerically graded

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7. How to Measure

sets of natural and synthetic abrasive stones. This kit, which I picked up once, weighed well north of 35 pounds. He fits a whole laboratory into one case.

Now I have to admit that the three steps forward and one step backward is a bit of overkill, but its use is well-based and pertinent in that it recognizes that the blade will always have a faulty cant if the abrasive platform itself displays a degree of error regarding flatness. And, his liberal use of water during this adjustment routine suggests that he blames much of the fault on loose slurry and loose steel swarf.

With his kit of progressively finer abrasive sharpening stones and backtracking without effectively deforming the edge of the steel edge, but only the rounded (deformed) surface of the bevel, utilizing agents of progressively finer "correction" stones, and by flushing, with lots and lots of water he moves in increments towards excellence.

This person gave me no verbal instructions, I stole this technique from him in public. I don't mind if he sues me, any chance to spend time with this splendid fellow is worthwhile, has always been and will always be a joy to associate with him.

We know that the composition of the Japanese Narutaki Awasedo natural stones from the major mines acts in two ways, first as an abrasive for cutting steel, and second as a vehicle for the vacating of spent grit and metal swarf. This contained system is one of the beauties of Narutaki Awasedo.

This also happens when a loose grit slurry component of a nagura (similar helper stone) is introduced, and some variables can be predicted with known stone combinations. When ultimate keenness is demanded, the silica and alumina grit particles from the nagura must be as fine and friable as those of the base stones grit. We can also observe that attempting to pair an ultra-hard base stone with an ultra-hard nagura is almost always a failure as the nagura can scratch and gouge and disfigure the base stone's surface thereby providing oddly shaped and sized rogue grit. The alternative fix to the above dilemma is to use an ever so slightly softer nagura, one that when used will not only add an alternative grit but one that will encourage the release of fresh base stone grit.

Ultra-hard Japanese natural stones in the Mohs 6 & 6+ range or above, come with their unique built-in difficulties. Accessing the bound-up grit for production work is nearly impossible and so these stones are usually delegated for the final polish stages, as opposed to the actual sharpening of, sizing, and shaping of the blade. Shaving razors however have such narrow cutting-edge bevels and the workload being smaller, the fatigue of finishing off those edges is within reason when using Mohs 6+ hardness stones. For finishing wider bevels on knives or tools, ultra-hard stones can be an endurance test of fighting hand fatigue which is the enemy of handcrafted work, so knowing the limits and compatibility of stone vs. steel combinations is helpful.

Under the burden of a steel blade or a diamond lapping plate, the so-called hardness of a Jnat can more easily be equated. Rubbing a familiar dedicated nagura stone or even tapping with your fingernail can lead to conclusions regarding hardness. A small mallet can be handy for lightly taping a stone to identify

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internal structural problems and the hardness of a stone. A ringing tone is positive, and a thud is a dud. Duds should be less expensive, and often they can be remanded as a nagura.

Depending on the thickness of the stone, the choice sound when tapping will be that of a bright bell. If dull, like that of rapping on wood, the stone is likely cracked. A dull vibrating tone indicates internal inclusions or irregularities in the stone. The bell-ringing bright tone will indicate hardness and structural integrity while with a stone of the same size and quality but softer it will sound deeper. Using a familiar test blade on a stone of known hardness and then moving the steel to your target untested stone will give insight, or rubbing the stone being tested with a lapping plate as the provocateur will offer insight into the ease and amount of free-ranging silicate clay and alumina abrasive material that might be released from this new base stone. All of these tips are relative to your empirical experience, as there are no industry-standardized common scales to refer to. The Mohs scale can help track the character of an assortment of stones for comparative testing to help you to note and deduce the incremental values of potential purchases.

Any of the tennen toishi, just like synthetic stones when used with razors, knives, or tools, can become glazed as the swarf builds up in the pores of the stone. This can make the stone feel even finer and harder than it might be. Stones with a super-refined silicate clay matrix although not greatly compressed can shield a stone's surface particles from rubbing loose under a blade. When this happens only the tops of the grit particles come into contact with the steel giving the impression of finer particles or, of a harder stone. When these grit components remain in situ, their exposed peaks become worn and rounded with diminishing, ineffective cutting powers which then begin to more and more provide a polished or burnished surface to the steel mimicking fineness. It is your choice to promote or demote this lack of actual cutting action.

With medium-hard or medium-soft awasedo toishi finishing stones, the clay components are less compacted and thus provide the ability of water intrusion and for dulled (cleaved) silica particles to shed allowing for new fresh sharp particles to be exposed which can, and usually will accelerate the cutting processes. If the silica grit is ultra-fine and in a softer stone, you can develop a very fine-gritted Kasumi pattern on the steel. Or vice versa if using coarser gritted stones.

Honing/sharpening is abrasion, a process with a method and a goal. How long and how hard it is for any given abrasive material to abrade a particular steel can be recorded if carefully observed through the indicators of your scratch pattern. Once the first, or most recent scratch pattern has been replaced by the newest scratch pattern, in theory then the job has been completed. The steel at the edge might be fully refined before the general face of the full bevel has been, but so what. It is only the edge of the edge that will be doing the productive cutting. With synthetics in a finely tuned shop situation, predictive results can be dialed in and targeted, with natural stones more burden is placed on the craft skills of the operator so using an easily repeatable method can be a great advantage.

The simplest single method I use for observing progress is by alternating the direction of scratch patterns from the first abrasive to the next abrasive as a sequence. When a diagonal scratch pattern that reaches from the cutting edge to the transition line of the hollow ground steel has been removed and replaced by a straight-on right angle perpendicular to the previous edge scratch pattern, then I can accurately predict the relative state of the apex and the cutting speed of that stone with that steel. Treating both sides of the blade equally is just logical, and following the process of the scratch pattern is a great help in doing this. For a craft person, this progress of abrasion is important to monitor because it makes redundant any additional or continued abrasive actions. Determining when it is time to move on to the next

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abrasive or stone, the scratch pattern is a tool of indication. It provides visual records of the step-by-step from one abrasive to the next. There is one visual state of the blade however that needs some explanation, once read it will make sense.

If you look closely at a previously fully honed and stropped razor's edge and then go to hone it again, the new scratch pattern will appear to develop first at the base of the steel bevel instead of the edge of the bevel. This is because the stropping action of a razor blade on leather has slightly reduced, but mainly affected the thickness of the edge. Understand that this is the goal of stropping, to thin the edge. Whenever you strop a razor, the emphasis will be on the edge and its reduction. The slack of the hanging strop assures this. So when you begin to re-hone a used straight razor the abrasion will begin by affecting the base of the bevel, and only when fully resurfaced it will display the new continuous scratch pattern from the base to the edge.

When testing stones in my shop for compatibility with certain steels, I use this routine. From stone to stone after examining the blade, and setting the bevel of the blade, using edge leading passes, I use a diminishing 21-stroke count routine. If this stone in hand can remove all of the scratches in 21 or fewer strokes, I deem it an excellent pairing. If the scratches are hardly affected, I quickly move on to a different stone. By always using the same comfortable and consistent hand pressure. I think of the honing process for testing stones like l am backing my car into a strange garage, by using repetitively accurate, reasonably soft, and efficient strokes (like taps to the gas pedal or foot brake). With the last three strokes of the steel to the stone, the only adjustment for me is in the speed of moving the blade across the stone. I do not adjust or alter my hand's downward pressure, only the speed of the stroke by moving the blade slower and slower across the stone until I just snuggle into the slot of keenness. Once I have efficiently honed my razor on a particular stone, and have tested it, I can save the energy and the steel of testing the next time by referring to my notes.

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Skills and How to Use

Chapter VIII

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VIII. SKILLS AND HOW TO USE

1. How I work with kamisori razors

I have begun the sharpening section of this book with the honing of shaving razors because what we call "wet" shaving demands the ultimate type of smooth, close, and comfortable keenness. This is not to minimize the importance of keenness regarding tools and knives, but only to suggest that any (often painful) negative feedback provided from a semi-sharp or dull razor is an excellent critique of your honing skills. Many of the same honing skills necessary for razors can in turn be transferred to define your sharpening technique and material needs for a host of other tools like pairing chisels and finishing planes which also require the highest states of edge development for the shaving of wood. Although shaved wood does not scream back at you with the same ferocity as a poor shave will, the critical components of truly keen cannot be compromised or faked. The virtue of being "as sharp as a razor" is universally accepted as a standard. A poor shave knows no geographic barriers between interested parties or conversations regarding skills. Techniques and mnemonic rhythms can be passed on between persons and are almost always shared gratefully. Once you recognize what truly sharp is and what it feels like, it is a bite that is not easily forgotten.

The traditional Japanese kamisori razor is and always has followed the patterns of a working man's single bevel tool, that of having a front (omote) and a back (ura). To the Western user of symmetrically designed razors and cutting and chopping tools, the asymmetrical kamisori presents certain questions and challenges regarding their honing, maintenance, and use. The Western world promotes symmetricity while the Japanese culture recognizes symmetry but if their gardens are any hint, they have a unique version of it. I would suggest that form, balance, utility, and economy rule above symmetry. The odd and the old speak of character in Japan, and honing and shaving with kamisori requires a wide perspective.

The traditional hand tools of Japan are based on ancient patterns designated for use by a right-handed craft person. 99.99 percent of samuri were right-handed, and 100 percent of the barbers were right-handed before the Edo Period. Specialized tools such as the kamisori were not widely available to the public

#149 Metal kamisori and a bamboo practice kamisori.

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but instead were handmade specifically for use by barbers. In ancient Japan a tool could be a lifetime investment and owning just one kamisori might have been enough for a barber in Japan to start a multigenerational business. Head hair and beard hair in the classic early years of Japan spoke of social position and it was only the elite and especially the samurai and priests and lords who maintained a shaved pate or jaw. It was not until the late Edo period that shaving daily became common. There was even an attempt in the Meiji period to mandate shaving for all men to encourage those of the lower classes to join the already shaving popular upper classes. This mandate was short-lived, maybe because it was driven by the government to anglicize the populace. The truth is, if my father-in-law was any example, working men were not shy of a little pain and preferred to pluck what hair they deemed disposable.

The kamisori profile is shaped by hammer to anvil, and the metal of the narrow handle is formed by the same as an extension of the blade platform. The handle can be (is very) awkward to hold, but tradition dictates. The handle and blade platform will be further shaped mainly with the use of just one hammer and the anvil. When the overall structure for the kamisori shape is formed, the blade platform of the ura is heated red hot, peppered with flux, and an elongated two-millimeter thin piece of precious high carbon hagane steel is laid upon. Hammer striking, as in forge-welding the iron base and hagane steel structure to represent the blade.

After re-heating, and malleable, the hollow ground ura formation is hammered into its final shape by the smith working at an indented anvil and a convex-headed hammer matching the curve. In its finished tool form, the overlaying hagane steel will be sharpened to represent a proper edge. These two forge-welded domestic metals as a unit share the same root as that of the samuri sword. The introduction of the tatara kiln in the early 6th century accompanied the imported Buddhist texts regarding the ceremonial shaving of head hair by priests with kamisori. The mention of kamisori shaving and lamination techniques in a religious setting predates any mention of creating weaponry using those same metalworking techniques.

#150 Above, prepare for folding and more consolidation by hitting.

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In the historic tatara kiln, the hagane and jigane metals are born as brothers from the same smelt. These metals were derived from natural iron-rich black volcanic river sand that was traditionally processed in the fire-hardened clay tatara kiln fueled with pinewood charcoal. These two specific metals in their graded form, when derived from a tatara and specifically used for swords and razors are spoken of as Tamahagane-steel and Watetsu-iron. In a modern setting, razors and knives are made from a wider variety of steel formulas that will possess a chemical type of tamahagane and watetsu. These modern boutique steels will often be jet-enhanced with carbon. Whether developed in a factory or a backyard modern gas-fired smelting kilns made from re-purposed oil drums and operated by enthusiasts; any ancient name designation carry over for these current kilns and metals does not enhance, belittle or infringe upon the traditions of the old clay tatara, but instead, they highlight the uniqueness of the traditional way of the tatara and the persistence of ancient themes. Although in late Edo and early Meiji, the class of the samurai was officially abolished, and the forging of the katana was halted, the blacksmiths continued their craft by making useful tools and introducing more modern steels for modern uses.

In the smelting of tamahagane and watetsu, the local industry of making charcoal of pinewood takes place along with the gathering of volcanic iron-rich black sand from clear water mountain riverbeds. Large amounts of specially sourced kaolin-rich earth are hand-packed over a woven willow tree branch frame. Following a specific pattern, the frame is then covered with heat-insulating layers of local clay with incorporated natural fibers. A set of bellows is installed and linked to sets of pipes used for adding oxygen to the heated silica bloom below. When the tatara structure is finished, a fuel base of charcoal is loaded into the tatara and ignited to dry the clay and to prove the heating abilities above and below the ground including a heat-sink moisture barrier below the kiln. This may take several days. If you include the construction of the clay kiln structure, the firing, sequences of pine charcoal-sand-charcoal-sand-charcoal, and so on including the cool-down period: the whole process can take weeks and employ dozens of people. These very same methods in ancient times were a guarded secret by rural clans in forested/iron-rich outposts.

The days and nights of the smelting process are a constant effort, adding fuel and pumping the bellows to provide fresh oxygen into the basement of the tatara never halts. The goal is a finished mass of a sponge-looking iron bloom called a kera, and a successful kera is not guaranteed. It will always be the skill and dedication of all of the participants that will raise the odds of successful tatara. The moment to reveal the kera from the kiln's basement is a no-turning-back event. The Murage (kiln master) at times orders portions of kera to be pulled out from the lowest depths of the tatara, while still red hot in its never-molten sponge lump state. After the inspection, he has some options to work with but the general crew still has little chance to relax after days of tending the fires over.

On a small-scale smelt, the Murage may prod and pick with a metal poker as he begins to break off and separate obvious portions for the making of watetsu. This grade is set aside. On a large-scale smelt, the mass will need to be slightly cooled before separating the grades. In either case, at some point, the kera will be turned, hit, and struck in the search and recognition of the tamahagane portion by hammer blows at an anvil while the bloom is still hot. As the kera cools it is reheated to facilitate more prodding while in the malleable state. The pieces of watetsu and tamahagane are separated into graded piles by the master as he goes along. The rhythm of the hammer is ever-present, the Murage's goal is to collect the metals for consolidation, and nothing goes to waste. The grade groups are based on the quality of the metals and their perceived carbon content, and the recognition of success comes when the various parts of the kera bloom are hit to judge their consolidation, and to what degree. The carbon-rich portions of the kera will be denser,

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2. The Omote

have a finer sponge structure, will feel heavier, and will not crumble but instead will squish under the hammer blows. Nothing goes to waste.

In modern Japan, tamahagane is still produced by the Japanese Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords, The Nihon Bijutsu Token Hozon Kyokai (NBTHK) together with the Japanese government's Agency for Cultural Affairs with the help of the Hitachi Metal Works. A full-size tatara is built in Shimane Prefecture at one of two locations and this is the so-called Nittoho Tatara for the continued production of Japanese swords. This is at its heart a ceremonial smelting of high-carbon tamahagane steel in a classic tatara, created in an iconic setting once or twice a year. The new tatara is built under the instruction of a Murage master who was chosen from a rotating shortlist. This smelt is as much about the duty of preserving and the recognition of the past as it is to provide steel. Tamahagane and Watetsu are not chemically the purest or finest steel products in the world, instead, the whole process represents an almost religious event, a heritage.

