Informative Issue No. 258 2017

Pandoy Pulido Those Who Seek Simulated Reality Regional Influence Polishing Out the Best in the Filipino

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The FMA Informative would like to thank Pandoy Pulido / Mr. Pulido for the material on the subject of the “Hidden Filipino Art Form Revealed at History Con Manila 2017.” Which the event was held August 10 - 13, 2017. Mr. Pulido an artisan second-in-line to the smith, called a pulidor is one who works quietly, unhurriedly, with stone and cool water, to bring out the smith’s vision hiding underneath the charred, ragged surface of the freshly forged blade. Though a panday is an artist in making blades Mr. Pulido a pulidor works for hours on end, carefully defining the geometry of the blade’s edge and tip, then painstakingly evening out the surface so that the panday’s intricate metallurgical pattern of water (sometimes oil) rushing over the fire is made visible to the naked eye; and more importantly, the maximum cutting efficiency that he had in mind, is finally realized.

About Mr. PulidoPandoy Pulido sharpens, polishes, and restores Filipino blades using hybrid methods. He is also a part-time English tutor and a student of Japanese, European, and Filipino swordsmanship; as well as a beginner in Zen, bushcraft, and permaculture, which he hopes to integrate into an ethos of the Filipino bolo that will be respon-sive to the “new normal” of the 21st century.Mr. Pulido can be contacted on Face Book as Pandoy Pulido: Click Here

Photos by Katrina Miniano Photo Citations By Adrian Gabriel and Mike Hernandez Screencap by Joseph Arnaldo

Visayan Barung showing a “jumping” hardened area (tobiyaki) close to the tip

Moro Gunong with full body tempering (hitatsura)

Pandoy Pulido

I am no panday, but rather a pulidor. A blade polisher. Similar to my namesake, a Joey de Leon character from a 90’s fantasy movie, I am simply an “alalay ng panday”, an artisan second-in-line to the smith. The panday works rapidly with fire and ham-mer, striking whilst the iron is hot, swiftly bringing the raw blade into being with a resolute quench that imparts his vision unto the steel in a shock of hissing steam. The pulidor works quietly, unhurriedly, with stone and cool water, to bring out the smith’s vision hiding underneath the charred, ragged surface of the freshly forged blade.

Over a few days or weeks, the pulidor will sit for hours on end, carefully defining the geometry of the blade’s edge and tip, then painstakingly evening out the surface so that the panday’s intricate metal-lurgical pattern of water (sometimes oil) rushing over the fire is made visible to the naked eye; and more

importantly, the maximum cutting efficiency that he had in mind, is finally realized. There are probably very, very few of us, though, and I don’t know where the others are, nor how they are faring with their livelihoods. When I was starting out, I often felt anxious at how the task of rendering the country’s history in steel, in all its vivid detail, seemed to fall solely on my aching shoulders, at least for the time being. This was why I tried to work with blades from as many Filipino smiths as I could; most of them friends and colleagues across different provinces in the country, some of them unknown masters long deceased. Without so many words, I needed was to learn how to listen as closely as I could to the stories they hammered onto the very shape and structure of these various blades from their respective geographi-cal regions and historical periods. Modern and vintage Filipino blades (mid-20th century and up) are forged from a single piece of sophisticated alloy steel; at first these came from sal-vaged or sabotaged railroad tracks, and more recently from automotive leaf springs or ball-bearings. All of them are differentially-hardened and will reveal what the Japanese call a hamon (or subo in Tagalog), a white frosty line undulating across the length of the blade, which defines two contrasting steel microstruc-tures: a hard martensite edge and a soft pearlite back. The hard edge is intended to hold a keen, slicing angle, while the soft back absorbs the shock of every cut. Antique Filipino blades (early 20th century and older) are made from folded or laminated steel, which means that they are forged from different

grades of impure steel with varying properties and hardness, meticulously hammered, flattened, and folded together numerous times. In addition to the hamon, they will also display what the Japanese call hada, or folded layer patterns that resemble the swirl-ing grain of fine wood. This tempering and hardening is perhaps the highest art in the entire craft of the panday, yet the resulting patterns far often remain invisible to us; felt, perhaps, during the cut or when sharpening on a

rough stone, but almost never seen. Reclaiming this lost visual art as a tangible cultural heritage proved to be as difficult as if it were sunken treasure buried in the depths of the sea, or perhaps captured booty to be wrested back from the clutches of an oppressive conqueror. As “Manila makes History” (so the con-vention’s tagline goes) once again on August 2017, I was brimming with excitement that this hidden art form might finally be revealed.

