The sound is dull, regular, almost organic. A hammer on white-hot steel. Not one blow more than necessary, not one fewer. Inside the workshop, the heat is dry, immediate. The forge glows. The smith doesn’t speak. He strikes, turns the blade, strikes again. His gestures are six hundred years old.
Sakai, a city of 820,000 in Osaka prefecture, supplies 98% of the professional knives used by Japanese chefs. That figure, cited by the Sakai Tourism Bureau and echoed by specialist sources, is staggering. It means that in almost every starred kitchen in Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto, the blade that slices the fish, minces the ginger, or cuts tofu into translucent sheets comes from here.
From imperial tomb to tobacco knife
Sakai’s metallurgical history doesn’t begin with knives. It begins with shovels. In the fifth century, the construction of Emperor Nintoku’s tumulus — the largest ancient tomb in the world by surface area — drew blacksmiths to Sakai who specialised in iron tools: hoes, ploughs, spades. They settled, and the know-how took root.
The turning point came in the sixteenth century. The Portuguese arrived in Japan in 1543 carrying two things: guns and tobacco. Sakai, a prosperous merchant port, began manufacturing both. Tobacco knives — thin, razor-sharp blades used to cut the leaves — became the city’s speciality. Their quality was such that the Tokugawa Shogunate awarded Sakai knives the “Sakai Kiwame” seal, a quality mark guaranteed by the state. The monopoly was official.
It was also at this time that swordsmiths, rendered redundant by the Tokugawa peace, turned their techniques to kitchen knives. They brought with them the forging methods inherited from katana-making: the lamination of hard steel and soft iron, differential tempering, sharpening on natural stones. The Japanese kitchen knife was born from this convergence of the everyday tool and the warrior’s weapon.
By the late seventeenth century, during the Genroku era, the single-bevel knife that remains Sakai’s signature appeared. One cutting edge, a sharp angle, a clean cut that preserves the fibres of ingredients and the cellular membranes of fish. This isn’t a technical detail — it’s the reason sashimi sliced with a Sakai blade has a texture and flavour that Western double-bevel knives cannot reproduce.
Three trades for one knife
What sets Sakai apart from every other cutlery capital in the world is its division of labour. A Sakai knife is never the work of a single person. It takes at least three, and often four.
The smith — kajiya — shapes the blade. He heats two distinct metals: hagane, a hard, high-carbon steel for the edge, and jigane, a softer iron for the body of the blade. Forge-welded at a precise temperature — too low and the metals won’t fuse; too high and the steel’s carbon burns off — they become one piece. The smith hammers, stretches, and forms the blank without mould or template. Only eye and muscle memory. Then comes the quench: the blade, heated to red, is plunged into water. This moment determines the steel’s hardness and edge.
The sharpener — togishi — hones the blade on natural stones. This work is silent, meticulous, almost meditative. A skilled sharpener spends hours on a single blade, checking the angle by touch, correcting to the micron. It is the sharpener who gives the knife its legendary edge. Without this step, a forged blade remains a piece of steel. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, it takes ten years to achieve competence in sharpening.
The handle-maker — e-tsuke — fits the handle. Magnolia wood for its lightness and moisture resistance, or ebony and rosewood for premium pieces. The ferrule — kakumaki — is carved from buffalo horn, black and lustrous, ensuring a solid junction.
The fourth actor is the wholesaler-manufacturer — toiya — who commissions the pieces, coordinates the craftsmen, controls quality, and distributes the finished product. It is the toiya who stamps the mark on the blade, a gesture called meikiri, performed with hammer and chisel.
This system already existed when Sakai’s smiths were forging swords. It persists because it works: each craftsman devotes an entire life to mastering a single aspect of the process. Extreme specialisation produces a quality that integrated work cannot match.
Ten smiths in twenty years
This is where the story tightens.
According to an article on PR Times citing a Sakai manufacturer, the city had over thirty smiths a few decades ago. Around fifteen remain today. At this rate, in twenty years, there will be five. The JR West website estimates the total number of craftsmen working in Sakai’s cutlery industry at around one hundred, across all trades.
Among them, twenty-eight hold the title of dentō kōgeishi — traditional craft artisan — a national certification awarded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy after a minimum of twelve years’ practice and a rigorous examination. This is the elite of the elite. But the title doesn’t make its holders any younger.
Satoshi Nakagawa is an exception. Certified as dentō kōgeishi in 2023, he is the youngest craftsman ever to have received the title in the history of Sakai’s cutlery trade. Trained for sixteen years under the legendary Kenichi Shiraki, he founded Nakagawa Hamono (Nakagawa Uchihamono) in April 2021. His trajectory proves that succession is possible. But behind him, candidates are not exactly queueing up.
The city of Sakai’s official website states it plainly: mastering the forge takes ten to fifteen years. Ten to fifteen years of repeated gestures, of ruined blades, of heat and noise. The Sakai Cutlery Cooperatives Federation works with local authorities to train young people, but the challenge remains structural. When a master closes his workshop without a successor, the know-how disappears with him. No documentation, no instructional video. The gesture dies with the hand that carried it. The Japanese have a word for this transmission: mite nusume — “steal with your eyes.” You learn by watching, by imitating, by absorbing. Not by reading.