Tamahagane, in its impurity, is found its character. Its foible is its strength, the power to absorb shock without shattering. There are no national laws forbidding private parties from creating tamahagane in Japan, and these non-sanctioned products will have to stand on their own merits. Tamahagane and the elusive watetsu provide for those parties just mentioned, and their group culture, the same taste of history that we users of Natutaki Awasedo are reminded of when we splash the rocks with water. The inanimate comes alive, they stand up on their tiptoes and brighten our work. It is their perfect imperfection that commands our continued interests. Techniques and mnemonic rhythms can be passed on between persons and are almost always shared gratefully. Once you recognize what truly sharp is and what it feels like; inspecting the internal patterns of the steel when polished with awasedo, it is a bite that is not easily forgotten.

Now about the omote side of the kamisori razor. First, it must be noted that the face of the omote is composed of 98% soft iron-jigane, and this soft iron also represents the frame of the kamisori. The omote is even more susceptible to the same over-honing (altered geometry) as the ura side of the blade. They each have exposed soft jigane at their spine, and it is easy to needlessly waste that jigane on either side of the kamisori. However, the omote is especially vulnerable because of a centrally positioned bulge of the soft iron jigane, and if you begin to reduce this bulge you will then be altering the slope of the hard steel on this same side. In edge maintenance, the omote and ura will only need a short series of light touches to the stone plus stropping to spring it back to use, and using Kapton tape guarantees that the apex of the edge is fixed. Ideally, the reservation of the soft iron is most easily achieved by shielding the jigane during regular

#150

#151

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maintenance. For restorations of chipped or rusted blade edges, a longer regime is in order, and this is an action that requires tremendous restraint to prevent needless deformation to any of the portions of the blade, especially of the omote. One way to prevent the unnecessary loss of jigane soft iron from the spine of the ura, and the hump of the omote, is to cover them with wear-resistant tape.

Kapton tape serves this task well. It is thin and has excellent wear-resistant qualities which allows for intimate stone-steel contact under circumstances you control while maintaining the blade's original form. Kapton also minimizes the residue left on the stone that others like electrician's tape tend to do.

Regarding the blacksmith's geometric intentions and taping the spine to prevent premature wear. It will likely take a year or more of taping and honing before any angle adjustments are necessary to recreate the blacksmith's expected wear patterns. And at that point, you will have matured in your understanding of the uniqueness of the kamisori. Realistically, abrasion to the protruding ridges on each side of the kamisori is a projected loss by the smith, but because Japan is the only country in the world that can easily provide regenerative services for kamisori, the premature loss of metal will be a sad circumstance indeed.

In a general sense, the main reason to touch the ura side with your very finest gritted and perfectly flat stone is after you have finished one-half of the correction work required for refreshing the edge on the omote.

Begin on the omote with let us say 5 light strokes. Now, the only reason to move over to the ura on the stone is to begin to influence a wire edge that was being encouraged while working the omote side. When next working with accurate strokes on the ura, you judge that pronounced wire edge begins to lay towards the ura, this is when you, with very light strokes, go back to the omote side with a few strokes (maybe 2 or3) to coax the wire again back towards the ura. If it is this fragile, then it will suffer less shock when next you remove the wire completely by honing it off from the ura side. If so, now you are almost finished and stropping is next.

If you examine the edge portions of the ura and omote of a "new from the blacksmith" kamisori, the bright shiny hagane hard steel will be seen as 3 times as wide on the omote, to 1 portion wide on the ura. This is the ratio that you will want to maintain. By all means, the soft hagane should never be seen to represent the edge of the edge on the omote side or the ura side. The hard steel width on the ura should ideally be 1/3 as wide as that of the omote on a geometrically balanced kamisori.

#152, #153, #154

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3. Knives

If you can maintain these examples of 3-to-1 wear ratios over many routine sharpenings, you are doing very well in preserving the metals. The blade on the left is from the early Meiji period, the two others are from the 20th century.

Always strop the razor before testing keenness. The last few strokes on the leather must be of the lightest direct and dedicated pressure aimed only at the edge without lifting the spine. Imagine and focus the stroke so the edge is truly affected. If there is a wire edge on the ura when you are going back to the hone-stone, that wire must be the first issue to be addressed on the ura by beginning first on the omote side with the lightest touch on the stone. Do not wear off the wire using hard pressure, it must be abrasion and preferably in increments.

You do not need to wear the wire off all at once or right away. The wire edge should yield without hesitation under the motion of just a few edge-leading strokes. If it does not, refrain from manually removing by extra pressure, but instead add a few strokes to the opposite omote. If it does not yield under light but direct pressure, check your stone again for flatness. Any extra strokes on either side should be balanced on the opposite side. Going back to the omote side is the easiest and best choice for moving forward in many circumstances, especially if the spine is shielded by Kapton tape, but do not over-compensate from the ura or the soft omote side, try and work through the hanging wire edge with abrasion.

When honing a classic hocho single-bevel Japanese knife, it is my opinion and intent to make all of the developmental strokes on the omote side. And for the ura side, all and any work should be weighted towards representing as few possible touches of the blade to the stone as possible. For the ura side, and the preservation of its geometry I suggest being very stingy and using as few very light-handed, straight-on-right-angle to-edge leading or slightly cross-angled (always spine-trailing) strokes as possible. It is not cheating to lay tape along the whole spine surface of the ura, or individually along the perimeter of the spine line and the ridge line of the ura side when you are working on any other portion of the omote face of the blade. And back to the ura, you will feel remorseful if you hone/sharpen away on the ura side removing those very thin and narrow perimeter edge shelves. That steel of the ura is hard, but it will wear down and away easily. Photo#155 (left)

When working on the omote, the more of your fingers that you can plant on the ura side the better. All strokes should be edge leading and all should be gently pushing down from the ura side so that only the omote is the beneficiary. Most professional edge masters will not lift the omote off the stone off the blade off of the stone for the return stroke ( that of pulling back towards yourself. and finish one area before moving along the blade to the next area. Many Japanese blades have a faint sway in the middle. Always hesitate to add more strokes or more pressure, and instead take a break as I said before and go to your clean linen and leather strop after this first session to test your blade. Don't hesitate to use a loupe, you might be happily surprised. If the edge is not in the zone of keenness you expected, try taking the knife back to the kitchen and test how dull it is or is not.

Photo#155 (left)

Before Uraoshi

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4. Kasumi

Try and keep in mind that the default is to go back to the omote side and focus on the edge again. Shy away from changing the geometry of the ura side. You will be on your own in the maintenance of your blade if you do, and I know of no one outside of Japan that will regrind the ura on your knives because it requires a massively large grinding wheel and a massive amount of talent and technique. If you have already fully flattened the hollow ground of the ura side of your knife, I encourage you to continue to use it as a reminder that these knives were not designed for export 500 years ago and that you are just one of a multitude of users in the same, not so shabby boat regarding the way the knife now sits in your possession. So continue to use it as it sits.

Kanna blades, however, do allow for a certain amount of misdirection, they can be tapped out. This is done by striking the thick layer of softer wrought iron omote/jigane side, which transfers the energy through the omote influencing the hagane hard steel layer below. If you try this tapping-out technique on a knife blade, the hagane in the blade will likely shatter or crack.

This skill for tapping out a kanna blade however can be picked up and practiced. It requires an anvil, a hammer, a good eye, and a steady and true hand. The blade is placed ura face down on the corner of the anvil and the wrought iron (not the hard steel at the edge) omote is struck from above which encourages the hard hagane to give, bend and shift away from the blows. The thickness of jigane soft iron prevents the blade's hard thin steel edge below the hitting area from springing back. With each tap at the edge of the hagane, the hagane is influenced to protrude past the plane of the former edge in the form of a raised lip which will represent the new edge. This method will not work with knives because there is not enough thickness or mass of jigane wrought iron to 'set' the sprung position.

All of the natural and synthetic stones, and especially the very hard stones when used to sharpen razors, knives, and tools have the potential to become glazed as metal swarf accumulates in the pores of the working surface of the stone. When this happens the glazed surface will feel and act finer and harder while the stone's cutting action will be diminished, and it is in this state that the honing motion will begin to represent a polishing or burnishing action instead of a full-on cutting for the removal of steel. A burnished steel edge can be made very thin, keen, shiny, and extremely sharp, so sharp in fact that it is often fragile, leading to deformation dullness. Many tool steels are so tenacious that with continued polishing the edge will form a tongue-extension or fin-like weak appendage beyond the intersection of bevels. Edge trailing and circular strokes encourage fin formation, and although the creation of this false fin edge is proof that you have re-surfaced that side of the blade at the edge, a fin will not represent the desired geometry of a working edge. To remove that fin, often just a few edge-leading strokes will challenge the steel head-on to a point where the fin will detach; and depending on which stone and the fineness of the grit components of that stone, your cutting edge will emerge with advanced sharpness along with a consistent geometry which is always desirable. Wearing off the fin with finer grit will leave a finer edge, and when a thicker-stronger apex is preferred, this can be engineered by your choice of a coarser gritted stone or slurry.

I am not inclined to finish critical blades with edge trailing or circular strokes. Instead, prefer the perpendicular edge-leading strokes for finishing all of my razors and knives to avoid weak false-feather edges.

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Saying this is not to deny the metal-moving effectiveness of edge trailing and or circular strokes but instead to point out that symmetry in a blade is analogous to strength if all other factors are equal. Although not easily seen with the naked eye in the final stages, an edge-leading scratch pattern has structural advantages over irregular, haphazard, or edge trailing and especially over parallel to the edge strokes.

Because I want the job done efficiently with the least waste of time and material, I prefer to energize the awasedo base stone by using an Atoma diamond plate to create the 3rd body of a structured 3-Body Polishing Program. In Japan, a more simplified system has been used for centuries with the use of a nagura softer-helper stone. The components for any of these systems are the base stone Body-1 (B-1), the steel blade B-2, and the loose slurry B-3. Although not commonly referred to as such, this is a sharpening/polishing scheme that carpenters have used in Japan for eons, that of introducing loose slurry B-3 derived from a tomo (helper) nagura stone, or a Mikawa, Odori, Tsushima Nagura, etc. But it was Todd Simpson, the brains and skill behind the website Science of Sharp.com., from whom I had first heard the naming of the specific Three Body Sharpening process.

The technique of using a diamond plate that I use was introduced to me in 2005 by the Kezuroukai-Japan sharpening wizard Yasutoishi Sengu. It was he who suggested the incorporation of the Atoma diamond plate to free up the slurry directly from the body of your base stone as an alternative to a tomonagura. Some fellows at first rejected this technique with gusto for years, but now since many woodworkers have gone to Japan and seen its wide use there, many in the west here now incorporate a "diamond-nagura" (So Yamashita/Japan-Tool.com, Australia) plate to aid in the sharpening tools and razors.

It is mainly the awasedo types that provide an advantageous slurry. Their binders are grit-rich and will powderize. The same is not true with most synthetic stones and naturals such as the monolithic Arkansas novaculite or the Belgium coticule whose grit matrix will not so conveniently shed micro-sized grit. The awasedo slurry B-3 is unique in that it continues to break down when rubbing between B-1 with B-2. The B-3 slurry began as coarser mini conglomerate slurry packages of the B-1 product. If a fine B-2 product like a 1200-grit diamond plate was used, the B-3 will be finer or vice versa. These slurries ideally should not contain any loose diamond particles. A similar procedure logically suggests that if you rub B-1 with a slurry stone like a Mikawa nagura or a fine tomo nagura, the B-3 will represent proportions of that nagura material coupled with portions of the B1 base stone just as carpenters have done for centuries. In the preparation of rubbing of B-1 with a B-2, the surface of B-1 itself should be as flat as possible so the slurry begins and leaves B-1 as a flat template. When rubbing with B-2, the surface of Body-1 will become either rougher, or smoother, it cannot remain virginal when abrasion takes place, therefore is it wise to rub with any small hand-held nagura towards the ends of the honing stone; outside of the middle honing sections to prevent dishing of the base. By balancing the amount, and the choosing of the abrasives you are designing a customized 3-Body abrasive method.

Using awasedo slurry for cutting steel, although mechanical, is not robotic; skill and observation are required. With the King, Shapton, Naniwa, and the majority of various branded synthetic sharpening stones, their dominant cutting agent is weighted towards aluminum oxide Al2O3 carborundum (Mohs 9). The natural Arkansas Novaculite is almost pure (up to 99%) carborundum. (Mohs 9), and the cherished and rare natural Belgium coticule's main cutting mineral of spessartine garnet (Mohs 7) Mn2+3Al2(SiO4)3which is also weighted towards its aluminum oxide components.

Many of the natural and synthetic stones when used for sharpening tend to act as monolithic abrasive surfaces and not as slurry providers. When their grit remains locked in the stone matrix all is well and regular

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but if the grit particles become loose and roam freely they begin to act independently: some as larger carborundum units that can disfigure the fragile tempered steel edge of a razor or fine knife.

The abrasive propensity of a freshly lapped Japanese awasedo stone is to cut faster-deeper while morphing finer-slower. With the 3-Body abrasive honing environment the Jnat slurry within just a few strokes, the fragility of the hydrated awasedo stone is encouraged to shed a whole slew of micro and sub-millimeter grit bundles. These roaming-cutting units at first act aggressively but soon begin to reduce into smaller bundles until finally, the grit is acting as individual micrometer-sized cutting agents.

It is at this stage that the dominant minerals of silica (65% to 79%) and alumina (4% to 11%) begin to leave their unique individual footprints in the steel. The minor alternate oxides in Awasedo may play a role but their percentages are too low to easily document. This is a refinement scheme, and in 99% of these situations, we are removing previous scratches on the blade in sequence and replacing them with finer scratches. Eventually, with finer abrasives, the individual scratches left are too shallow to see with the naked eye. Just before this, there will be evidence of the Kasumi Effect, that of a hazy appearance from the silica and alumina leaving their divot pattern that represents their abrasion pattern. This hazy fuzzy look is a stage in the refinement sequence that does not necessarily represent the final state of keenness of the cutting edge. But it does represent a sheen to the razor blade's surface that can enhance the comfort of your shaving experience. There is no reason to believe that the wealth of alternate chemical grit components does not add to the "character" of a blade sharpened by organic natural means.

Again, kasumi in Japanese means mirage, that fuzzy space between the images of reality. You can live and shave without a kasumi finish on your straight razor. I am not promoting the cutting action in regards to kasumi, but instead, the difference in comfort when the mirage is in place. A peaceful place where your razor's edge can feel different upon the skin, or the brightness in the sheen of freshly shaved wood.

The Jnat silica and alumina sub-4 micron grit particles cannot be cleaved by the man on the street. As individual particles, they can be reduced in a laboratory. Their size is the result of their origin as explosive a shot from a volcanic tephra gun, and their sedimentation was determined by their aeolian sorting sequence at the whims of the wind. With the Narutaki awasedo sediments of silica and aluminum oxides ranging in the in low single-digit micron size; is it not remarkable that we have access to them? It is not remarkable that you or I can effortlessly cut hair in diameters between 45 and 180 microns in thickness and sheets of wood as thin as 2 to 5 microns in thickness range.