Vintage T’boli Kampilan, before and after polishing

Antique Moro Kris, before and after polishing

Those Who Seek However, tucked away in a little table at the furthest corner of the blade market section of the convention center, the subtle patterns of the tradi-tional Filipino blade threatened to be overshadowed by the fantastic display of traditional-looking, Chi-nese-made reproductions of Japanese-style swords at the forefront. I have always feared that the virtues of the Filipino blade, just like those of the Filipino spirit, might not be for all Filipinos to see, but only for those who seek it. One by one, though, the seekers come: fellow Filipino martial arts (FMA) practitioners and blade merchants, academics, bush crafters, rescue work-ers, and even the convention’s historical re-enactors. To them I clarify or elaborate on the story I narrated above; but when the pandays come to visit, whether junior or senior to me in years, I need not retell the story in so many words. They might simply take a look at the clear, crisp surface of the polished steel, note the fascinating but expected patterns deep within the blade’s metallurgical soul, perhaps mumbling “Oil” here, or “Water” there, and give a small nod. They were men of few words, faint smiles, and hand-shakes firm but gentle, what with our callused hands

and fingers suffering from varying degrees of tenosy-novitis, a minor occupational hazard not many people know about. History Channel’s very own panday, Ryu Lim, was no different. He picks up the most humble, least attractive item I had on display. It was an agricultural imple-ment from the northernmost provinces of Luzon, a one-and-a-half foot blade mounted on a two-foot steel pipe which serves as an oversized handle, minimally

Panday Ryu Lim and Pandoy Pulido

wrapped with tennis-grip tape. He hefts it in his hands to check the weight, balance, and center of percussive (cutting) power in one quick, instinctive movement, and expresses his brief approval. But it is only the

day after, when he finally gets to do some test-cut-ting with the blade, does he actually pronounce the Cagayan panabas to be good.

Simulated Reality Outside the convention center, in the dusty heat of the gravel parking lot, behind a handsome speedboat big enough to ferry a platoon of student activists to Pag-asa Island, and beside the muted rattling of platoons of air-soft players trying to pin down or outflank each other in the military simulation arena, Ryu enters our test-cutting station from one of the designated smoking areas. He carefully flicks his cigarette, and grinds the ember under the heels of his patent leather boots. After a while, he casually ad-dresses the gathering crowd. The panabas, he says, is used by Filipino farmers to trim the weeds and grasses that tend to overrun the mud dikes used to divide rice paddies into manageable plots, what in Tagalog is called a pilapil. Boys as young as nine or ten will use these imple-ments, in their usual rusty and rather dull condition, to hack away clumps of mud and grass off the pilapil, root and all. Polished and sharpened such as it is now, the panabas in Ryu’s hands echoes its earlier, al-most-forgotten purpose among the southern Moro peoples who popularized the original design; that of a head-chopping executioner’s blade, or a coup de grace weapon used to finish off injured foemen in the battlefield.

Facing him was a composite target made by our swordsmanship coach; a thin stick of rattan wrapped first with sheets of newspaper, then tightly rolled up inside an anahaw mat, and finally soaked in water overnight. Our coach intended these materials to simulate bone, tendon, and muscle. Ryu Lim was going to cut the equivalent of a human forearm.

He puts both hands on the round steel handle, winds up the panabas behind his shoulder, and cuts down diagonally across the target. The blade never seems to slow down through-out its trajectory, with a little swish barely louder than a single shot from one of the airsoft rifles firing in the distance. The sound of the severed piece of the target hitting the ground was more audible, but it was quick-Standard agricultural Panabas from Cagayan province

Ryu cuts with the Panabas

ly drowned out by the cheers of the crowd. Ryu makes a small flourish of the blade, very much in the Japanese fashion, which is intended to

shake off as much debris and liquid as possible after the cut. He looked satisfied, while I on the other hand, was grinning from ear to ear.