Some workshops are starting to act. Eric Chevallier, a French smith, completed a full apprenticeship at Sasuke, the workshop of Yasuhiro Hirakawa — a twenty-second-generation smith. It was an event: foreign apprentices remain exceptionally rare. On Reddit, an American smith trained in Japan summed up the situation: “I am the first American in the history of the world to receive this training.”
The tension
Sakai is living a fascinating contradiction. On one side, demand has never been stronger. The global boom in Japanese cuisine has created an insatiable appetite for hand-forged Japanese chef’s knives. Foreign enthusiasts order hand-forged blades from Australia, the United States, France.
On the other, the smiths are ageing and apprentices are scarce. Demand is rising; supply is thinning. Prices climb mechanically. That’s the price of scarcity.
Culinary tourism and social media have brought renewed attention to Sakai. The Smithsonian Magazine recounts how a Toronto TikToker, HiHelloItsMary, visited the forge of Mizuno Tanrenjo — one of Sakai’s oldest, a fifth-generation smithy — and shared the experience with her followers. Tour circuits now offer visits to workshops, the chance to watch a smith hammer a blade in real time.
It’s good for awareness. Is it good for succession? Less certain. Watching a forging video and spending fifteen years in a sweltering workshop are two very different things.
The names of Sakai
Japanese knife enthusiasts know Sakai’s brands with an almost religious fervour. Sakai Takayuki, the brand of Aoki Hamono (founded in 1948), is the best known internationally — six hundred years of heritage concentrated in hand-forged, hand-polished blades. Mizuno Tanrenjo, a fifth-generation forge, is renowned for its honyaki — blades made entirely from carbon steel, without lamination, the most difficult technique of all. Sakai Ichimonji Mitsuhide has been producing knives for professionals for generations.
Then there are the individual smiths, whose names enthusiasts spell out like incantations. Shogo Yamatsuka, master of Ginsan (silver steel), certified dentō kōgeishi in 2012. Tadashi Enami, fifth-generation smith, certified in 2003 and honoured as “Meister of Sakai” in 2007. Tatsuo Ikeda, third generation at the helm of Ikeda Cutlery, specialist in honyaki and the “wave of Fuji” pattern, decorated with the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 2009 — deceased in 2015. Yoshikazu Ikeda, president of the Sakai Traditional Craftsmen’s Association, certified in 1988.
These are the names. Not Mazaki (Sanjo, Niigata), not Watanabe Blade (Sanjo, Niigata), not Tadafusa (Sanjo, Niigata). The confusion is common because Japan has three major cutlery regions — Sakai, Sanjo, and Seki — and Western enthusiasts often mix them up. Sakai is the single bevel, the oldest tradition, the division of labour. Sanjo is the double bevel, individual smiths who forge and finish by themselves. Seki is industrial — volume and stainless steel.
From Thiers to Sakai
There’s something unsettling about placing Thiers and Sakai side by side. Two cities, two continents, two cultures. The same story.
The same centuries-old specialisation. The same golden age followed by a decline in numbers. The same move towards the high end as a survival strategy. The same nagging question: who takes over?
In Thiers, the CFAI trains young people who arrive by vocation. In Sakai, transmission remains largely artisanal, individual — one master, one apprentice, ten to fifteen years. The model is more fragile. Training programmes supported by the city and the Cutlery Federation exist, but the problem is structural: the division of labour that is Sakai’s glory is also its vulnerability. It’s not enough to replace one smith. The sharpener must be replaced too. And the handle-maker. And the wholesaler who coordinates the whole. When one link in the chain fails, the whole weakens. An Osaka Info article puts it bluntly: the division of labour is becoming “a jaw with missing teeth.”
But there is one fundamental difference. Thiers lost its mass market and repositioned. Sakai never had a mass market. Its knives have always been artisanal pieces, forged one by one, intended for professionals. The city hasn’t had to reinvent itself. It simply has to keep existing.
That may be harder.
What holds
Sakai’s knives carry a reputation built over six centuries. The most demanding chefs in Japan swear by them. Informed enthusiasts worldwide consider them the pinnacle of cutlery. This is not marketing. It’s the result of a system in which three craftsmen pour their excellence into a single object.
But Sakai is not a museum. It’s a city that makes things. Smiths, sharpeners, handle-makers who work six days a week. Orders arriving from around the world.
The problem isn’t demand. The problem is time. Around fifteen active smiths. In twenty years, perhaps five. Sakai’s system is a masterpiece of human organisation. Three interdependent trades, passed from hand to hand for six centuries. If one link fails, the whole collapses.
Somewhere in Sakai, a smith lights his forge at five in the morning. The pine charcoal glows. He takes a bar of steel, slides it into the fire, waits. When the metal reaches the right colour — a luminous orange, almost white — he places it on the anvil and strikes.
This gesture, someone must learn. Before nothing remains but silence.