(1) #156. The photos (1), (2), (3) display three stages of the development of a kasumi finish on a Henckels razor, and the hair that it will be cut for testing stones. All photos are taken with the same at 315 optical power.

My bead hair as a sample (enlarged), seen and measured to be 0.125mm (average 0.1 to 0.150 mm in diameter) is a bit thicker than the hair I use in my hanging hair tests, the photo has not been reduced or enlarged. By looking closely, you can see how small and close the cuticles of the hair are, those that the razor's edge must slide between to shave.

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(2) photo #157. The re-honing of a Henckels's Friodur razor begins with a bevel set, the new scratches (King 1000) begin at the base of the razor, not at the edge as many assume. The upper portion represents the previous old edge after 20 shaves plus stropping. It will still shave but will not give me an effortless shave.

(3) photo #158. The bevel is fully re-set with King 1000. The B-side of this razor should mimic the attributes of this side-A.

(4) photo #159. Adding 20 straight-on edge leading strokes, on both sides of the razor, using a compatible Nakayama kiita slurry that was generated with Atoma #600 diamond plate, followed by stropping on clean leather 20 passes per side A and B.

(5) photo #160. Using the same kiita stone but with the original and slightly water-diluted slurry, twenty perpendicular passes on stone per side followed by 20 passes on a clean Kanayama leather strop.

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The motion of stropping a razor on clean leather creates microbursts of heat that will facilitate the shaping of a thin edge, and this is why a razor edge can be refreshed. If you can recognize the formation of the bevel in stages, you can target a type and predict a type of sharpness. We all do this already in our stropping routine, and when we test our razor's keenness quota and our skill by shaving arm hair or cleaving dedicated hair for the hanging hair test. Without adding alternate abrasive grit to your strop, a razor edge can be manipulated by stropping for a long period by adjusting the compression and the slack in the strop, moving the razor slower over the strop, cleaning the leather, and charging it with skin oil by rubbing with the inside of your forearm. Holding the razor at diagonals and stropping faster building heat, or slower with purposeful attention to portions of the razor.

Creating the keenest space-age type of sharpness in your home is an amazing accomplishment, but the downside is that the actual using of the keenest edge that any particular steel can hold has the same likelihood of dying sooner than the old-fashioned just keen enough edge might have. A tuned keen edge can carry on for dozens if not hundreds of shaves as Alfredo Gil of Rhode Island has proven by shaving for nearly a year without going back to the stone.

The Japanese kanji (written form) for kasumi and kasuri have different characters but they share the same visual imaging. Kasumi is that of a mirage, an illusion you perceive as "fuzzy objects" appearing over an expanse of a hot flat surface; classically like in desert. For kasuri weaving, the reference is very clearly displayed in the historic weaving method in Japan, those of irregular edge boundaries of woven patterns leaving them with a fuzzy/hazy outline featuring for instance a bird and cloud & flower patterns or a toy. The kasumi pattern along the hamon of Japanese samuri sword or laminated knife steel is all created by the silica and alumina particles as they pot-mark a divot surface pattern created by awasedo stones and their slurry.

(6) photo #161. The same stone and slurry, less moist but still hydrated, after ten straight perpendicular passes on kiita per side, stropped on clean Kanayama top-grain forty passes using a slower speed. Now representing a faint classic kasumi finish. My goal with all the stones is to use light but firm and consistent enough hand pressure to allow the stone and the slurry to act on their own with the least effect from me. I do not shave with less-than-keen razors, but I also do not shave with overly keen razors. Sharpness in a tool is an elusive beast, it can be keen one moment and dull the next, but good steel can also be refreshed, often with little effort.

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5. Honing kamisori

Kamisori razors are asymmetrical by design, and this fact should influence the honing method. If you hone a kamisori as you would a western-style razor (with its spine of hardened steel) resting on the abrasive stone being abraded, the geometry of the softer spine metal of the kamisori will be susceptible to deformation from haphazard sharpening because the soft jigane iron wears very easily. The omote side surfaces, especially the angle transitions, must be considered and cherished during the life of the razor. You may refer to this design of kamisori as arcane and awkward. With that said understanding, the correct way to maintain these tools will only benefit your efforts. If you fail to approach the honing task with technique and caution you will quickly become disappointed as you suddenly realize that all of those successive sharpenings were not only abrading the steel but tragically, and at a greater rate removing the soft base iron in the process. This core of wrought iron cannot be replaced, and if the original geometry is to be restored it will best be reconstructed by a trained kamisori blacksmith, probably in Japan.

All of the technical skills I will be describing for honing kamisori will be from the perspective of favoring the pushing or pulling of the cutting edge leading across the stone, as opposed to the pushing or pulling of the spine leading across the stone or of circular haphazard strokes. It is my opinion that all of the sharpening from the bevel setting to the final finishing of kamisori should be with edge leading strokes and there is no reason to use spine leading strokes. I am an early promoter of using Kapton high-tech tape to wrap the spines of both Western and kamisori razors when honing them to prevent hapless premature wearing away of the metals. You can always grind away metal, but you cannot easily replace metal.

The chore of abrading Rockwell 61-64 hardness-rated high carbon razor steel representing the cutting edge on a small handheld tool is a demanding exercise. In the bevel setting stage, the cutting edge of hard steel only at the edge of the edge is abraded as flat as possible to create a new surface. I encourage the use of Kapton tape for all of the honing steps for Kamisori, not just the bevel set. In the rudimentary stage of bevel setting (flattening the bevel) refinement, the error of over-working the soft iron omote side's hump, and the thin spine of soft iron of the ura face of a kamisori are sadly too common. To create and consistently maintain flat cutting edges in this critical bevel-set phase with coarser stones and heavier hand pressure requires caution, skill, and technique. Sharpening knives and honing razors is all about directed focused hand pressure. To focus 98% of your hand pressure towards this very narrow portion of the edge of the blade during the bevel setting stage is imperative. This is when the taping of the soft iron can prevent unnecessary waste of good iron because the tape helps to preserve the keen geometry of the spine and the bevels of the edge.

In the finishing stage, 95% of your hand pressure should be affecting only the edge. These high demands will help to preserve the blacksmith's geometry. A torquing of the spine via the handle to minimize the loss of iron is difficult to maintain accurately if you choose not to use tape. Skewing the bevels on a razor, and or pushing them at an angle on the stone will often lead to dramatic and negative effects on the kamisori spine. In every case, a positive or negative gain in bevel angles beyond the blacksmith's intentions can, over time make or break the razor's character. Do not be encouraged by YouTube videos of those fellows who are enjoying a cigar or talking their heads off while honing a kamisori. Any video that requires 20 minutes or more to demonstrate the basic honing of a kamisori razor should be suspect. Some of these fellows are selling you a cultural product and not a skill.

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The essential hand-wrist movement in honing a kamisori is a directional rotation of the axis of the razor from the wrist. This will encourage close contact with the hard steel edge to touch the stone, while at the same time discouraging a wear pattern on the softer spine metal. This does not mean to lift the spine off the stone, but instead to concentrate contact of the edge to the stone. Always hone the edge in a way that minimizes spine wear and always use edge-leading strokes on both sides of the kamisori. Spine leading strokes will never hone a blade satisfactorily.

There will always be a reduction of metal when honing a razor, concentrating that loss at the cutting edge is the goal. You win by sacrificing hard steel with intention. You lose by haphazardly touching soft iron to stone. It is the controlling of a planned method of loss/gain that describes skill. Any skew or lifting on either the bevels or the spine will factor in the shaving geometry of the razor, and those tweaks, in the long run, are just as likely to be multiplied. But if the loss from skewing or lifting the spine is intentional let's say, in a restoration, a program can be devised as a scheme to prevent un-controlled metal loss. The introduction of an abrasive shield can be a player in that scheme. By minimizing, or better yet controlling the natural progression of loss to the organics of the razor, the work of honing should not harm the kamisori. By understanding how you can control the loss of the most vulnerable metal, it's iron, there can be an enormous benefit. Even just a simple thought can provide a way for positive metal loss.

We do not need to sharpen the spine of a razor or a knife, only the cutting edge. And with care, the task of refreshing the cutting edges on a kamisori might involve as few as 5 to 10 well-placed strokes per side/per stone if the edge to be honed is positively touching the stone. The spine of the razor determines the sharpening angle of the edge by creating triangulation. Because the spine is softer metal than the edge, the spine is the most susceptible to deformation, and when the spine is losing thickness faster than the hard cutting edge is gaining keenness, an uncontrolled leveraging of the cutting edge away from the cutting stone occurs. The more you lose at the spine-the higher the bevel's edge is tilted away from the stone-thus losing contact. By artificially guarding against the deformation of the spines we stabilize the system.

By preventing the development of an unstable or reduced pivot point, which the soft omote spine represents, we retain the uninterrupted potential of the hard steel's intimate contact with the edge during honing. It must be acknowledged that over time, the artificially stable thickness of the spine by being taped or artificially lifted or from the torque of the wrist will steepen the cutting edge; this can, however, be rectified by adjusting the spine's thickness as a machinist might do, in increments. This task would be one of playing catch-up over the life of the kamisori, and the good thing is that the rectification would be on your calculated terms.

For years enthusiasts had used electrical tape on the spine of their razors to subdue loss, this can work, but imperfectly, and the consequence is that as the soft type of tape shreds, and when it does it leaves residue that is an indication of a shifting bevel angle. I first discovered and spread the word on the various English-speaking "razor shaving forums" about using a wear-resistant tape called Kapton. I did this posting a few months after NASA troubleshooting engineer friend Bernard Calip visited my shop to test out razor stones in March 2016. As we were setting up to hone his beautiful razors I opened the discussion about irreversible spine wear from honing on abrasives with his razors. I asked him if he regularly taped the spines of his razors or not. He said he did not. I told him that the spines of his new razors would remain "as new" only if a strip of standard electrical tape were applied before starting and he accepted the method.

Bernard's NASA contract is based on his ability to rectify satellite gyroscope issues. He explained to me that moment that the Kapton brand 1mil Polyimide tape is the only NASA-approved tape to use for zero-

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gravity exposures because the adhesive Kapton has does not de-gas/degrade in a zero-gravity atmosphere as plumbers and electrical tape does. NASA tested this all out. In zero gravity, plastic tape like 3-M disintegrates and the adhesives degrade into the state of an aerosol. When this happens the microscopic adhesive particles will float and eventually "gum up the works" of sensitive equipment due to the zero gravity environment. He said that every contact point in the satellite's internals and those of the Space Shuttle, are covered with Kapton tape. Bernard also told me that the internal surface of the space shuttle's light reflective windshield is another example of the special coating of Kapton, one that incorporates 24k gold that is sandwiched between two layers of polyimide tape. This gold is sandwiched thin enough to be able to see through it while the harmful solar rays are reflected away. The same 24k gold foil is used in the astronaut's helmet sunscreen. In his shop, he told me that he has boxes of leftover Kapton tape in different thicknesses and widths from projects and that he would send me some samples, and we agreed to each test out the Kapton and have a conversation on the results, of which we did. I now use no other tape besides Kapton.

Except for restorations and chip removal, the amount of hard steel removal necessary to maintain the keenness of a razor is so small that you cannot easily measure it. On the other hand, the potential for the unnecessary loss of the soft jigane iron is great if casual abrasion takes place. I recommend everyone to use a Kapton-type Polyimide wear-resistant tape or some type of tape on both spines of either side of your kamisori for all steps of honing a razor. Wrap it up and over the spine of the razor as the foible, and you are good to go.

You will find that it will be the edge-leading strokes that will give you the greatest access to the edges of the kamisori. The inertia of the pull stroke is natural movement, we humans use it to gather our subsistence. The fact that the edge leading pull strokes give you the full view as you pull and the whole stroke encourages close contact. The second choice stroke pattern in my opinion for some of those same reasons would be that of the edge-leading push stroke. These two movements will best minimize the formation of a weak false edge. Using a haphazard stroke count pattern during the process can lead to over-honing one side or the other. A 1/1 stroke per side or 1/3 or 1/5 per side pattern can be misleading depending on the state of the kamisori. The emphasis should always be to follow an evaluation, and all work

Note: #162 photo (above). The spines of these two mid-19th-century antique kamisori, seen here have been shielded along their spines with Kapton tape.

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should be in favor of revealing a generally narrow 1mm portion or less of the hard steel on the omote and 1.5 to 2mm wide revilement of hagane on the ura sides of the cutting edge is more than enough steel.

The width and extreme curve of the ura side will allow for some compensation. If for some reason or another, the soft jigane iron is seen peaking thru at the ura side you must rectify that. But if there is just a bit more steel showing on one the omote side than the other, do not fret. Instead, try and balance and adjust the equation over the next few honing sessions. My suggestion is to not over-compensate one side of the blade if you find that there is an imbalance. Just live with it for a while.

For general touch-up honing, you should keep the stroke count low, strop often, and test the edge by cutting sample hair. Check often as the kamisori might be in a good shave-able state of "sharp enough" before you notice. If this were a beauty contest the odd profile might be the winner so shave testing might reveal a good edge. For an extensive restoration, you will want to, as soon as possible balance the width of the bevel's hagane at 3 parts on the ura, and while always preserving the soft jigane on both spines as much as possible, the omote should show 1 part of hagane at the edge, it need not be more. Any previous or future damage should keep this ratio in mind.

Most over-honed kamisori razors are overworked on the omote side, leading to loss to the soft jigane iron at the hump transition zone (false spine). This loss will present itself as the shallowness of the hollow (mini ura hollow) in the soft jigane iron is reduced. What does this now require for restoration? Nothing! Live with it! But if you wish to restore the hollow some effort will be necessary to reform the soft iron. This type of restoration is best done by someone who has a few restorations already under their belt. In other words, someone who has already made the mistakes that you are about to make. In any case, do not attempt to restore the whole hollow in one restoration session. You will probably never recapture the original blacksmith's profile, so try and live with it, or don't dig too deep. In Japan. the hollow of the omote is carved out with a super hard/brittle scraper blade called a "sen" that is shaped to size. If you can master the use of a sen, then you are a unique person and might develop a career using it.

All of us are born with an almost perfect anatomical movement that can guarantee the firm steel-to-stone contact we need for honing a kamisori. I do not recommend back-and-forth strokes, but instead, only edge-leading strokes because these encourage the most intimate contact of steel to stone. Try holding the kamisori as seen below for an advantage in torque power that does not overtly encourage the lifting of the spine. The photos below give hints for encouraging close contact with the stone to razor dilemma when working with these smaller blades. The hint of torque can be just as effective as the intent of torque, deformation is just beyond the ignoring of those nuances. P.S. I mistakenly left out the taping of the spine in these photos. I recommend taping the spine for almost all bevel work.

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For detail or restoration work, a pointed finger technique allows me to target weak areas on my razor's edge. The resting of the fingertip emphasizes where the contact with the stone will be greatest. For any restoration, you will have to follow your intuition during the progress as you decide what grit stones you will use. For a personal razor or a historically valuable blade, I would rather leave a shallow portion of a small chip intact on the edge and continue to shave with that edge as best I could instead of honing down through that chip for the sake of neatness or vanity. So in this case, a touch-up might suffice.