Regional Influence

It is impossible to ignore the Japanese influ-ence on modern test-cutting (tameshigiri) method-ology, and even more so for the kind of specialized metallurgical terminology used to describe features peculiar to differentially-hardened blades, which include practically all traditional Filipino weapons and tools. The factors that make the panabas such an effective cutter can all be clearly seen on its polished steel surface. The hamon falls short of covering the entire edge area of the blade, but completely encompasses the “sweet spot” where cutting power is concentrat-ed. This misty line occasionally diffuses into dots

of discrete, very hard spots of martensite-structured steel called nie, or spindly tendrils which might be called ashi. Moreover, there are less distinct second-ary temper patterns suggesting a medium-hard matrix of ferrite (“ordinary” iron microstructure) scattered across the soft pearlite body, but polishing these out

Hamon, Nie, and Ashi on the PanabasHypothesized cross-section of a typical Filipino blade

(not to scale)

in detail is a more time-consuming process that I have yet to master. The closest Japanese terms I can use to describe them would be jifu or jifu utsuri. There are a myriad other tempering styles and patterns all over the country. A Visayan barung, for example, might show a part of the hamon “jumping” away from the main line, which might well be called tobiyaki. A double-edged Moro dagger, on the other hand, is commonly treated with a full-body temper-ing, or hitatsura. All these Japanese loanwords are used loosely. The same blade of a given tempering method can sometimes manifest different patterns, depending on the finishing treatment used. With blades from a particular tradition in the province of Pangasinan, a mirror finish will reveal a straight, hazy hamon resembling the suguha style, while an acid treatment would give that very same blade an irregular zig-zag-ging temper-line, smaller in scale but reminiscent of the midare style. The use of acid is actually taboo in Japanese polishing, but very much necessary to ex-press certain temper-patterns in Filipino blades, or if a specific knife needs to be darkened for food prepa-ration or hard, messy outdoor work in all-weather conditions. Finally, the most striking difference among the

various hamon in Filipino bladecraft is between those which are quenched in water, and those quenched in oil. Water produces a very hard edge that falls just short of brittleness, consequently this area has to be smaller, resulting in a relatively narrow hamon. Oil, on the other hand, produces a less hard, almost springy temper, thus the hamon has to be bigger and wider. In either case, the hamon is symmetrical on both sides, but only for homogenous modern steels which are not folded. There are, however, blades that have been quenched first in water, then in oil. Their hamon are bizarre and almost surreal, are devilishly hard to reveal, and even more so to photograph. In his quest to perfect a blade that will tame a jungle or defeat an enemy, or to equip the Filipino everyman with his primary tool of survival and liveli-hood, all at a very modest cost, the venerable panday tempers his steel quickly and intuitively, in contrast to the deliberately artistic process of the Japanese. The more natural, subdued patterns produced are no less mesmerizing, and this article can only provide a very brief overview of the many kinds of tempering meth-ods practiced across different regions and historical periods. These examples represent only the very tip of the iceberg.

SeseBlades NCO Knife in mirror vs. acid-etched finish

Leyte Sansibar with narrow wa-ter-quenched hamon

Laguna Dahonpalay with wide oil-quenched hamon

Polishing Out the Best in the Filipino

Ryu Lim returns the next afternoon and makes short work of more anahaw targets. He gives me back the panabas, and I hand it over to Gabriel Chee Kee of Parokya ni Edgar, while the organizers obligingly

play his band’s hit song Bagsakan! to roaring ap-plause from the crowd. The heavy guitar riffs seemed to add power to his smooth sweeping cuts, making each severed piece that hit the dust seem even more

Jaime Dempsey draws on her past lessons in the Filipino martial arts

dramatic. Towards the end of the day, motorcycle host Jaime Dempsey tries out her Filipino martial arts skills with the blade, and competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi puts his calories and ripped triceps to good use. A modern Japanese pop hero swinging that curious-looking beast of blade at the setting of the sun seemed to bring the cultural debt full circle, and embodied the wild and wonderful melting pot that was History Con Manila 2017. Inside the convention center, the seekers still come one by one. The work of countless pandays through the ages, who forged in fire and water the very spirit of their peoples into these immortal steel blades, stands proudly for all who seek it. The crown-ing glory of their art that is the hamon or subo, hidden for so long under a dark, weathered exterior, is some-what like the virtues of resilience and ingenuity that are the very best of the Filipino. It simply needs to be polished out.

Takeru Kobayashi in fine cutting form

Left - Right: Joseph Arnaldo, Gabriel Chee Kee, Ryu Lim, Jericho Viejo, Edmundo Ongsiako, and Pandoy Pulido

Re-enactors examining the Moro Kris

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