Just watched it in full screen. The ball is coming from his left, and he swings the sword in an arc to his right. That tells me he’s cutting in the same direction the ball is traveling.
This isn’t one of those spinning ballerina pictures that your mind can turn in either direction. There is no way he cuts the rear of the ball, the sword hits the leading edge.
“Just watched it in full screen. The ball is coming from his left, and he swings the sword in an arc to his right. That tells me he’s cutting in the same direction the ball is traveling.”
Your observation makes me even more uncertain if we are watching the same video.
In the one I see, shown at the top of this thread, his right side is mostly, but not directly, presented toward the machine that is firing the ball. A line from big toe to big toe of his feet, when the ball is pitched, is oriented about 20 degrees to the right of pointing at the hole the ball comes through. The center line on the platform that he is standing on is pointed directly at the hole the ball comes through. The point of the sword is a bit closer to the source of the ball than the handle when it impacts the ball.
The sheathed sword is on his left side, away from the ball pitcher. The ball comes at him from the his right, though his upper torso is twisted a bit so that his head is looking directly at the hole where the ball comes through. He draws the sword and swings it toward the ball pitcher, cutting the ball, and pivoting his left foot clockwise, from left to right as he completes the stroke.
Is that different from what you see?
I have been thinking about it from a perspective aspect.
The camera is to the left/rear of the swordsman. We are seeing a flat image, not three dimensional.
What appears to be movement from the left to the right is the left to right vector component of the balls trajectory when viewed from the camera position.
When viewed from the the swordsman’s position, the ball is coming nearly directly at him, passing in front of him, from right to left. Notice that his feet do not shift until after the ball has been cut. Post 8 in this thread shows the action in alternating real time and slow motion. The slow motion shows what I have described very clearly.