The classic kamisori razor-grade commercial trade stone size is 82mm wide, 136mm long, and 15mm thick. For a western razor, a useable size is up to you, for me, it does not need not to be thicker or wider as there is plenty of room for distributing the wear pattern on the stone. For the finishing stage of honing, it should be the finest gritted stone that you have on hand. The stone should be perfectly flat and have a freshened surface, lightly scrubbed with a natural tomonagura or nagura stone so the base stone's grit is bright and aggressive. The less time you spend on the stone the better. The tolerances of the kamisori's edge to stone should be tight, and a mist of slurry is suggested to prevent striction between the stone and steel. Too much slurry may set any previous keenness backward. Use only edge-leading one-directional strokes. Back-and-forth contact strokes do not help and instead can hamper progress. On the return stroke, lift to minimize creating a false edge. If you have ever watched the Iwasaki video on YouTube you see him using circular strokes, but then he finishes with edge-leading strokes and slurry.

#163

#164

#165

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Lastly, he finishes the razor by drawing the blade laterally from heel to toe on a felt pad highly charged with diamond grit. This lateral drawing stroke on diamonds is to confirm the removal of any hint of a false-edge burr.

For kamisori bevel restoration, if necessary, a synthetic stone in the 2,000 to 4,000 grit range can help but I would encourage you not to use those coarse stones regularly. A synthetic 6,000 to 8,000 will help but even these grits should be used prudently in taking care of your kamisori. The kamisori was designed by blacksmiths with the expectation that they would be honed with awasedo. There is no reason not to use awasedo for maintenance. Use a loupe to judge the state of the razor, take another look with the loupe after you add the first few strokes on the stone to re-evaluate and make sure the razor's edge is touching the stone the full width of the blade. If they do not either carefully correct this as gingerly as possible or pass on this step to the next session. Always have a plan of expediency to save your steel and iron, and I suggest finishing the kamisori on a compatible natural high-grade awasedo and not a synthetic one. The virtue of the less time you spend on any one stone will become obvious. Matching stone with certain steel is desirable and this is why synthetic stones are a blessing for the early to middle work.

Your final stone should be your finest stone. Traditional tools like kanna plane blades, nomi chisels, and kamisori razors are hand forged and hardened by traditional blacksmiths with the expectation that they will be honed in the final step on awasedo natural stones. If you visit a Kezuroukai wood planning contest you will notice that all of the main competitors finish their blades with Narutaki Awasedo. Synthetic finishing stones will cut just as well or faster than awasedo natural stones, but the character of the tennen toishi, especially the Narutaki Awasedo stones are in a class above the synthetics because the naturals will leave more complex polish, a product that is more comfortable to the skin because of less suction between your skin and the steel. Suction can lead to drawn blood during shaving. Naturals do not necessarily create keener edge, but Narutaki Awasedo are proven to be keen enough will provide a superior edge if the wet shaving community is to be trusted in their public opinions. Nature does not compete with science, but it is more often that science attempts to mimic nature.

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The first 5 examples below are all antique over-honed kamisori. The last blade at the bottom has been carefully honed with Kapton tape on the spine so it still maintains the blacksmith's geometric intentions.

Photos #166 and #167.

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6. Blacksmiths in Japan

Blacksmiths in Japan have been hoarding pieces of 18th-century European puddled iron since the 18th century. Hunting for decommissioned bridges, scrapped ship anchors and chains, discarded cladding, recycled antique nails, and vintage cast iron pots and pans, all have been used for knife and kamisori making representing the namaji (native) jigane softer iron. Japan has not paused in the smelting of domestic high-carbon steel and it is an innovative leader in the science of steel. These two metals meet each other in the world of shaving.

Three-quarters to seven-eighths of a kamisori by weight is wrought iron jigane, and the last bit is a thin sheet of hard high carbon hagane steel representing the cutting face of the ura side. The two metals are borax flux forge welded, and still, to this day a certain portion of a kamisori frame structure is hand-hammered by the old-school smiths. Modern Yasuki-Hitachi steels with carbon contents in the range of 0.5% to 1.15% are popular. The fine granular composition of the best steels when heat treated and finely honed will shave dozens and dozens of beards before the necessity of fully re-setting the bevel and a follow-up of re-honing is required.

The opposing sides of the kamisori are asymmetrical. The ura side possesses the 0.5 to 1mm thick forge-welded layer of hard hagane steel plate that has hammered, dramatic sweeping hollow ground configuration. The flat edge of the cutting steel on the ura side should be about 1.5mm in width. And this side the kamisori will also contain a punched bonji, or kanji trademark of the blacksmith's name into the exposed iron of the spine. Of the opposing side of the kamisori, the omote will host the bulk of the softer iron and it has a hump step feature of iron that runs parallel to the spine. The hagane hard steel is only exposed at the cutting edge of the omote where it peeks out about 0.5mm. This hard steel ledge of hagane on the omote should be maintained at this width, there is no reason why it should be any wider.

Kamisori razors are handmade by sashimono blacksmiths who specialize in small and miniature tools like scissors, picks-punches-drills, saws, scrapers, miniature kanna hand plane blades, measuring devices such as straight rulers, and small single-bevel traditional knives called kiridashi, steel squares, nails, tiny hammers. All of these and thousands upon thousands of other unique tools are used by a country thick in an economy of craft or craft-minded persons. In essence, Japan is and has been a nation of handcrafters. The above is not a complete list of products but instead just suggestion of the variety of small tools made by those creative blacksmiths who made all of these too for right-handed craft persons. In the Meiji period with Western fashion and the introduction of mass production, retail goods began to reach a wider population of tourists, and these early 20th-century luxury and fashion products were in demand for a wave of hobbyists that modern Japan now hosts. After WW2, especially from the 1970s and on, left-handed kamisori could be found or specially ordered from those same traditional sashimono shops in cosmopolitan Kyoto, Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, Kanazawa, Sanjo, and beyond.

In a modern context, objects like the traditional kamisori might feel awkward to the self-shaving Western population, an arcane pattern that was not designed for shaving ourselves. Kamisori were as alluded to above, made to be used by right-handed barbers. Throughout Japan's history, the average man did not own a kamisori or shave their face unless it was a rash hurry-up affair like with a knife. Men in Japan often do not possess what we here in the West refer to in the west as full growth of beard hair. Some do but most do not. There are exceptions of course, but kamisori were primarily used to shave the pate, the crown of the head of monks and soldiers during the feudal days. Because shaving for the average laborer, farmer,

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or tradesman was not a social necessity, facial hair has been an acceptable fashion in Japan throughout the ages. For farmers or those who did not care one way or the other, if beard hair was a bother, they plucked it. While those courtiers, samurai, and the ruling class, all of whom carried edged weapons had access to all manner of knives keen enough to shave with, most men in those ranks used the services of a barber as fashion dictated.

The Hitachi Steel company has a dedicated boutique steel facility, the Yasuki Steel Works in the small town of Yasugi, Shimane prefecture that is dedicated to the smelting of a whole selection of steel and wrought iron. They do not smelt true classic tamahagane in a clay tatara kiln in the Yasuki plant but they did at one time and they do now provide an equivalent to the trades. Yasuki Steel is well known for its partnering in creating custom steels for famous blacksmiths. A few listed here have their favorite formulas on file at Yasuki. They order smelted steel as finely grained or finer than the classic tamahagane. Tasai Akio and his son Michio have formulas they designed on file at Yasuki. Historic tool smiths Ishido Teruhide, Funahiro, Chiyozuro Sadahide. Kengo Usui did, along with Tunesaburo, Ishi-Hiroshi, Ichihiro, and the list goes on. And saw makers current and past: Chuyemon, Mitsukawa, Yataiki, Hirota, Heijiro, and more. There are books on the subjects in Japanese that describe the intimacy between blacksmiths and the steel they use and cherish.

The old crooked streets in Yasuki will lead you to the wonderful Wakou Museum of Steel and Smelting that you can easily walk to from the train station. There is a tatara kiln on display along with case after case of ancient iron and steel tools created by sashimono blacksmiths and toolsmiths. The museum used to host a blade smiths show before Covid, and it might start up again soon. The southern Shimane Prefecture on the coastline here is the closest part of Japan to the continent. The Sea of Japan faces China and Korea. The Yasugi area of the Shimane peninsula with its classic cone-shaped Daisen volcano overlooking the town is

#168. Tasai Michio-san standing, Inomoto-san the dai-ya seated middle alongside Tasai Akio-san in Sanjo, Niigata Prefecture.

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thought to be the location of the first tatara kiln built in Japan, as early as the 5th, and certainly in the 6th century. There are volcanic black iron-rich sands in the nearby clear mountain rivers above the town of Yasugi, pine forests as sources of charcoal, and fine silica-rich clay abound for the tatara kiln's structure.

The Blade Fair winds around the Taisho-era business district and blacksmiths from all over Japan have a chance to rent street-side garages and gardens, spots on side streets, and green grass parks to set up for demonstration booths. A group of local men set up a large area for anyone needing to have their knives sharpened or repaired including re-handling, re-tempering, and forming new tips for free. The families of the area set up food booths and there is lots of beer drunk over the day as I can attest. Yasuki is very remote, and it has a unique home-grown style that is very appealing.

The photos below are from the Yasuki Hamono (blade) Festival in 2014. Great fun and lots to buy and see including a fellow making steel files by hand & foot. Top row, #169, #170, #171. Bottom row photos, #172, #173, #174.

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Western Straight Razor

Chapter IX

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IX. WESTERN STRAIGHT RAZOR

1. Thought and Process

Below is a note to Tim Zowada and myself from our friend from Germany:

Dear Tim & Alex,

For joy and a treat for all my senses I did the following progression today which is pure overkill:

Okudo Shiro suita #296 - 20 strokes, light pressure

Okudo Kiita Hon Suita #444 - 20 strokes, light pressure

Ogura Asagi Karasu - 3x15 strokes diluting with water between sessions from thin to almost no slurry and no pressure.

After stropping, the result is a super-super keen edge on your Damascus steel! I could have already stopped after the second Suita and the edge would have been even keener - but adding the Ogura Karasu, which is softer than the 2 suitas, tamed the edge a bit down. Your friend in Germany, Hanjo

Our friend Dr. Hanjo Till takes on his razor-sharpening as seriously as he does his bicycle racing and his business as a pharmacist. He knew how to get Sharp Enough with the first stone, and with a second stone, he could get Overly Sharp. So he made a creative decision to Calm the edge down to suit his beard and skin type by using that third stone to get Comfortable Sharp. He had a target, and by having honed and shaved with his razors over and over again he was able to project how to craft a specific edge. Now a second method from Hanjo.

Alex,

I use a method of palm stropping in-between sets on the final finishing stone, and reducing the stroke length from set to set has proven for me to work on any finishing stone, it doesn't matter if it's a Jnat, a Coticule, or Escher. I recently worked on maxing out this procedure and now it is my standard technique to strop:

20 strokes 15cm long on the final stone, followed by palm stropping

20 strokes 8cm long on the same stone, followed by palm stropping

20 strokes 4cm long - same stone, ending by palm stropping

20 strokes 1-2cm long under a slowly running water tube (hose?)

20 strokes Linen + 20 Cordovan

Your friend, Hanjo

Hanjo's tale is that of a lover of the craft who is acting like a professional, he builds patterns. The three of us, Tim and I all have microscopes, keep notes and we always look forward to comfortable shaves.

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(We 3 boys and Emiko also spent time together in Germany drinking lots of really good beer, and old wine and haunting Hanjo's favorite restaurants.)

For honing razors, I encourage everyone to discover that keeping tabs on your stroke count can lead to a better understanding of your results based on logic. Even if it fails to produce the keenest edge every time, if you had a plan and took notes, then by default you now have something to improve upon later. Balancing the amount of work on each side (A&B) of a razor is very important unless you don't mind overdoing one side and then having to overdo the opposing side playing catch-up. If you work with a plan and observe the formation of the bevel of each side, you will, in the long run, conserve steel & stone. This is especially true when honing kamisori because their unique structure can be somewhat of a mystery and challenging.

In any edge refinement process, there is an apex of sharpness which represents the epitome of the abrasive's abilities coupled with the granular structure of the steel and the skill of the operator. In theory, by using certain number of strokes with consistent hand pressure on a particular stone, with certain steels, there is a moment in the process where the results are near-perfect. This apex of refinement is signified by when the edge, as seen in a cross-section view would look like a 'V'. Once the state of a V has been reached, and it will shave hair, going further is a waste of steel and stone and if that isn't bad enough, the leading edge of the V will morph with more stone exposure, to look more and more like a 'Y'. The V was the representation of the sweet spot while the Y is that of a weak edge where the "tail" of the Y will fold and crumble under the duress of shaving. It might be super sharp, but at the same time super weak.

You can strop off the tail but dullness follows so then a follow-up on the stone might be necessary. A formula with consistent hand pressure and the counting of strokes can help build a knowledge-based handcraft. Some fellows claim that they never count strokes. I believe them, but at the same time, I expect that they do use observation of some form which is just as well and helpful.

For honing a dull razor or sharpening a dull knife or tool, the V shape is a moment in the process; make it a target. Some fellows sharpen like it is a marathon, an endurance test, or a way to pass an afternoon. Or maybe they hone slowly as they finish their last finger of an Islay Scotch. In such a case, beware of driving your car after sharpening a blade.

I look to draw a line regarding strokes per side A & B, and look for and expect that there will be a moment when the razor or knife has reached its maximum degree of sharpness with that stone. I want to find that moment through observation, so I have made it a habit to count the number of strokes it takes to remove the previous scratch pattern by creating a new recognizable alternate direction scratch pattern. If it takes too long to remove the previous scratch pattern, like after 40 strokes per side, set that stone aside and try a different stone. This can be true with synthetics too. No one stone will perfectly abrade all steels. I encourage every craftsperson who drops by to work in my toishi dojo to understand but discard the belief that simply adding more and more and more stokes makes a razor or knife keener and keener and keener. If that were true then adding 500 more strokes would make it that much sharper than the first 100 strokes.

There is no such thing as going 5 times beyond optimal sharpness. By keeping tabs on the stroke count ratio for each razor you are at the same time grading the performance characteristics of that stone, and over time you will be able to build a mental or written inventory of which stones work the best with certain steels. I have found and proven that certain Narutaki Awasedo stones, coupled with certain razors, can take a dull razor after bevel set on a 1k King stone, plus stropping on clean leather to shave ready in as few as 12 strokes per side on the Awasedo. This feat is rare, but it is possible.

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2. Touching steel to the stone

For the bevel setting stage, I use only diagonal edge leading strokes, but I do recognize that back-and-forth or edge trailing strokes work equally well at this stage. When going beyond the bevel setting stage I recommend edge leading strokes only. For me, all or any stroke should follow the length of the stone's surface as a template when using either a 1k King or the next grit up. The same goes for Shapton synthetic bench-size stones for bevel work. I usually begin with the razor's branded name-logo side as the designated side-'A' facing up. With a total of 10 consistently light pressure pull strokes on this side 'A', I will next switch the razor to my other hand and make 10 identical edge leading pull strokes on side 'B'. I do not allow the razor's toe or heel to trail off the stone when honing, but instead, I carefully keep the full width of the blade touching the stone and run it slowly down the full length of the stone representing one stroke.

