"Don't be fooled by how easy I make this look. This is actually pretty tricky. The real challenge is controlling the blade's position."
"I've been demonstrating for a while, so you all should understand by now that you can split bamboo quite easily by striking it vertically, right?"
"But the blade is extremely sharp. While you're striking downward, if you don't control your force or the angle properly, you can easily slice into the other bamboo fibers. This results in a strip that isn't straight, like these ones here."
He picked up four bamboo strips from the ground that seemed indistinguishable. Holding them together, he raised them up, and only then could the viewers see what he meant by a crooked split.
A strip that should have been straight had an unnatural curve in one spot, as if a piece was missing. The corresponding half of the split had a piece jutting out, making the pair look completely uneven.
