Single-bevel kitchen knives, hand-forged in laminated white-paper steel, water-quenched, hammer-finished, and ground over forty-eight stones. One smith. One blade at a time.
Apprenticed eleven years under Master Tanaka of the Sakai sword-smiths. Opened a single-forge workshop in the Sakai Hamono district in the twelfth year of Taishō, hammering scissors and small kitchen knives for the Osaka fish markets.
Re-laid the foundation after the war and pivoted the workshop entirely to single-bevel sashimi blades. Established the lamination ratio still used today.
Refined the water-quench timing to a degree no instrument has matched. Trained the fourth generation for nineteen years before stepping away from the anvil.
Holds the forge today. Refuses to scale beyond twenty-two blades a month. Every knife leaves the workshop signed and dated on the tang.
Single-bevel slicer drawn through the flesh of raw fish in one unbroken pull. Ho-wood octagonal handle. Buffalo-horn ferrule.
Vegetable knife with a tall, square tip for katsuramuki — the rotary peel of daikon into translucent sheets. Pure cutting board contact.
Heavy, single-bevel filleting blade. Built to break through fish bone on the spine and slice cleanly along the belly. Thick at the heel.
Our concession to the Western kitchen — a double-bevel chef's knife with the rocker and length to butcher, slice, and chop in equal measure.
Small-format utility blade, ground to a finer edge than its size suggests. For the work the gyuto is too long to honor.
Pointed boning knife, single-beveled and rigid. For poultry: the blade separates joint from socket without ever touching bone.
Soft iron and a thin core of white-paper steel are heated to 1,250°C and forge-welded into a single billet. The seam, when correct, sounds different against the anvil.
The shaped blade is buried in a clay slurry, heated to the moment of incandescence the smith has memorized, and dropped into a water trough. Forty percent of blades fail here.
The blade is taken across forty-eight stones — coarse synthetic through ultra-fine natural Aoto and Awasedo — over six weeks. The final mirror is hand-pulled, never powered.
The waiting list is sixteen weeks at present. We accept ten new commissions a month and close intake when the shelf is full. There is no rush queue.
Tell us which blade you cook with, what you cut most often, and the size of your dominant hand. The smith will reply by post within the week.