With this honing technique, if the razor has proper geometry and the stone is flat, the new scratch pattern will be seen along the full length of the edge as a diagonal pattern. I aim to pull the razor from the back farthest end of the stone towards myself with the same consistent light (1lb) hand pressure. This continues with each of the stones from 1k King up to the final finishing stones. I always lift the blade off the stone for the return to the head of the stone. This first group will represent 10 neat and consistent strokes to the best of my ability. I next flip the razor over and proceed to hone on the non-logo Side-B of the razor repeating that same edge leading stroke sequence for a total now of ten passes per side.

I have trained myself to be ambidextrous for these procedures. If you have not, the Side-B edge-leading strokes will be as a pushing edge-leading stroke of the razor away from your belly while maintaining the diagonal to the stone position of the razor to the stone. This same edge leading side A & B procedure is followed with the next 5 strokes per side, then 3 per side, 2 per side passes, ending by 1 final pass per side. My goal is to treat each side equally with the same 21 strokes per side routine.

When testing stones in my shop for compatibility with certain steels, I use this same Jnat routine with the diminishing 21-stroke count. By always using comfortable and consistent hand pressure, once I have efficiently honed this one razor on this one particular stone if I have taken notes, I can save the energy, and the steel of testing for compatibility the next time.

Note; If you are simply touching up an already or near shave-ready razor edge, a finer stone and fewer strokes per side will often suffice instead of going to a 1,000 grit full bevel set routine. Or for restorations, you might make many more strokes as needed.

Tips: Setting your hone-stone on a bathroom scale every once in a while as you hone will provide you some perspective about your hand pressure.

Finally, after progressing thru the 1,000 grit, and maybe a 5,000 or 8,000, and my last or whatever finest stone I use, I will strop the razor with a regime of clean linen and then leather. If the razor does not pass a hanging hair test (HHT) I strop again and test. If still not perfect I will go back to the final stone, using the same left-over slurry for an abbreviated sequence, and strop again so I can test the edge with one of several techniques to prove to myself that the convergence of sides A & B is as close to perfect as possible.

The "dangling hanging hair test" or the arm hair "tree topping" test judges if the razor's edge is keen enough to catch the arm hair above skin level and silently cleave it or not. And then there is the "cherry tomato" test designed by Dr. Alfredo Gil to prove if the razor will cut through the skin of a tomato effortlessly or not without using a sawing action. With a well-honed razor, just allowing the weight of the

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To move on from the honing bench.

razor to cut into the skin of a tomato is proof of a shave-ready razor. Now, in any of these home tests, if the hair or tomato is not easily bitten or cut, then there is still a good chance that you might be just 10 strokes shy or so of a comfortable shave.

Using slow strokes will mimic using light hand pressure because your sense of feel is enhanced. When finished with this routine I will strop with linen 30 or 40 times, then leather 30x or up to 40 times, and then test the edge with an HHT hanging hair test. The results of this 21-stroke count and stropping can sometimes be enough if your last stone is fine and fast, but if your HHT tests are weak, try stropping one more time before going back to the stone. If still not keen enough, touch the stone for an abbreviated session of 5,3,2,1=11 total strokes per side, strop, and test again.

In honing, the slurry may resemble heavy whipping cream. This heavy cream stage for use in honing a razor should not be the norm. Look to make a half & half or a whole milk consistency. I use a new #1200 diamond Atoma plate but prefer an almost worn-out #400 or #600 Atoma for raising slurry. The coarser the diamond plate is, the more aggressive the slurry will be. A finer grade or a friction-worn mellow cutting diamond plate will only affect a fraction of a millimeter of the top surface of the Jnat, leaving the stone under the slurry mostly unaffected and still smooth to act as a finishing stone should. A tomo-nagura (rubbing stone of the same type) slurry, and a slurry made with a diamond plate (DN) diamond nagura) will have similar effects of removing iron swarf lodged in the pores of the stone, thereby restoring cutting powers of the surface of the stone, and or providing a working slurry.

It is at the foil of the very edge, 1 to 10 microns wide that could be acting as a barrier to strong HHT-5 results and a perfectly comfortable shave, but one in which you can with palm, paddle, or strop reduce to a thinness so fine that it cannot be easily documented, but it can be felt in the form of a keen or keener shaving experience. This extreme state of molecular adjustment is beyond par with our daily chores, and this is one reason why men get charged and puffed up by the experience of honing and shaving off their hand-crafted edges. We are proud and joyful in our almost little giggling boy kind of way.

Don't give up on that edge yet if it is not passing HHT, a perfect edge is just around the corner. If you are finding an HHT-4 or 5 at any portion of the edge. The chance is great if you find low HHT-2 or 3 on a part of the edge, and you can try a pointed finger technique to pick up keenness in the less keen area. With the lightest of slurry, use your index finger placed on that part of the less keen edge, and with your alternate hand, pull the razor slowly towards yourself. As few as two passes per side might be enough to pick up the edge. Strop, test, and shave is the true test.

If this is the first razor you have ever tried to hone, and you have come this far with these results then you have accomplished a lot. If you are experienced at honing and you often have high HHT results, these AxMethod edges may not be epic for you. But in either case with just a little more work and stropping these modestly keen edges can become memorable edges. I've said this before, the difference between a good shave and a great shave is just a matter of microns, so work slowly and diligently at these final stages.

By keeping track of your stroke count, your results can be documented and repeated with this same razor and hone combination. I incorporate the HHT hanging hair test as a benchmark and for best results, it helps to have a consistent supply of the same hair for testing. My hanging hair results are based on these

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3. Stropping

observations when the hair is held between the thumb and forefinger and presented in a gentle downward motion so that the hair touches the blade at 1 inch or so from the holding fingers. My results will translate as below.

HHT-1 = The hair will not cut in any way and instead slides off away from the razor

HHT-2 = The hair was not cut but instead lingers hesitantly on the blade

HHT-3 = The hair catches between the cuticles on the blade and slides along the blade length but is not cut, or if it is cut the result will be the splitting of the hair lengthwise down along the cortex

HHT-4 = The hair is easily caught, and it is cut but awkwardly, irregularly, and often with a sound like a ping, and the cut hair may flip back over the blade onto the holding hand side.

HHT-5 = The hair is easily and effortlessly caught and cut silently falling on the side away from the hand without hesitation, a vast difference from the HHT-4 result.

The HHT test results are based on your results taking into account the shave and its closeness and comfort and the test hair you are using for testing. The tenacity of the razor's edge to hold up under multiple shaves is a separate target, one that is worth addressing. Having a good stock of the same hair will help with your craft skills and your shaves. I have bought hair extensions on the internet, and have asked for and was given hair extensions (sorted and taped together clumps of hair) from my local barber/salon for free. From the same salon, I asked them to save for me clumps of freshly washed and cut one-foot-long hair scraps from young women's haircuts. I live in a Latino section of town and these samples were of dark black hair, and they worked superbly.

Some razor steels are more easily worked with certain types of stones. There is a saying in Japan "soft steel-hard stone, hard steel-soft stone". And although not foolproof there is a lot of truth to this proverb. And it is a good way to approach a large group of stones to sort through. Striking out or failing with the first stone and steel combination is not unusual, but using any repeatable technique can help to overcome some difficulties. When buying Japanese natural stones remember that only a small percentage of mined stones were designated to be razor-finishing grade according to Yamamoto-san my friend and mentor in Gifu. The remainder 90% is to be tool grade or pre-finishers. All this is to suggest that if you fail with your stone/steel combination it might not be your fault. Some combinations will work remarkably well, and some obviously will not. This is why sharpening and honing is called a craft, the transference of skill, art, and occupation.

The purpose of stropping should be to physically reduce the thickness of the blade at the edge, while at the same time aligning the converging bevels to balance the geometry between them.

It will be the combination of friction and compression coupled with the curved angle of slack of the hanging strop that is directing the effects of energy to the edge. This is simply part and parcel of why we, and our ancestors all strop on leather. This is the age-old sequence no matter if you accept the science of it or not.

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WHAT IS AN OVER-HONED RAZOR?

4. The AxMethod

There is no mystery here, the fact is that shaving and the associated practices of shaving certainly do on a microscopic level dull and damage/alter and deform an edge to a greater or lesser degree depending on the skill of the practitioner. Men who shave with disposal razors solve this evolution change when their razor blades lose keenness by "disposing of them". The Rolls Razor company created a built-in strop in their kit 100 years ago with this acknowledgment. Everyone needs to use a strop and the curved strop slack targets the contact of the blade at its most vulnerable, weakest but most important feature, the edge. Photo #2 illustrates this contact effect. Every time we use a strop we change its edge geometry from a little bit dull to super keen, in doing so we are creating the eventual necessity to reset the bevel of the razor as the bevels begin to more and more assume the obtuse profile when contacting the reverse curve of the hanging strop.

Stropping is with intent, the mechanical alteration of a razor's edge. The slack or lack of slack in the curve of the strop is the governor of the scheme; the impregnated silica, inherently in all living matter, is the executioner of the deed. The alteration that takes place when stropping is the removal of steel in a formulated sequence that requires compression. The cutting is slow by design and its effectiveness, as history proves, is enough to suffice our purposes. Photo #2 shows us what we are up against if we fail to periodically fully reset the bevels.

An edge that exceeds its optimum state of convergence. A razor that is guaranteed to fail when testing the steel's ability to remain intact at the edge under duress or a cutting edge composed by thinning out the converging bevel's opposing angles to such a point that it becomes obvious that steel will not hold together under a normal shaving workload. This is proven when a razor goes dull in the middle of a shave, or when an edge only last 4 or fewer shaves. It isn't that the razor was not sharp, but only that the razor was not appropriately sharp for the job at hand. Too sharp and too dull provide the same results.

Now some have questioned what happens between the steel and the leather when stropping a blade, and even go so far as to suggest that leather does not contain silica or any other abrasive material. Animals who graze will digest silica as part of the plant material that they eat. Straw and all terrestrial plant matter contain silica, and it is the digested silica consumed by the horse that provided the abrasive action in a strop.

I developed a razor-honing method called The AxMethod. It is based on a diminishing stroke count sequence that treats each side of the razor equally by alternating bundles of passes on the abrasive stone while maintaining the same hand pressure throughout the process. For the bevel setting as well as with the actual final finishing stages I only use one-directional edge leading strokes because only they promote the thinning of the edge while at the same time discouraging the formation of a wire or false edge by maintaining close contact with the stone.

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Below is an example of TheAxMethod from beginning to end, a chart will follow.

Build, with diminishing stroke bundles, a matching scratch pattern foundation on each side of your razor. On paper, it looks something like this. First, make 10 full-length strokes on the stone on Side A of your razor, then 10 full-length strokes on Side B; repeat this with 5 on Side A and 5 on B; 3 on A 3 on B. 2 on A, 2 on B. 1 stroke on A, and finally 1 stroke on B. The final tally is 21 strokes per side. This procedure can be used with your 1,000 or 2,000-grit bevel setting stone, or with your middle or final finishing stone. I use the same counting of strokes and bundles of strokes for knives, razors, hatchets, etc.

In either or all cases I will then check with magnification what progress has been made on both sides of the blade. If the blade was in poor condition or if this is a restoration I might have to go through this sequence again until each side has an identical scratch pattern that is neat and trimmed along the full width and full length of both sides. Naturally, if the blade was in good condition and the stone-steel combination is well paired, one bevel-set sequence might be enough to reset both bevels. If this is a restoration then I might need to repeat the sequence, or if it just needs a touch-up I could reduce the total number.

Smiling edges and blades with unique spines require additional attention, but the whole idea is to build a foundation that is balanced from side to side. This method can be used with coarser 500 or 1000-grit stones to remove chips or nicks, or for removing more steel from one side to balance one side to the other. I have found that, especially for foundation work, counting strokes and using this rhythmic diminishing stroke method can keep a handle on any unnecessary loss of steel by providing sequential targets. Checking progress with a loupe is a good idea before going on to a finer stone, but the goal in all cases is that the scratches must lead from the edge to the base of the bevel where it meets the hollow ground portion of the blade. When the scratch pattern is continuous to the edge, then you are done with the bevel set. If not repeat with the same type of balanced stroke count or an abbreviated diminishing stroke sequence. For badly chipped, warped, or rusty blades additional sessions may be needed. Keeping a close eye on the work in progress can reduce the amount of back-tracking in the later steps.

After the bevel is 'set' to my standards I will next go to a medium grit stone and hold the razor at a slightly different angle to create a contrasting scratch pattern to the previous side to help judge the progress, do the same 21 diminishing stroke count from side to side or a reduced stroke count rhythm. This stroke counting Ax Method can also be used with tomo-nagura or Mikawa slurry stone or any other abrasive sharpening step program.

#175

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Four-step honing stroke progression

Step | Stone | Side A | Side B
Step #1 | Bevel Set Stone | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x
Step #2 | Medium Stone | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x
Step #3 | Finishing stone | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x
Step #4 | Tomo | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x | 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x

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5. How to get started

If you have on hand a good quality straight razor that is not rusted or damaged and you want to learn to hone it by yourself, you will find some techniques and theories below. Before you begin you will need to assemble this short list of items.

1) A 1000-grit synthetic sharpening stone,

2) A middle stone option of 3,000 or 4,000 grit range natural or synthetic

3) The best quality Japanese natural finishing stone you can afford, or an 8,000 to 12,000 synthetic stone

4) A smaller high-quality Japanese slurry (helper) stone called a tomo-nagura

5) A 21cm x 7.5cm #400 and #1200 Atoma or similar brand diamond lapping plate

6) A small bucket of water

7) A couple of cotton rags

8) Two small pans for rinsing your stones. Bread pans will work

9) A barber-type high-quality leather and linen strop

10) 1 quality achromatic loupe of 10x or 20x lope

Once you have these products at hand and have half an hour or so of spare time, set yourself up with all your gear on a water-resistant table near a window or another daylight-quality light source. Beginning with a 1000-grit synthetic lapping stone as your bevel setter, soak it in water for 5 minutes if necessary or as recommended by the manufacturer. Next lap the bevel set stone with the Atoma to confirm that it is flat. If it is not, flatten your bevel set stone with the course #400 Atoma of an equivalent. This lapping procedure will become second nature over time and it is imperative to have all of your stones very flat. Lapping does little harm to your stone but instead provides you with great advantages. There is no substitute for a flat hone stone. Lapping is essential to provide straight cutting-edge profiles, and if your stones are dished or deformed your razors will be tempted to mimic the profile of your stones' top surface, sometimes to exaggeration.

Honing a razor is a multi-step sequence and with each step, your razor's edge profile will be challenged to be straight or not. While honing, the razor wears down the stone, and the stone wears down the razor. Beginning with flat/straight surfaces your results will become more predictable. The tendency when honing razors or sharpening knives is to favor the center of the stone, this promotes the hollowing out or dishing of the stone affecting the straightness of the blade. This is why we have to periodically lap the designated stones. Teaching yourself to hone on the stone's top surface by thinking of it as being divided as thirds, or focusing some of the procedure towards the ends will spread out the hone-wear.

