blade
Sakai: The City That Sharpens Japan
How a port town near Osaka became the source of the professional chef's knife — the four-hundred-year division of labour behind a single Sakai blade.
Ask a Japanese chef where a good knife comes from and you will often hear one word: Sakai. A port city on the edge of Osaka, it has been making blades for centuries, and it still makes the knives that professional kitchens across Japan reach for first.
From tobacco to kitchens
Sakai’s edge-making did not begin with cooking. In the 16th century, with firearms and then tobacco arriving through the port, the town’s smiths turned to making the fine knives used to cut tobacco leaf. The work demanded a very sharp, very clean edge — and when demand for tobacco knives faded, that skill turned to the kitchen.
Out of Sakai came the shapes professional cooks still use: the heavy deba for breaking down fish, the long thin yanagiba for slicing sashimi in a single pull. The town’s reputation was built not on home cooks but on the people who use a knife all day.
One blade, many hands
The thing that makes Sakai unusual is that no single person makes the knife. The craft is split, deliberately, among specialists.
A forging smith (kaji) heats and hammers the steel, forge-welding a hard cutting steel to a softer iron body so the blade can take a keen edge without being brittle. A separate sharpener (togishi) then grinds and hones that blank into a finished edge on a succession of stones — a craft of its own, and the reason a Sakai edge is so fine. Often a third house — a merchant (ton’ya) — commissions the work, has the handle fitted, and puts its name on the finished blade.
This division of labour is why Sakai blades are so consistently good: each pair of hands does one thing, and has done only that thing for a working lifetime.
Kasumi and honyaki
Most Sakai kitchen knives are kasumi — the two-metal construction above, hard steel laminated to soft iron. It is tough, repairable and takes a brilliant edge, which is why it is the everyday professional choice.
A smaller number are honyaki: forged from a single high-carbon steel and hardened like a sword, with a visible temper line. They are harder, hold an edge longer, and are far less forgiving to make and to sharpen — the work of the most experienced smiths, and priced accordingly.
Owning a Sakai knife
A Sakai blade rewards a little knowledge — which shape, single or double bevel, how to keep the edge. Start with the guide before you buy.
Read: Choosing your first Japanese knife. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped blades on The Table.
Sources & Further Reading
- KOGEI JAPAN — Sakai Cutlery (Sakai Uchihamono) — The craft-industry portal’s overview of Sakai blades: the tobacco-knife origins, the three-stage division of labour, and the claim that over 90% of Japan’s professional chefs’ knives come from Sakai.
- Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — Sakai Uchihamono (Forged Blades) — The Association for the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries on Sakai’s history, its designation as a traditional craft in 1982, and the specialised craftsmen behind each stage of a blade.
- Sakai Traditional Crafts Museum (Sakai Denshokan) — The city-run museum in Sakai where the forging and sharpening crafts are exhibited and demonstrated.