Tsubame-Sanjo: The Two Towns Behind Japan's Tools

There is a bullet-train station in Niigata called Tsubame-Sanjo. A short drive away there is an expressway interchange called Sanjo-Tsubame. Same two towns, opposite order, and the reversal is not an accident — it was the price of peace. Neither place would accept going second twice.

That is the first thing to understand about one of Japan’s most productive stretches of metalworking country: it is two towns, not one, and they have spent four hundred years being very good at slightly different things.

It started with nails

Sanjo sits on the Shinano, Japan’s longest river, and for most of its history the river was a problem. It flooded. Rice failed. Farmers needed something to do in the months when the fields gave them nothing.

The story Sanjo tells is that in 1625 a local magistrate named Ōtani Seibei brought nail smiths down from Edo and taught the farmers to make wakugi — Japanese nails, square-sectioned and hand-forged, nothing like the wire nails you know. Edo burned down with grim regularity and needed rebuilding each time, so demand was effectively infinite. (The account comes from local tradition rather than surviving documents, and Sanjo itself frames it that way; what is not in doubt is that the trade took hold.)

Within a generation there were smiths doing it full time rather than between harvests, and the work widened from nails into sickles, saws, hatchets and kitchen knives.

That widening never really stopped. The craft is now recognised nationally as Echigo Sanjo uchihamono, Echigo Sanjo forged blades, designated a traditional craft of Japan in April 2009 — a category that covers kitchen knives, planes, chisels, hatchets, axes, sickles, shears and, still, Japanese nails.

The nails that went to Ise

The nail trade should have been a dead craft by the twentieth century. It nearly was.

Then in 1989 the Ise Grand Shrine came asking. Ise is rebuilt from scratch every twenty years — the shikinen sengū, a practice running back well over a thousand years — and the sixty-first rebuilding was due in 1993. The wooden-boat builders who had traditionally forged its fittings were a dying trade. Sanjo’s manufacturers formed a committee, and in March 1991 delivered around 68,000 hand-forged nails in five types, and about 13,500 sets of metal fittings in twenty-four.

The shrine at the centre of Shinto is held together by nails from a Niigata flood plain. It is the kind of continuity that sounds invented and isn’t.

Meanwhile, across the river

Tsubame took the same starting point and went the other way.

Copper had been found in the hills near Mount Yahiko, and from the middle of the Edo period Tsubame’s smiths worked it rather than iron. Craftsmen from Sendai brought the technique of tsuiki — raising a vessel by hammering — and it stuck. Tsubame also made kiseru, the slim Japanese tobacco pipes, and metal files.

So by the end of the Edo period the split was set: Sanjo made things that cut, Tsubame made things that hold. Blades and tools on one side; vessels, pipes and fine finishing on the other.

Tsubame tsuiki dōki, Tsubame beaten copperware, was designated a national traditional craft on 22 June 1981. The method is close to unchanged. A flat disc of pure copper is hammered against shaped iron stakes called ategane, annealed soft again when the metal work-hardens, and hammered further — cycle after cycle, many thousands of blows, until a sheet becomes a kettle. The most demanding pieces are raised from a single sheet, with the spout drawn out of the same copper rather than soldered on. The finish is not paint: the colour is grown chemically on the surface with copper compounds, which is why an old Tsubame kettle is a deep brown-red you cannot quite match with pigment.

There is a saying in the trade that it takes three years to learn to flatten a surface and six to learn to shape one.

The century that made Tsubame famous

Here is the pivot. In 1911 a Ginza import house needed a set of Western spoons and forks for a wealthy client, and put the job to a Tsubame copper craftsman. It was a one-off curiosity, nothing more.

Three years later the First World War turned Europe’s cutlery factories over to munitions, and the world’s orders for spoons and forks landed on a town that had just discovered it could make them. Tsubame took the work. The government’s protective tariffs of the mid-1920s then handed it the domestic market as Japan’s own eating habits turned Western; a 1940 wartime order on metal use shut production down entirely; and stainless steel, adopted from 1951, brought it back.

Tsubame now accounts for around 90% of Japan’s domestic production of Western-style cutlery. Since 1991 — when the Nobel Foundation commissioned new flatware for the prize’s ninetieth anniversary — the forks and spoons on the tables at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm have been made by a Tsubame company.

Tsubame’s other reputation is for polishing, one of the least glamorous and most exacting metalworking skills there is. The mirror-bright stainless back of the early iPod is widely said to have been finished by a small polishing shop here. Whether or not the story has grown in the telling, the underlying point holds: when a product needs a surface with no visible flaw, this is where the work has tended to go.

The towns opened their doors

In 2013 the two cities tried something unusual. Rather than sell through catalogues and trade shows, they opened the workshops themselves — the Tsubame-Sanjo Factory Festival, Kōba no Saiten, in which the region’s factories let the public in to watch, ask questions and buy. Fifty-four workshops took part in the first year. By the seventh edition in 2019 there were 113, drawing some 56,000 visitors over the run.

It is a good instinct. Tsubame-Sanjo has no cathedral kiln, no famous master, no single object you can point at. What it has is a dense population of small workshops, each unreasonably good at one operation — forging, pressing, spinning, grinding, polishing, plating — and the only honest way to convey that is to let people stand in the doorway and watch.

What to buy from here

Sanjo is where to look for cutting tools: kitchen knives, garden shears, carpentry chisels, outdoor gear. It is a stainless-and-practical town rather than a single-bevel-and-reverent one, so it sits closer to Seki than to Sakai in temperament — well made, unfussy, meant to be used hard. If you are still deciding what shape of knife you need, start here.

Tsubame is where to look for everything that isn’t a blade: cutlery, kettles, tumblers, ladles, canisters. Stainless from Tsubame is generally a safe bet at any price point — the polishing culture means even inexpensive pieces have properly finished edges and no burrs, which is exactly what you feel in the hand and rarely see in a photograph. Hand-hammered copperware is the other end of the range, and priced accordingly; it is a lifetime object, and copper wants hand-washing and a soft cloth, never a dishwasher or an abrasive pad.

Browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped kitchen tools on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• ECHIGO SANJO Uchihamono (Forged Blades) — Japan Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The national traditional-crafts body on Sanjo: the 28 April 2009 designation, the origin in farmers’ off-season nail-making, and the full range of tools covered.
• TSUBAME Tsuiki Doki (Beaten Copperware) — Japan Traditional Crafts Aoyama Square — The 22 June 1981 designation, the craftsmen from Sendai, the ategane stakes and annealing cycles, and the chemical colouring process.
• 三条鍛冶の技「伊勢神宮」— Sanjo City official website — The city’s own record of the 1993 Ise rebuilding: the 1989 request, and the roughly 68,000 nails and 13,500 sets of fittings delivered in March 1991.
• 選べるカトラリー — Tsubame City official website — Tsubame City on its 90% domestic share of cutlery production and the 1991 Nobel ninetieth-anniversary commission.
• 日本の洋食器展示室 — Tsubame Industrial Materials Museum (Tsubame City) — The municipal museum’s timeline of Tsubame cutlery: the 1911 Ginza order, the 1914 wartime export boom, the 1925 tariffs, the 1940 shutdown and the 1951 move to stainless.
• 燕三条 工場の祭典 について — official festival site — The organisers’ own figures: 54 participating workshops at the first festival in 2013, 113 at the seventh in 2019, and some 56,000 visitors.