For lapping, if your diamond or ceramic lapping plate is anywhere near the same size and shape as your bevel setting or honing stone you cannot go wrong with any routine or lapping pattern. Back and forth is the most common or a figure-eight motion will generally wear your honing stone evenly. If your lapping plate is smaller than your hone stone then some care must be taken to attend to the corners so they are flattened evenly. Many folks draw a grid pattern with a pencil on the top of the honing stone to indicate where the lapping plate touches or does not contact the stone, This pencil mark is a good indicator for the first few lapping correction strokes, remember that any disengaged loose grit that can pool under the lapping plate can give you a false flatness reading. To prevent this false/positive reading just simply rinse

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your stone of slurry after every few strokes or do your lapping under running water, try lapping underwater, it works. To prevent any false readings of flatness, just simply rinse your stone of slurry after every few strokes or do your lapping under running water. Try lapping underwater, it works. In this way, the slurry-free two surfaces will give you closer to accurate dead-flat results.

To begin honing, stage your tools with everything wiped down and clean and ready to easily be individually picked up in a sequence to minimize the possibility of cross-pollinating grit particles from stone to stone or surface to surface. No particles of 1,000 grit must end up on your finest finishing stone or in that stone's slurry. Ideally, keep each stone segregated in its sequestered rinse water, or if working at a faucet keep every article rinsed. Keep in mind that over time you will develop a more streamlined system. Using a commercial stone holder or hand-holding your stone, either method will work equally well.

The grip with which you hold your straight razor will also be unique to you for honing and shaving. Over time the grip will become second nature, so at first, do not dwell upon this but instead follow your native instincts as they speak volumes.

I recommend that you do some practice shaving with a butter knife or a mock razor with lather to get the swing of it, so you can more or less do the routine with confidence. Practice picking up and unfolding your razor over and over again until it becomes second nature. All ergonomic adjustments will gradually be memorized by your hands and you will go along without even thinking twice about them. Practicing honing with a razor or knife will do nothing but help. If you bother yourself by following photos or videos of other active straight razor users' handgrips, you might ignore subtle differences in their hands that do not translate to yours. Honing and shaving rely on muscle memory so begin at the beginning to teach your mind to follow your native instinctual hand motions and reactions, and not the opposite which is your hand following someone else's video.

In this same vein, if you ever lose the grip of your razor while honing or handling it, if it accidentally leaves your hand and falls, if the edge is exposed or not, do not try and catch it in mid-air. Let it fall to the floor untouched. I work on rubber mats to reinforce this mantra. I will give you a 15% chance that you will catch the falling razor without cutting yourself, those are very bad odds. Any cut with a razor will be surprisingly deep. I suggest that you just pick up your razor from the floor and chalk up any damage to the razor as fortunate that it was not your hand or foot.

With your 1,000 grit freshly soaked stone in either hand or mounted on a bench stone holder, hydrate the stone with enough H2O so that it maintains a reflective sheen of water before you begin, and don't hesitate to dunk, rinse or flush your 1k stone anytime that you seem fit. This is a good habit in the bevel setting stage because it will help to ensure that any ground-up steel swarf particles that were shed from the razor are flushed away before they have a chance to become embedded within the pores of the stone. If the stone becomes glazed (embedded swarf), you can often rub and loosen that swarf with an alternate synthetic or natural stone or use your diamond lapping plate to refresh the surface and when done, the base stone's cutting powers will be restored.

Note; If you are simply touching up an already or near shave-ready razor edge, a finer stone and fewer strokes per side will often suffice instead of going to a 1,000 grit full bevel set routine. Or for restorations, you might make many more strokes as needed.

Tip; setting your hone-stone on a bathroom scale every once in a while as you hone will give you some perspective about your hand pressure.

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Testing Stones and Steel

Finally, after progressing thru the 1,000 grit, and maybe a 5,000 or 8,000 my last or whatever finest stone I use, I strop the razor with a regime of clean linen and then leather. If the razor does not pass a hanging hair test (HHT) I strop again to re-test. If still not perfect I will go back to that last stone, using the same left-over slurry for an abbreviated sequence, and strop again so I can test the edge with one of several techniques to prove to myself that the convergence of sides A & B is as close to perfect as possible. There will be further advanced honing and stropping technique suggestions further on in the following chapters.

The "hanging hair" or the arm hair "treetop" test is where the razor catches the hair above skin level. There is the "cherry tomato" test to cut the fruit without using a sawing stroke. With a well-honed razor, just allowing the weight of the razor to cut into the skin of the tomato is proof of a shave-ready razor. This is unique test designed by Alfredo Gil to test his remarkable edges. If in any of these tests, the hair or tomato might not easily be cut, but if the tomato is bitten or the hair catches but is not separated, then you might be just 10 or fewer strokes shy of a comfortable shave. If the blade enters the tomato without hesitation or by not having to use a saw stroke you are good to go and shave.

When testing natural stones in my shop for compatibility with certain steels, I use my Ax routine with the same diminishing 21-stroke count. By always using comfortable and consistent hand pressure, I think of the honing process like I am backing my car into a strange garage, with accurate efficient strokes/taps to the gas pedal or on/off the break with the last three/per side being slower and slower until I just snuggle into the slot of keenness. Once I have efficiently honed my razor on a particular stone, I can save the energy and the steel of testing the next time if I have to take written notes, and instead, just use my routine. Changing razors and stones, and following the same system helps eliminate false positive results.

Using slow strokes will mimic using light hand pressure because your sense of feel is enhanced. When finished with this routine I will strop with linen 30 or 40 times, then leather 30x or up to 40 times, and then test the edge with an HHT hanging hair test. The results of this 21-stroke count and stropping can sometimes be enough if your last stone is fine and fast, but if your HHT tests are weak, try stropping one more time before going back to the stone. If still not keen enough, touch the stone for an abbreviated session of 5,3,2,1=11 total strokes per side, strop, and test again.

In honing, the slurry may resemble heavy whipping cream. This heavy cream stage for use in honing a razor should not be the norm. Look to make a half & half or a whole milk consistency. I use a new #1200 diamond Atoma plate but prefer an almost worn-out #400 or #600 Atoma for raising a slurry. The coarser the diamond plate the more aggressive the slurry will be. A finer grade or a friction-worn mellow cutting diamond plate will only affect a fraction of a millimeter of the top surface of the Jnat, leaving the stone under the slurry.

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6. Tips & Musing

Sharpening hard stock tool steel to razor-quality edges requires above-average abrasives with sharpening character beyond the average stone types. Sharpness is relative to the use of the blade and without a choice of abrasives leading to ultra-fine grits, a tool's use is limited. Fortunately, the geological history of the Japanese islands is rich in sedimentary material, and drawing upon this helps to explain the reputation regarding the incredible sharpness of Japanese katana sword edges and their woodworking tools. You cannot have one without the other. A stone can either bless or destroy a steel blade, with an abundance of abrasive choices, the act of sharpening/honing and polishing can be tailored to a wide array of steel and their intended uses. Natural Narutaki Awasedo sharpening stones continue to be sought after and used worldwide for creating final finishes on critical edges by professional handcrafters. Why? It is not for their narrow bandwidth or their dimensional grit components; synthetic stones can be finer and more consistent. They are admired and used for the elusive factor that they can leave a steel blade with a personality, character to the edge. And it is an edge you must earn through practice. This edge character is most easily demonstrated in the shaving of a man's beard hair, where the removal of hair is expected, but a smooth comfortable close shave without a skin rash is celebrated. These same qualities are appealing to carpenters as they find that these stones leave wood with a surface that is so exceeding smooth with a sheen so fine that it will repel water. A state only possible when wood cells are cleaved and shaved off, instead of torn out.

The winners of the wood shaving competition at the Kezuroukai woodworkers' events in Japan and the U.S. meetings have produced wood shaving below 5 microns in thickness for years. The winning shaving is based on thinness but also to qualify the shaving which must be unbroken, continuous, and of a consistent thickness, width, and length from along the 60mm wide by 2-meter-long wood board. Ribbons of µ4 to µ5 thin shavings are regularly taken (µ10 are common) from Alaskan Yellow Cedar wood shavings as measured with scientific-grade calipers. The world record, as reported by Brian Holcombe in his blog at his website, www. brianholcomwoodworker.com was µ2 (2 microns) and was shaved at the New York Kezuroukai 2018. At this thinness, a newspaper or book with full details including periods and commas can easily be read through the shavings when viewed through these gossamer ribbons. In comparison, as a common reference, the thickness of an average sheet of printer paper is about µ100, human blond hair ranges from µ40 to 80 in diameter, while darker brown to black hair is often µ80-200. A human red blood cell is usually around µ5 in thickness. A cut finger, as I have haphazardly performed upon myself, at these keenness levels will not immediately bleed, and the cut was not felt.

I have shaved off skin cells (similar to those above) with awasedo sharpened blades that left blood vessels that did not immediately bleed).

#175 (left)

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7. Stone Safe

It's in the Recipe

Another character quality that has been reported is the tenacity of the edge of the tool, and its ability to maintain the desired level of keenness. This feature of strength in an edge is important to professional woodworkers and barbers as it pertains to the downtime necessary to re-sharpen and hone a dull edge on the job. For a hobbyist, this might not be important, but for a professional it is. The edge retention qualities are a physical display of the marriage of the metallurgy of the blade with its multifaceted structure at the cutting edge and the abrasive qualities of the sharpening stone. Duller edges stay dull longer, keener edges lose keenness soon enough. Pairing abrasives with certain steels for certain purposes will most generously be served with keen edges, as proved by woodworkers and professional barbers all over the world. I am contacted by professionals who want to improve the keenness of their microtome for laboratory shaving skin cells, and professional sports sponsors who are looking for a keener longer lasting edge on equipment like those on snow skis.

It is a thin line between a tenacious edge and sharp enough edge, but most proponents will agree that with careful observation, there are sweet combinations to be found using natural stones. Sort of like improving the miles, you can expect from a certain car engine by carefully maintaining the oil, fluids, and tires.

A Japanese tennen toishi will absorb water, and this is an important feature regarding their utility, and it can also be their bane. Absorbing water is the trick of these stones, it loosens their matrix of silica and alumina clays so they can abrade steel as three-dimensional agents in their unique sequence of sharpening steel. Tennen toishi tends to massage the steel blade into a state of sharpness instead of demanding it to be so like those other sharpening stones whose grit is cemented. With Jnats the grit is triggered into acting when water is applied, swelling as the clay is hydrated and challenging the bonds of the clay surface. This is fine for the top working surface of the stone but can lead to waste if the sides and back of the stone are needlessly hydrated, especially if there are weak inclusions in those areas.

Those who sharpen their razors periodically need not be too concerned, but if you use one stone over and over during the day, it is always wet, or several users are in succession as in an active shop I suggest that you seal the sides and the back surface to discourage the soaking up of unnecessary water. Various products from varnish to exotic lacquers, fingernail polish, or as in Japan, urushi or cashew oil all will work to seal the back and especially the sides of your Jnats. Some products work better than others, yet something is better than nothing. In Japan, a thin yet strong handmade fibrous Japanese Kozo-plant washi-paper made from mulberry stem cellulose is the favorite choice because the grain of the fibers tends to overlay in all directions creating a strong resistance to tension from all quarters.

I was taught a technique to seal the edge of awasedo about 20 years ago by a New England master cabinetmaker who prefers to remain retired and out of the picture.

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Hi Alex,

It truly is amazing how fast the years go by. They warned us! □

I do indeed still recommend this varnish and washi paper coating.

1) Make sure the stone is as clean and dry as you can get.

2) cut the washi into a strip long enough to wrap all the sides in one piece.

3) cut a piece of washi to cover the bottom and so to slightly overhang the sides.

4) coat the edges/sides of the stone with the varnish right out of the can, and put on a 'nice' coat, not a weak one, more is better than less provided it doesn't run.

5) let this dry long enough to get VERY sticky, if you touch a corner it should be sticky but not 'wet' on your fingertip, then you're ready for the paper. The basic idea here is for the varnish to grip the stone and for the paper to cling to the sticky varnish.

6) take a dry toothbrush and start to wrap the stone. i.e., stick the paper to an edge/corner and start working your way around brushing it down flat as you go. Meaning let the toothbrush push the paper onto the surface of the stone as you work your way around.

7) Work it as flat to the stone as you can. For little holes, crevices, etc. you can knife/slit the paper where it wants to bubble rather than stick. Bubbles will show up 'whiter' they are the death of this process working well, so be vigilant to get the paper stuck to the stone with no bubbles or air spaces. This is made much easier by letting the varnish tac well before beginning. After the sides are done do the bottom the same way, wrapping/brushing the paper to the chamfered edges where the bottom meets the sides. Let this dry a day or two and when you begin again, LIGHTLY scuff the whiskers with 320 sandpaper, and coat at least 4 times with varnish only, letting each coat dry completely before the next

(Highlights; Paper only goes on once in the first coat. Do not first coat the stone with varnish only and then let that coat dry, and then try to add the varnish/ and paper layer...it NEVER works or lasts. When all is done let the stone dry for at least 2 weeks before using or submerging it in water)

Thank you, S. for the tip.

Another master enthusiast I know, in Japan, lays down the first layer of paper with plain old white school glue, and he squishes it to the stone by messaging it the paper. He follows this up with coats of cashew lacquer tinted in the color of the day or his mood.

A Japanese tennen toishi will degrade to a great degree if left in deep water, the longer the greater the change. Not quickly or easily but it is the side surfaces that are the most vulnerable to water absorption when exposed long-term. Sedimentary inherently means that a stone has accumulated minerals by remaining in one place over a term. The sediment accumulation comes to them. When sharpening a blade or honing a razor on an awasedo you will observe that the stone will deform, and a hollow will develop where the steel is most often pressured to touch the stone. By habit usually in the middle of the stone. Try to spread out the wear pattern to all areas of the stone by habit.

The skill of the user directly impacts the results of a sharpening session. The technique of using these stones is important because each awasedo stone will react differently with certain steels. I have found that skill is best served by using some form of a developed method. A method based on practice that also allows for the storage of success and or failures with certain stone/steel pairings. A method, any method

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encourages confidence when approaching alternate steel/stone challenges. Knowing how one failed in the past can lead to success in the future.

Abrasion is a process with a goal, which for our purposes it is the formation and refinement of an apex on a piece of high-carbon steel. How long it takes for any given abrasive material to abrade each type or brand of steel can be recorded if carefully observed through the indicators of your scratch pattern.

When you see that the previous scratch pattern has been replaced by the newest scratch pattern, then jot down a note that a certain stone paired with certain steel should and has produced certain repeatable results if a method is followed. With synthetics in a finely tuned shop situation, predictive results can be dialed in and targeted. With natural stones, more burden is placed on the craft skills of the operator and thus an easily repeatable method can be a great advantage.

The simplest single method I use is the visual one described above. It is in a nutshell, a directional scratch pattern sequence on the blade with enough strokes to create a new pattern on the full face of the blade side A, and then make the same pattern in an opposing direction on side B with an equal number of strokes and hand pressure. Changing the direction of the scratch pattern when I change abrasives provides me with a complete picture with a beginning and an end and the stroke count that supplied a finished product. By doing this I then know what success resembles. There is more information and suggestions in a later chapter. For a double-beveled blade, knife, or razor my goal is to treat each side equally. Call me silly for counting if you like, or claim that you do not need to count strokes. I would feel remiss if I were working on your valuable blade and one side became lopsided through my doing or not doing. Would you purchase a knife that was over-ground on one side by accident? Honing razors are a bit easier in these matters because we use the spine as an angle guide, but with knives and wide long strokes, wonky comes to play at the house of the sloppy.

