Echizen: The Blade Town That Rebuilt Itself

Sakai and Seki are the two blade towns most people abroad have heard of. The third name, and the one that keeps turning up on the knives chefs get quietly excited about, is Echizen — a stretch of Fukui prefecture on the Sea of Japan side, snowed in half the year, forging steel for something like seven centuries.

The smith who came looking for water

The story begins around 1337, when a Kyoto swordsmith called Chiyozuru Kuniyasu is said to have settled in Echizen Fuchū, the town that is now Echizen City. He was not looking for customers. He was looking for water — the cold, clean water a smith needs to quench a blade properly.

What he found when he arrived was farmers working with bad sickles. So he turned his sword technique sideways and made them better ones, and then taught the local smiths how to do it. That is the founding act of Echizen blade-making: not a weapon, but a farm tool made properly.

There is a shrine to him in the town, built in 1932 around one of his swords, with a pond beside it said to be where he drew his water. The legend attached to it is a strange and rather beautiful one. Every time Kuniyasu finished a sword, he is said to have carved a komainu — a guardian lion-dog — out of a sharpening stone and sunk it in the pond, a prayer that the blade he had just made would not be used to kill. When the pond was dredged, around the time the shrine went up, stone komainu came out of the mud. And a sword. The komainu faces, by all accounts, are not fierce at all.

Sickles for the whole country

For most of its history Echizen was not a knife town at all. It was a sickle town. Peddlers carried Echizen blades out along the roads to farming villages across the country, and the trade grew large enough that in the government’s 1874 production survey, Echizen was making over a quarter of every sickle in Japan — more than any other region, by a wide margin — and roughly a quarter of the country’s kitchen knives.

Two techniques came out of that work and still define the place.

The first is nimai-hiroge, “two-sheet spreading.” Instead of hammering out one blade at a time, the smith stacks two red-hot blanks and works them together, striking from both sides. The pair holds its heat far better than a single piece would, so the steel can be drawn out thinner and flatter without cooling to a stop halfway. The second, mawashi hagane-tsuke — roughly “rotated steel joining” — is the sickle method, compressing the cutting steel into a diamond section that comes to a very thin edge and sharpens easily.

Both are aimed at the same quality, and it is the quality Echizen is known for: a blade that is thin and light in the hand without being fragile. In January 1979 the craft became the first blade-making region in Japan to be designated a national traditional craft.

Nearly over

None of that saved it. By the 1970s stamped stainless blades were arriving cheap and in volume, the smiths were ageing with no one behind them, and of roughly sixty workshops in the area most had shut.

What happened next is the reason Echizen is worth writing about. In 1982 a group of the remaining smiths sat down with an industrial designer, Kazuo Kawasaki, and did something blade towns almost never do: they agreed to work under one name and to design new products together rather than compete downward on price. Seventeen of them were finished by 1983 and shown in Tokyo. In 1986 the work went to New York.

Then, in May 1993, ten of the companies opened a shared workshop — Takefu Knife Village, in a building by the architect Kiko Mozuna. There were no subsidies. The build ran to around 300 million yen, and each of the ten smiths personally took on three million yen of debt to make it happen.

It worked. The cooperative is thirteen workshops now, and young people move to Fukui from all over Japan to apprentice there — the exact problem the whole thing was built to solve. You can walk into the shared forge and watch them work, which is not a demonstration staged for visitors but simply the floor where the knives get made.

Choosing an Echizen knife

What you are buying from Echizen is that thinness — a blade that feels lighter and cuts with less effort than its size suggests. It rewards a decent sharpening habit and dislikes being left wet.

Read: choosing your first Japanese knife and how to care for and sharpen it. For the other two towns, see Sakai and Seki. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped blades on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• Echizen Blades: Japanese Knife-Making in Fukui — Discover Fukui (Fukui Prefecture official travel guide) — Chiyozuru Kuniyasu’s move from Kyoto in 1337, his shift from swords to farmers’ sickles, the komainu legend, and the 1979 designation as the first blade region recognised nationally.
• Echizen Forged Blades (Echizen Uchihamono) — KOGEI JAPAN — The craft-industry portal’s account of the two signature techniques (double layering and rotated steel joining) and the 1874 production figures for Echizen sickles and knives.
• 伝統産業「越前打刃物」 — Echizen City official website — The city’s own summary: roughly 700 years of history, the nimai-hiroge and mawashi hagane-tsuke methods, and its status as the first blade-producing region designated a traditional craft in 1979.
• タケフナイフビレッジについて — Takefu Knife Village official site — The cooperative’s own history: the 1982 meeting with designer Kazuo Kawasaki, the ten founding workshops, architect Kiko Mozuna’s building, and the money each smith borrowed to build it.