Talk:Hamon (swordsmithing)

Comments

For now this article is a stub, i'm trying to get some media to expand it - such as a picture of a hamon to inline. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lordkazan (talk • contribs) . --Kjoonlee 16:56, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

This definitely deserves a picture. LieAfterLie (talk) 07:20, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I changed the literal definition from ripples to edge pattern. I think there's some merit to ripples as a translation, as obviously the pattern looks wavy, and on the Japanese page it seems 波紋 is used as a representation by people outside sword-smithing. It's totally possible that the root of hamon is from 波紋, but 刃文 served as a convenient way to write it, and obscured the etymology when it became the dominant representation. Or it could be a coincidence. Either way, unless someone with more knowledge than me wants to do that research, I think directly translating 刃文 as "edge pattern" is better. Mousefire777 (talk) 17:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Mousefire. I don't speak or read Japanese, but I have been bladesmithing since I was a kid, and am very familiar with some Japanese terms. I'm also a bit familiar with linguistics, language morphology, and etymology in general. I don't think you can really look at the characters like that and work backward to a meaning or etymology. Languages typically evolve verbally and writing generally follows, rather than the other way around. It also evolves in illogical and unpredictable ways.

One of my favorite examples of this unpredictability is the English word "gear". This originally meant "habits and mannerisms". Today, you only find an echo of this meaning on rare occasions, such as "gearing up for a bout". By the early Middle Ages, this word came to mean "arms or armor". By the late Middle Ages, it meant "any goods or supplies carried by a person". During the Industrial Revolution it meant "any internal workings of a machine". It was only within the last hundred years that it came to mean "a wheel with interlocking teeth". Tamahagane is a similar word in Japanese. Tama could literally mean "jewel" or it could mean "ball". Hagane is pretty simple to figure out (literally "edge metal"; free translation "steel"). But why choose tama as the adjective, and which meaning does it derive from? I guess only Amakuni knows for sure.

With hamon, the word has been freely translatable as "edge pattern" since at least the advent of Japanese swordsmithing. Japanese swords originally had suguha (straight pattern) hamons, so I doubt the waviness had anything to do with it. The shape of the hammon is controlled by the shape of the clay coating at the time of quenching. It wasn't until around the 1200--1300s that smiths such as Kunimitsu and Masamune began producing midareba hamons (irregular pattern). The three main groups are suguha (straight edge), notare (undulating/wavy) and guname (zigzag). By the 1500-1600 you could find hamons with flowers, clovers, trees, or other shapes in them. By the 1800s, people were making hamons with entire landscapes.

As "ripples", the word "hamon" is associated with the pattern formed by specifically throwing a rock into a lake. That outward expansion of waves from a central point, which could lead to hamon's other meaning, "banishment/expulsion from a group" (such as the Yakuza, for example). For swords, it could have originally been used simply because the pattern is made as the blade splashes into the water upon quenching. It could be related to expulsion of the heat. Who knows? It may not even be related at all, anymore than "world peace" is to "whirled peas". It could simply be a combination of two separate words, ha meaning "edge" and mon meaning "a pattern or emblem uniquely identifying something or someone".

However, in modern Japanese, I think it can be both freely and literally translated as edge pattern within this context. It has been used that way since the beginning within this context. That's what the sources do, any anything else is just original research (see: WP:NOR). Zaereth (talk) 21:13, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Fake hamon as main image?

It looks like the current front image is a "fake" hamon line done via an etching or sanding process. Would anyone have any issues with me finding a replacement for it? Epicfacethe3rd (talk) 21:18, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

What makes you think it's fake? It looks real to me, and I say this because you can see the nioi very well at the tip due to the way the light is glancing off of it. Zaereth (talk) 22:08, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

ah crap, on closer inspection i think you're right, my bad.

looked way too consistent and with no "shadow" in places. I didn't see the nioi because i was looking at the body of the blade.

thanks for responding so fast! Epicfacethe3rd (talk) 17:22, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Hamon and hadori (fake hamon image)

Many people do not seem to know the difference between hamon (刃文) and hadori (刃取) and seem to confuse hadori with hamon. The white area on the side of the blade is the area whitened by a polishing process called hadori to bring out the hamon. The hamon is an indistinct line within the hadori. In this Twitter image, the light blue line is the hadori and the red line is the hamon. In the case of suguha (直刃), where the hamon is straight, the hadori is easily misunderstood because it is formed to overlap with the hamon, but when the pattern of the hamon is complex (midareba, 乱刃), such as gunome (互の目), it is easy to distinguish the two. It is difficult to photograph, and the hamon is not visible in many of the photos attached to descriptions of the hamon on the Internet. In order to properly appreciate the hamon, one must hold the sword in one's hand and adjust the angle of the light illuminating the blade, or change one's position in front of the display case to change the angle of the light reflecting off the blade.--SLIMHANNYA (talk) 06:55, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Are you sure? None of the sources I looked at (and I just checked a bunch to be sure, including the ones used in the article such as The Connoisseur's Book of Japanese Swords) says anything like that. According to everything I've read, "hadori" refers to the final stage of the polishing process, and to the special hadori stones used in the process, which are slightly more coarse than the stones used for the sharpening steps. If fine stones were used the entire edge would end up with a mirror-like polish and no discernable difference would be seen between the hira and the yakiba. The coarser stones leave deeper scratches; far deeper in the hira than in the yakiba. The yakiba diffuses the reflected light with little dependence on viewing angle, (kind of like frosted glass, hence "hadori" is often called the "whitening process") whereas the hira reflects light more like velvet or a fur coat, being either shiny or dark depending on the viewing angle with respect to the direction of the scratches.

The hamon is always described as the line that separates the hira from the yakiba, whereas the lighter area you're describing between this line and the edge is always called the nioi in every book I've read, which is already described in the article. In actuality, it is the nioi that actually provides the boundary between the yakiba and the hira, but as you (and all the books) say, it is only visible when viewed from just the right angles with respect to the lighting. Zaereth (talk) 07:45, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

This well-known Japanese sword store explains the difference between hamon and hadori, and how hamon and yakiba mean the same thing,[1] which may be helpful to you if you translate it into English at DeepL or elsewhere. Hamon and yakiba mean almost the same. At the time of forging it is often called yakiba, and when it is polished it is often called hamon. The difference between nie and nioi is the size of the particles that make up the hamon, with nie being larger and nioi being smaller. Soshu school, represented by Masamune, has perfected a style that emphasizes nie.

You can see how the hamon can be seen through the hadori by changing the angle when taking pictures of Japanese swords on this page.[2]

Since I am Japanese and English is not my first language, and I have trouble with technical explanations, I suggest you ask Paul Martin on Twitter.[3] He is a British expert on Japanese swords living in Japan, who has translated several books on Japanese swords into English and is well known among Japanese sword hobbyists. I have not met him, but from what I have seen in the media, he seems to be very sincere.--SLIMHANNYA (talk) 11:35, 2 March 2024 (UTC)