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Knives

Chapter X

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X. KNIVES

1. Designing a cutting edge

The successful honing or sharpening of any blade requires highly graded material- 50%, 40% skill, 5% technique, and the last 5% is often intuition; and for fun, let us just throw in another 50% for trial & error. For our concerns here, that of the hand sharpening of knives, and or the hand honing of razors but especially in this chapter for knives, the two most common stroke patterns where the stone remains stationary while the blade moves along are; the oscillating back and forth-push and pull stroke, and the elliptical stroke which will often resemble circles as you move the blade over the surface of the stone. Both of these patterns are effective and broadly used in blade work from restoration status to final finish. My intention in this chapter is not to encourage one of these over the other but instead to propound a pattern I have developed on my own, and this will be the first documentation of it.

The whole world either sharpens or has someone sharpen for them. Many people postpone the act of sharpening and some will even give up on a dull knife for dead and instead purchase a new/sharp knife to replace the old dull one that they have now shoveled into the back of a kitchen drawer or the garage. There is also the situation where a great majority of knives have such poor steel that they will never take a keen edge or hold that edge even if you were able to thin out the blade to represent a working edge. I have never dropped off or left one of my blacksmith's handmade knives with anyone for sharpening who I knew would use a grinding wheel or belt sanders to sharpen it. The preservation of steel and the efficiency of time in the sharpening of good steel have always interested me, and I would like to pass on a simple technique that I believe will help others to make their shop time sharpening knives an enlightening experience. My technique might at first look odd or even awkward, but I assure you that it has its base in anatomical science.

Ninety-nine-point nine percent of the videos about knife sharpening on the internet taught by knife makers and professional sharpeners all follow the same two-stroke pattern schemes; the push and pull, the circular (mostly ovals) stroke, or some combination of the two. In each of these routines, the handle of the knife is held as the power-generating hand in the pronated palm down position, while the opposing or guiding hand is also in a pronated palm down pose usually pushing the knife down on the stone. Each hand encourages contact between the knife steel and the abrasive stone. These two patterns, the push-pull and circular have worked well enough, so much so that they have been copied and taught from generation to generation. Sadly, though in doing so, this technique has left behind untold tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of deformed deeply dished stones requiring re-surfacing in their wake. Not to mention a quantity of good hard steel down the drain. My sharpening method is not taught anywhere, and it

#176

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2. The Basics

3. Hands-on

contains two equally important components: the first being the motion of the knife as it passes across the stone, and the second being the way that the knife is held and guided by the hands.

The most common error while sharpening a knife blade is to divert or alter the elevation of the knife spine during the sharpening stroke. In some cases, this tilt may be intentional as in the formation of a designated secondary bevel, or as in the maintenance of the belly-shaped bevel of the Shinogi portion of a Japanese single-bevel knife. But irrespective of these two examples if any sporadic unintentional tilting of the blade's angle to the sharpening stone face occurs during the sharpening stroke, this error will be transmitted to the edge, potentially leaving weak (deformed or dull) cutting portions, or overly worked or underworked areas along the edge. These would be the worst cases, and although knife work is not often that critical in a home setting, the general theme of error, this tilting will only lead to a waste of steel, stone, and time. And in a commercial setting, the loss of steel and stone will be multiplied because of the demand placed on performance.

With straight razors, the thicker factory spine acts as a designated triangulation guide, setting up a desired honing angle of the bevel's edge. Knives do not have this feature so we have to rely on honing jigs or hand skills to guide our angles. It is the equation of tilt at work that describes the final bevel angle of the cutting edge, and regardless of how that edge is manufactured, it is to be skill and design which share the fun and failure.

I believe that the paragon of the perfect knife edge is based on a V-shaped profile. If you cannot consistently hold the spine of a knife and maintain a constant bevel angle to the stone when sharpening the result will not represent a V but instead an obtusely rounded shaped bevel face at best, with a tummy or belly as seen in the far-left figure below. This obtuse edge can be sharp enough for certain work, and it can be strong. This strength however is its greatest attribute. The alternation of an engineered secondary bevel cut upon the geometry of your obtuse edge is challenging, and it will likely not be as keen as if you had begun with a true V profile. A rounded or less-than-flat edge can be desirable for cutting tasks like heavy chopping because if all other factors are equal, it will be a durable edge.

The edge of this convex belly is the poor second cousin to an engineered secondary bevel because it is haphazardly formed. Either shape, rounded or angular, shallow or wide these puffed-up edges will work long

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hours. When using this bulging bevel, the product being cut, from bread to meat, both sides of the blade will be fighting for who is boss of whatever void might exist as the blade moves through the cut zone shedding the product from left to right as each mass attempts to express their laterally opposing force. In the cutting of flesh, the product will "want" to be pushed aside before being cut. For the cutting of a wood product with a chisel or hand plane, the bulge on the tool side will tend to want to push the wood away to the lateral, and the effect will be to discourage the continued contact of the apex of the blade to the wood. The results will be hit-or-miss contact patterns where the wood relaxes or the blade bites in, and so a "chipping" kind of action occurs. This bulging edge when used to slice or cut soft and hard products will hold up for a long time and this can be an enduring type of sharpness. For paring chisels and hand planes where a higher degree of intimate steel-to-wood contact is desired, the radius of the bulge in the steel of the convex bevel minimizes the usefulness of the tool by reducing accuracy.

The opposite of the rounded convex bevel will be the simple concave bevel profile as in the center silhouette. The edge of a concave bevel has the potential to act as the second keenest bevel shape of the five on the chart, but by the nature of its thinness, it will prove to also be the second weakest edge when under duress. A specialty edge, the concave requires a wheel or other rounded abrasive to create and maintain the profile. There is a tendency for the concave void of steel, due to suction, to draw flesh products towards the blade instead of shedding the sample. The result will be in the gathering flesh as witnessed in the use of a medical microtome planar concave blade. The concave profile is an edge with somewhat limited use for the craft person because of its fragility, although its potential for detail work is unquestionable. A concave bevel belly is a bit like honey on a knife, a delectable best eaten with a spoon.

The iteration of the micro or secondary bevel is seen as second from the left, it is the rich second cousin of a true V-shaped edge. This manufactured edge will if all things are equal, provide a more robust (not sharper but stronger) cutting edge to the blade's previous V-angle from which it is usually post-grounded. Because the maintenance of the exact geometry of an established secondary bevel requires skill to balance the opposing bevels, there is a tendency to sacrifice more and more steel with each resharpening, leading to an ever-growing width of the proximal portion of the secondary bevel inferring an alternative type of keenness.

The profile that best melds the needs of sharpness and longevity will be found in the V-shaped bevel. This shape, above in the middle right, has the greatest potential to possess the appropriate keenness and the expected tenacious edge of a professional's slicing knife. The ability to create this target bevel angle with freehand sharpening is a skill that is most easily mastered and taught, and it can be engineered with jigs. The maintenance of the V is very straightforward, and it responds well to stropping. The results of a well-executed V bevel will exhibit the skill abilities of the creator, and express the compatibility of the stone and the steel. The maintenance of the V profile is the easiest of the four shapes to build and maintain and therefore it is the best pattern to use when testing stones.

The final edge in the lineup, at the far right, is a hybrid concave/convex profile found in certain traditional Japanese knives and razors. The overhanging edge represents a hollow ground ura form while the opposite side presents an ever so slight obtuse omote surface. This edge of this profile is always at risk, but in its fragility is the allowance for potential extreme keenness. This profile is also the only edge type that will allow (or demand) the designation of a knife as either a right-handed or a left-handed model. This unique cross-section profile of this knife blade will provide triple the number of advanced cutting and slicing

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techniques for the preparation of flesh, fruit & vegetables. If there is such a thing as an artistic use of a knife, it will best be expressed by using this blade style. Whichever bevel profile you choose for your tools and knives it will be the process of touching steel to the stone when sharpening, the expression of your technique and skill that will determine the outcome of the cutting edge. It must be acknowledged that a wobbling movement of the knife's spine during sharpening will promote a convex profile to the face of the edge. And although the knife may be truly sharp as a final product it will not always represent the paragon of the steel's potential edge tenacity. This is because now, all along the length of the blade, the edge, having been influenced by the wobbling hand, will represent an edge of varying thickness from heel to tip.

All knives and tools dull during use, the trick is for that progressive dullness to happen in a controlled and predictable manner. If weak areas randomly fail, the downtime of re-sharpening will be a cost in both time and steel.

You will do well to discover the ideal bevel angle matching your knife needs to hold the edge together under your particular workload. It always helps to start a sharpening session with a flat bevel for Western-style knives, and as much of a pristine representation of the blacksmith's interpretation of a Japanese knife's hasaki edge. There is no substitute for a fully robust ura profile, and unfortunately, a worn-away hollow of an ura cannot be bought and paid for outside of Japan. It will be you, and or a trained craftsperson who must deal with the reduction of the ura in one of two ways, either ignore its loss or re-establish its hollow-ground feature.

Always regrind your knife as close to its historic bevel angles and widths with intent and purpose, and not just with a random casual stroke pattern. This is not to suggest that the whole western knife face needs to be as flat as a mirror, or that the kireha face of the Japanese blade needs to be perfectly re-shaped from the edge to the shinogi transition plane every time the knife is dull. The cutting action of any knife is only performed at the edge. And so it is only this shallow/narrow portion near the edge that influences the cutting abilities. In Western knives, the flat edge of the bevel is just 1 to 3mm wide flat. With Japanese kitchen knives the maintenance of the hamon from the edge/hasaki to the kireha where the forge-line of hard steel is laminated to the softer iron hira/tsura, needs to be only lightly touched for the bringing back of the knife's utility. It is tempting to hone the whole face of the homon, but this is not necessary for each thinning of the edge.

There is an established culture of hamono/knife sharpening on the Internet, and especially on YouTube that promotes the revamping of the knife blade's full-face omote from the hasaki edge to over the transition kireha zone just behind the edge-all the way up to the shinogi demarcation line with "each dull to sharp" honing session. I am not a proponent of this, nor am I suggesting that the intent of the sharpening person in the video is either. It is my opinion though that the sharpening of a knife can often take as little as a minute or two. It is my experience that with owners of edges with expressive possibilities, with them, when a knife is too dull to use, it is most likely "just barely" or "just recently" dulled. Here in the west, young and old, those users of fine knives and razors tend to label, in a negative way, the state of the knife as "dull" at just about that same moment that it has "just become dull", and to designate this state as an event of, in my opinion, one of inflated proportion. My interpretation of this early state of dullness is, that the edge as it sits now, is just a moment away from being as keen as it was when I first picked it up. The difference between keen and dull is measured in a few well-placed or miss-placed microns of steel. A condition that can easily be amended. Therefore, why grind off good steel and wrought iron all of the way up to the shinogi? Or to reform the rarely used tip of a chopping knife with every trip to the stones.

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4. My method-The Swinging Stroke

Now there might be someone reading this that is new to extreme sharpness, or the subject of sharpness. If there is, I guarantee that over time you will quickly learn what not sharp enough feels like, and hopefully will look forward to the task of bringing a blade back to the same pleasure state that you had found it in. When you do, be calm in your first sojourn to sharpening, and address the one main issue, which is the edge, and nothing more. With Japanese hocho (knives), the whole face of the blade up to the shinogi was designed by a professional smith, and the less you affect that area the better. There will be a time that you will want to pare down the angle of the omote face of the blade from the edge to the shinogi. Maybe once every 20 sharpenings or so, but do not overdo it by making every maintenance honing, an attempt to recreate the blacksmith's original expressions of proportions and gracefulness. In the meanwhile, consider some of the technical options to follow.

The first one, and I am not being funny, came to me from my son a retired sushi chef. He worked in that wonderful college-drinking town of Chico, California. The sushi master maintained his knife edges on the back of any old ceramic plate he had on hand, upside down he would rub the knife over the rim of the foot.

The Swinging Stroke (SS) suggests a rhythmic rotational stroke pattern that flows across in front of your torso from left to right/right to left, in plain view at or near elbow height with you standing squarely and directly in front of the stone. It is a far easier and more accurate sharpening movement than the common push/pulls stroke pattern, which is a combo shoulder-hinge and wrist-hinge-driven movement. The SS frontal rotational movement method makes each stroke easier to maintain the calculated bevel angle because there are fewer moving parts as the hands and arms are set in a triangular forward-facing formation, always moving within the same lateral sweep. Each stroke movement mimics the previous stroke be they right or left.

The logistics of using this system are; the handle of the knife held in a supinated palm sky-facing upward position holding the toast, while your opposing hand is poised with the pronated palm earth-facing position. Your hands will sympathetically work in unison to guide the contact of the blade as each follows the simple rotation of your torso from left to right and back again representing the length of the blade you are sharpening. It does not matter which hand holds the handle or which hand points, and I suggest as I have proven to myself with practice, that you can easily train yourself to switch the holding hand and alternate the pointing hand when sharpening. The muscle function needed is the same as what many of us were taught for holding the steering wheel of our automobile, hands at 10 and 4 position or 9 and 3 or whichever feels comfortable. We steer a car ambidextrously but never think twice about it because the stroke movement and the grip are a natural blend of our symmetrical arms and digits working in unison while holding a single object.

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#176, #177, #178

A few strokes at the tip, the same number in the middle as at the heel to finish. The pointing fingers determine the area of the steel stone contact zone. Switching hands will also come naturally.

#179, #180,#181

The fingering determines the touchpoints by pushing the blade down onto the stone.

This technique is an excellent adjunct when a portion of the blade needs specific attention. Once identified, that spot can be given extra strokes by just positioning the pointing fingers at that portion of the blade and swinging. For general touch-ups, 2 to 5 strokes along the blade might do it. Otherwise, for general sharpening, you will find your pointing fingers dancing along the edge of the knife influencing the contact with the stone, like tapping your fingers on a desktop or playing the piano. Adjusting the downward force by simply leaning your torso forward adds emphasis.

Practically all two-handed physical work that humans do is performed by one hand holding the object, and the opposing hand directing the movement. Holding a screw-turning the screwdriver, writing with a pen-steadying the paper, swinging a baseball bat or golf club with opposing hands, from tennis to bowling, squirting water and wiping a window, holding wood and sawing, holding the box and striking a match, counting out money, etcetera, all utilize the advantages of the pronated/supinated opposing/hand teamwork. I have found that the Swinging Stroke will create a far more accurate motion because the arms and wrists are not asked to articulate beyond the triangular set-up step. Each of the hands when set and swung from side to side-congruent with the hips, will automatically replicate the rotational motion of a semicircle. The whole movement follows the mid-section of the sharpening person who is standing facing the sharpening stone that is resting upon a countertop or workbench at the height you have chosen.

This side-to-side semi-rotational pattern is by definition an oscillating movement, one which incorporates a radius governed by the rotation of the upper torso, a radius that with just a little skill will maintain the edge-to-stone contact throughout the arc, an arc that can easily adjust to sharpen a pairing

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knife or a long slicing knife. It is not a full circular pattern but instead, one of "return stroke passes", with all of the strokes being a duplicate moving past the center point following the exact path twice in a rotation. Repetition discourages error and although repetitive, this swing stroke is not monotonous by any means and will allow for the expression and the tweaking of contact at certain areas of the blade.

