Practicing His Craft To The Hilt

``Ordinary People'' is an ongoing series introducing you to people we rarely write about, people who don't make the headlines because they aren't making news, but who in their own way often lead extraordinary lives.

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Kerchunka, chunka, kerchunka, chunka, kerchunka, chunka . . .

Tatsuhiko Konno's daily grind is six hours of rhythmically stropping a yard-long strip of razor-edged steel.

Konno, 42, believes himself to be one of only three craftsmen in America practicing the ancient skill of polishing Japanese swords. (He says the other two are in San Francisco and Hawaii.)

The former Tokyo resident's workshop is the basement of a wood-frame rambler on a leafy, peaceful Kirkland cul-de-sac where he lives with his wife, Sadayo, and their three children.

Wearing a white judo-style jacket and black apron and slippers, Konno crouches over a centuries-old sword braced in a traditional wooden jig. All day he slides whetstones over the sword surface using techniques he learned during a six-year apprenticeship with a Japanese master.

Konno's craft involves much more than honing a sharp edge. A Japanese sword is really a system of curves, so the polisher actually resculptures the gleaming lethal steel. He scours the whole blade, starting with a very coarse whetstone and working through nine grades to a pasty stone so fine and soft it must be kept submerged in water or it turns to powder.

This professional burnishing boosts value in the same way that cutting and polishing enhances the worth of raw diamonds. And although most Japanese samurai swords are worth from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, the finest sell for more than $200,000.

Generally, it takes Konno 10 days of endlessly repetitive motions to reach a lustrous finale. Though some might think his occupation excruciatingly boring, Konno revels in restoring the lethal blades that have been called ``the soul of the samurai.''

``Sure, the first stages are hard work, especially if there's much rust,'' Konno says. ``But then it's fun watching the pattern of the grain and tempering emerge. I keep going to see what's there. And every blade is different.''

Actually, 10 days of polishing (at a cost of $800 to $1,000) doesn't sound like such an exacting project when one learns that in old Japan the forging of a samurai sword took up to a year and cost as much as a house. Often the handles and scabbards were exquisitely decorated with sharkskin and gold.

Konno has plied his craft here for nearly 15 years, ever since arriving from Japan to perform kendo (combat with wooden swords) at the Spokane World's Fair. Learning that the young kendoist knew how to polish swords, a Washington sword collector sponsored Konno's permanent residence in the U.S.

Since then Konno has kept polishing, polishing, polishing dozens of samurai swords. In fact Konno, who also makes sword scabbards and handles, doubts he'll ever run out of work. Reason: after World War II, U.S. occupation forces in Japan outlawed samurai swords as deadly weapons, and about 200,000 confiscated ones were shipped back to the U.S.

American owners often relegated them to mundane chores such as chopping weeds. But Japanese collectors are now steadily reclaiming their national heritage by sending teams of sword buyers on tour in U.S. cities.

Konno says America has about 2,000 collectors, about half of them members of the Japanese Sword Society of the United States. The largest such organization outside Japan, it convenes in Chicago this fall. Membership includes Washington State University mathematics professor Sam Saunders, a Japanese-speaking metal-fatigue specialist and sword collector. He says some swords are inscribed with the number of bodies they've cut through at one stroke (as many as five).

As another example of the fearsome strength of this martial steel, Saunders cites a famous Japanese imperial-forces movie showing an officer slicing through a machine-gun barrel. ``It ruined the blade,'' Saunders says. ``But it sure ruined the machine gun, too.''

A true samurai blade comprises a core of flexible spring steel inside a hard outer layer of carbon steel. The core is folded and hammered to produce more than 4,000 laminations, and the cover is folded to produce 300,000 layers. The resulting grainy-looking metal is tougher than modern steel alloy, and the hardened cutting edge is sharper than a razor. A distinguishing feature of each blade's cutting edge is ``hamon,'' meaning the beautiful shimmering pattern of shiny white crystals of hardened steel, which have been described as ``like a mass of cherry blossoms under the morning sun.''

``When you look at the actual edge of one of these swords, you can't see it,'' says Thomas Bolling, a University of Washington librarian who is adviser to a campus kendo club. ``It's just a haze, an awesome piece of steel dwindling off into a haze.''

Though Konno feels confident in polishing about 85 percent of the blades brought to him by customers, he says he still recommends sending the very finest to a master polisher in Japan. The disadvantage is a three-year waiting list and a bill for about $90 an inch, instead of Konno's usual $30-$35.

What ruffles Konno's calm dignity is amateurs who unintentionally ruin samurai swords by grinding and buffing them with power tools. ``They're destroying history,'' he says.

For about 700 years until 1869, these weapons were toted by the samurai military class that dominated Japan.

Patricia Watkinson, WSU Museum curator who helped mount a ``Swords of the Samurai'' exhibition in Bellevue and other Washington cities several years ago, says such swords often stayed in a family for generations. She says their uses ranged from weapon of war or suicide to severing the umbilical cord at birth.

Steven Frankfort, operator of Campbell's Antiques and a longtime collector of Japanese swords and sword ``furniture,'' says that ``historically speaking, while America's basic weapon is the gun, Japan's is the sword.'' In fact, he says, Japan banned guns for about 200 years and returned to the sword.

In feudal Japan, even some emperors made swords. Because the craft had such high status, for 1,000 years the finest Japanese artisans did metalwork.

Himself a samurai descendant, Konno practices a solo martial art called iai, which is vaguely like making tennis serves with a naked yard-long safety razor. Konno also teaches kendo, which now generally is performed with hardwood swords because using metal blades can be harmful to both swords and swordsman.

For recreation, Konno teaches iai at Lake City's Meadowbrook Community Center from 7 to 9 p.m. Mondays, and kendo from 3 to 5 p.m. Sundays at the Seattle Dojo in the International District.

Then it's back to the old grind on old swords.

Kerchunka chunka, kerchunka chunka . . .

If you have a candidate for us, someone you think would make a good profile for Ordinary People, let us know. Write to Ordinary People, c/o Scene, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, Wa. 98111. Make sure you include your name, address and a daytime telephone number.