There are three key benefits to using the Swinging Stroke (SS) for sharpening knives. The first is that all abrasion happens at the closest end of the stone and in plain view right there in front of your face. Even more so if you take the step to allow yourself, like I have, to relax and follow the ambidextrous model by switching the holding and pointing hands, this allows the knife's edges, front and back to be facing you for all of the work on the front and back of the knife. The second benefit is that the musculature necessary to hold and manipulate the knife is sustainable by the fact that all holding power is provided by the major tendons and large muscles of the upper arm. The Biceps Brachii turns the palm supinated-upward for gathering and holding the handle, and the Triceps Brachii straightens the arm, influencing the fingers of the pronated-down palm to reach out to make contact with the steel pushing it into the stone. Thirdly, both sets of wrists, hands, and arms are all direct extensions to the torso at the shoulders, creating a coveted triangle effect that inherently ties together all movements of the blade into a unified package. No one part is acting against another but instead, all are in unison.

The nature of the supinated holding hand (palm up), be it right or left-handed when engaged in the closed position, induces the hand to curl and pull and hold. This grip by its nature is a locking grip that directly incorporates some of the strongest muscles in the body, those of the biceps as already mentioned. A supine (from Latin supinus; "sup" root word of super) grip not only creates a ridged positive pressure, but it is a grip that can be maintained for great lengths of time. The anatomical pulling motion of the supinated grip can easily be demonstrated right there in front of you by opening and closing your fingers with your palms up. Try it right now, and in doing so you can also feel an encouraging tuck of your elbow into your side snuggling it up to your hip, and the gathering of the fingers close to your palm. When holding the handle of a knife, which more often than not has an ovoid shape, a great deal of muscle memory is built into the gripping relationship.

The pronated pointing hand of the SS method does not hold the blade or the handle but instead, in its palm down pose it pushes the blade down encouraging the contact of the steel to the stone by transmitting its singular natural direction, that of downward pressure to push the blade against the stone through the means of a pointed finger or two or more. Here again, stick out a finger from either hand and observe what its natural tendency is. You will find it is to push. These pointed fingers will glide along the face of the blade as near or far away from the edge as you choose. The whole swing will begin to feel almost automatic leaving the pointing fingers to express your thought and intention. By pushing down here or there along the face of the blade, even the slightest pressure will profoundly influence the blade's contact with the stone. Your fingers may slide along parallel to the edge of the blade or maintain a pointed push at chosen spots needing particular attention. Each nudge will translate as a scratch pattern or touchpoint on the blade as it swings across the stone.

The teamwork of the pronated hand with its pointing fingers is especially effective in the encouragement of precise contact with the stone. A supinated hand would have little effect if it was asked to point. Here again, this can be easily demonstrated by your attempt to pick up and hold a pen or pencil with your palm facing up, in the supinated position. Or try and push a doorbell or elevator button with your palm up, a task that is so easily done every day with the palm and fingers pronated down. This pushing

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A Second Chance

feature of the pronated hand is the creative asset of this sharpening system while the stable supinated hand holding the knife handle is the motor driving the motion of the blade laterally across the stone.

Sharpening a knife is a physical exercise, and one of the keys to success is the consistent presentation of the knife bevel with a calculated bevel angle in mind. Any old wobbly stroke will sharpen a knife, eventually, but will often leave a rounded bevel and a lot of wasted steel on the floor. A firmly set stroke pattern will sharpen a knife efficiently and will promote flatter bevel profiles that are more tenacious due to the acute geometry. These edges are also easier and quicker to create and maintain because a flatter bevel will always more effortlessly transmit a keyed-in intimate contact angle between stone and steel when presenting it to the stone.

I have found that the Swinging Stroke creates very little hand fatigue, while at the same time, the erect posture position of standing in front of the stone at waist level at a counter or tabletop has the opportunity of incorporating the static hanging three pounds or so, representing the weight of the hands and forearms holding the knife. Plenty of force for the sharpening of a knife. With wrists, elbows, and shoulders in a naturally locked articulated posture, additional downward pressure upon the stone can be exerted by simply leaning forward a bit at the waist without affecting the triangulated bevel-set angle. The rotational hip-to-hip movement powering the knife steel to touch the cutting stone is instigated at the hips, which by association carry the shoulders and encourage the legs et. al to rotate laterally without altering the elevation of the shoulders. This rhythm, with the elbows, tucked firmly to the sides at the beltline provides all the motion necessary in this arc stroke system. The torso simply twists 8 inches back and forth in front of yourself at belly level when sharpening an 8-inch blade, or more or less depending on the length of the blade. At all stages, the edge is directly in focus in front of your face. As the elbows are set against the sides of your torso upon the crown of your coxal/hip bones. You will find that a slight lateral twist of the torso will energize, without thought or constant attention, the correct motion to slide the knife over the stone. The supinated hand automatically twists and confirms the blades' contact with the stone creating a sharpening jig unit. In this system, you will find that your whole body shares as a player, almost like a piece of equipment sharpening the knife, instead of just the arms and hands doing all of the work in the common push-pull keep-it-flat stroke.

The task of sharpening the point of the knife often requires some manipulation of the blade. With this Swinging Stroke and just a little practice, you will find that with the minuscule tilt created by a slight bending of the knee or lifting a shoulder, your handle-holding hand will be encouraged to tilt up enough so you can fully manipulate the pointed tip of the knife's contact with the stone without consciously adjusting the flatness of the tip's presentation. The rotation at the hips and the shoulders will not be interrupted by this slight tilt.

An adjunct to the SS method is also available with the same hand formation, and you do not need to move a muscle. There is always the possibility that any sharpening stroke will make a knife too sharp, one that is so keen the edge can fold over. If you are consensus, that edge will most likely be your model of a perfectly formed edge. It might be weak but the geometry is perfect. If so, rectification is likely only a moment away.

With the knife in hand, as above, instead of rotating the blade left and right by your hip action, do not change your grip, but instead simply rock forwards and backward on your heels to your toes. Away from and

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towards your core, a few strokes will create an edge-leading scratch pattern on the edge. This edge will be stronger but with essentially the same thickness, angle, and fineness.

I encourage the formation and use of edge-leading strokes for cutting tools. With the arm triangulation in place, just rocking back and forth for a moment will boost the blade's utility and longevity.

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A sidebar

#182

The first time I shaved with a "sharp enough" straight razor was two days after it was honed for me by a downtown San Francisco barber, somewhere in the 600 or 700 block of Sutter Street in the spring of 1970. As an 18-year-old, longhair bell-bottom-pants flowered-shirt-wearing hippie, I had walked into this upscale downtown barbershop and instead of asking for a haircut, I asked that barber if he would kindly show me how to hone my straight razor which I had just happened to bring with me, along with an old hard brown Swaty hone. He, I think, was either so amused, along with his friend, to see the old razor and stone, but probably he was so surprised at the notion of a long-haired hippie had even walked into his shop, that he agreed to show me the fundamentals right there on the spot.

Now, to be truly honest, I think he felt a bit sorry for me during that encounter because the day before the barber visit, with a double-edge Gillette razor I had shaved off my two-year-old beard and I woke up that day to the most painful bloody red-splotched-skinned face you could imagine. I believe the barber felt sorry as much as anything, sorry for the pain I was in, so he gave me a little lesson in honing the razor.

After that raw encounter, while the razor was still sharp I messed around and shaved with it off and on until it became too dull to use, which was pretty soon. The Swaty was not very inspiring, so after that, I pretty much maintained a beard again until about the time I was married in 1977. A year later we moved to Japan, arriving on New Year's Eve, just in time for me to ring a massive temple bell before midnight. I began to work as a carpenter on January 5th, 1979, and worked through May of that year. The small company I worked for required me to shave and wear a uniform for work, lucky for me I had discovered that the wonderful hot springs water and disposable blade razors in Japan made shaving easy and enjoyable. Within 3 months in Japan, on weekends when off work, I started buying old used, and new Japanese craftsmen's handmade tools and stones to sharpen them with. My 6-month visa required me to leave the country, which I did in June and we moved back to Mendocino with a couple of boxes of woodworking tools and a few stones. This was about 2 weeks before James Krenov arrived in June of 1979. The Mendocino Woodworkers Guild (later to become The Krenov School at Mendocino College) had invited Mr. Krenov to teach a summer program in the woodworking shop at Mendocino High School. I was not a class member but I helped out a bit in the shop, and I ended up selling a good portion of my saws and chisels to the students. A member asked if I had any sharpening stones, I did and sold him one of the two that I imported. He knew that I was going back to Japan and he suggested that I bring back more stones which I did a few months later. I still have that first stone which I use every so often.

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Collections

Chapter XI

Printed page 172

XI. COLLECTIONS

1. SHARPENING STONES

({Middle English. collect (F. collecte, L. collecta) a gathering together. Collection -1681: (L. collectus), assembly esp. for worship, a short prayer usually concerned with one topic, a gathering of specimens, or works of art. Oxford Universal Dictionary of Historical Principles. William Little, H.W. Fowler, J. Coulson, C. T. Onions; Third Edition: Oxford At Clarendon Press 1947})

#183 Group of Nakayama stones that I bought in 1998. The dark clear numbers 1-27 are for my own inventory.

Photo #184 Iromono (colorful) Nakayama Awasedo & Iki Murasaki (gaudy purple)

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Photo #185 Some have Kawa Hada, and some do not.

Photo #186 Narutaki iromono

Photo #187 Narutaki Mukaida akapin(INV 1508)

#188 Okudo suita(inventory 1513)

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#189 Nakrutaki asagi (INV1504)

#190 Okudo suita from side (INV1513)

#191 Shobudani tenjyou (INV 1509)

#192 Nakayama asagi (INV1502)

#193 Ohira renge suita (wet)

#194 Ohira renge suita (dry)

#195 Nakayama iromono (aka) red streak"

#196 Rainbow (niji) Narutaki iromono iromono

Kato-san of the Nakayama mine stamped graded number designations on some but not all stones in the 1960s & 1970s. Hatanaka the wholesaler-miner inherited and used those stamps but eventually used only his stamp system.

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#197 (left) Nakayama grade No.2 grade, iromono (colorful pattern). Stamped, "Junshoshin-Honyama" (a pure true Honyama), "Saikokyuhin" (the very best quality).

#198 (right) Nakayama grade No.2 grade Shiro Aisa suita, iki murasaki colorful (purple color). Stamped, "Junshoshin-Honyama", "Saikokyu".

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#199 Nakayama grade No.12 iromono tomae

#200 Nakayama grade No.15 asagi

#201 Nakayama grade No.15 stone, #202 No.17 stone, #203 & #204 No.23 grade tomae stones.

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#205

#206

Nakayama grade No.23 Grade Nashiji Pear Skin pattern

#207

#208

Nakayama Grade No.26 kan pattern

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#209 Nakayama Grade No.27 Iki Murasaki (purple), #210 Nakayama Grade No.27 Iki Murasaki

#211 This Nakayama toishi was gifted to me from Nakayama in April 2017.

Weighs 15.2 pounds (6.9 kg) and is 11 1/2 x 6 x 2 3/4 inches thick (29x15x7cm thick)

And is probably one of the last stones dug during the commercial Kato family years.

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#212

#213

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Photos #214 Suita

#215 Suita

#216 Suita

#217 Iro (colored) tomae

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#218 Lighting Strikes Narutaki iromono w/purple Iki Murasaki coloration and alternate mineral-filled inclusion.

#219 Nakayama kiita mine entry, 1903 Osaka, Japan Industrial Exposition award.

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Top right to left, #220, #221. Bottom #222, #223 Namazu or catfish

#224

#225

Narutaki Awasedo Sumi nagashi (ink floating on water transfer to paper pattern)

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Tenjo suita w/sumigashi pattern

#226

#227

#228

Manganese mineral intrustion pattern. This is not a skelton.

#229

#230

#231

#232

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#233 Above Examples of Nakayama kawa.

Namazu post-sediment inclusion in-fill of alternate opportunistic minerals.

#234, #235

#236

Traditional stone grades and dimensions

Grade | Dimension or larger
#25 | 218x78 mm
#35 | 205x75 mm
#45 | Thin 205x75 mm
#65 | 195x70 mm
#85 | 180x63 mm
#100 | 160x58 mm
# razor | 136x82 mm
# extra big | 230x80 mm or larger

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#237

#238

#239

#240

#241

#242

#243,#244

#245,#246

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Carved hollow Edo-era wooden stone cradle (dai) for cherished finishing stone #247 and #248,

#249, #250, #251 Ultra Grip-Mechanical TackY stone holder, engineer M. Shultz

#252 & #253

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#254 Modern adjustable stone holder

#255 frugal Meiji-Edo barber hones

Below, are thin sections of awasedo. #256, #257

#258 Living edge kiita

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The Tale of Tanuki.

Photos #259, #260, #261, #262, #263

Above: Meiji era merchants' account book. Many old-style businesses to this day in Japan collect customer accounts at the end of each month. The account ledger here is made of handmade washi-mulberry paper. This paper is perfect for wrapping toishi, especially if the washi is treated with true urushi or another lacquer of some sort. I have used marine-grade varnish on the stone above.

If you happen to be walking about Japan, in the countryside or the city, you might have an opportunity to meet a tanuki late at night after the bars close. If you are having trouble finding your way home in the dark, especially if you are a wee bit loose (it will usually be men who are wandering) and maybe need some friendly directions home, one of these little tanuki fellows might be willing to help you. He might even offer you a drink of sake along the way. If you accept a swig from his jug, and if he does you the favour of helping you find you way home, this favour comes with a caveat, that he will eventually collect. Tanuki's haul around not only a jug of sake on his left hip but also a ledger book on his right to keep track of his "friends" accounts. Don't ever try to trick a tanuki. If he does you a favour, you now have an obligation to him. They are helpful but cannot be tricked, and he knows where you live, it is marked in his book.

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Photos #260,261,262

Tools for applying urushi. The cedar wood paddles are for working-mixing-thinning and applying the urushi lacquer to the project. The lacquered horse hair bristle brush is for stipple dabbing air bubbles, and smoothing out the urushi on the surface of your project. The strands of horse hair are tightly bundled and the box is built around them. As the bristles are worn or disfigured they are trimmed at the front edge, and with a knife, the box is paired down to expose fresh portions of horse hair to suit the craftsperson's needs. The hair takes up the whole interior of the box so it can be used down to the nub.

Map of Shobudani mine site: Copy and paste directly as a internet search. Zoom in and look for Takao and look for Arashiyama fishing pond. The mines are to the east of the pond along the ridge.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hiraoka-Hachiman-gu+Shrine/@35.0428991,135.6765194,64m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x6001a99187b12137:0xceca67601785ad3d!8m2!3d35.0411401!4d135.6876963

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2. PEOPLE IN THE TRADE OF STEEL & STONE

#263 Sharpening guru Yasutoshi Senga-san

#264 Above + below #266 retired miner Yamamoto-san

#265 Mikawa nagura principle provider, Sakamoto-san.

#266

Below, Tokyo blacksmith Ishido Teruhide #267

#268 Below, Hatanaka-san of Kyoto

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#269 & #270 Above Master Dai-ya of Sanjo , mentor to many, Inomoto-san.

#271,2 & 3 Kezuroukai, the character, the giving, and the inspiration to create from scratch. Himeiji castle below.

#274

Himeiji castle, built with handtools sharpened by Narutaki Awasedo

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Alaska yellow pine shaved to 6 microns in thickness measured at 3 points along a 7ft long shaving.

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