Knife making experience at a blacksmith in Kyoto, forge to handle

A Japanese kitchen knife starts as a sandwich rather than a bar. Traditional makers forge-weld a hard carbon-steel cutting edge to a softer iron body.¹ The pairing gives the knife a hard edge on top of a tougher supporting layer.⁵ Cut a finished blade across and the join shows: soft iron and steel bonded together, with the boundary line between them still visible.⁶ When a smith tells you the knife is laminated, this is the thing the word describes.

Regional smiths load the sandwich in different ways. In Tosa, in Kochi prefecture, a long groove is cut along the thin edge of an iron strip, the edge steel is inserted into the groove and lightly hammered, and boric acid is applied as an adhesive.⁷ In Echizen, in Fukui, a bar of iron has a groove cut in one side, and the steel blade is inserted and beaten with a hammer to join them.⁸ The Tosa description adds a reason worth remembering: placing hard steel between soft iron prevents the steel from breaking.⁹

Not every knife is a sandwich. Blades known as honyaki are forged from a single piece of steel, so the construction and the heat treatment change with the type of blade.¹⁰ Sakai's tourism bureau notes that professional chefs also use knives made only from steel.¹¹ Some Tosa production centers now use a ready-made combination of steel and iron rather than welding their own.¹² When you watch a blacksmith work, ask which of these methods you are seeing; the answer tells you how the finished knife is likely to behave.

Once welded, the plate is reheated and hammered out repeatedly to thin the metal, and the tang that will sit inside the handle is cut to shape.¹³ Tosa smiths call their method free forging, in which shapes are formed by hammering and flattening hot metal, and they describe it as the craft's distinctive trait.³⁴ Artisans in this tradition can make any size or shape of blade in small production runs.³⁵

Machines share some of the work. The belt hammer used in Tosa is a high-speed rotary machine hammer developed in the Showa period, and it helped raise production volume.³⁶ Echizen uses double layering, in which two blade plates are layered and hammer-beaten on both sides.³⁷ The hand hammer remains the tool you will picture and the tool a visitor is handed, but the craft has long used help from machinery.

After shaping, the knife is laid on a bed of straw and left to cool naturally, and the straw turning to ash helps remove internal distortions.¹⁴ Later, at room temperature, the blade is hammered again to flatten marks and tiny holes, fix distortion and give an even thickness.³⁸ Both steps are about straightness. A blade that leaves the forge bent will not sharpen into a straight edge, and much of the rest of the process is about keeping it true.

The session behind this site is a Kyoto listing for an authentic knife making experience at a blacksmith. It lasts 3 hours and starts from $152, with an instructor who speaks English or Japanese. A small group is available, and the listing carries 800 reviews at a rating of 4.8. Free cancellation applies up to 24 hours ahead, and you can reserve now and pay later.

The listing places the meeting point in the Yase district of Sakyo Ward, a one-minute walk from the Yase-Hieizan exit of the Eizan Electric Railway. The operator runs a pair of studios in Sakyo Ward, and staff message guests before the visit to say which location to attend. Expect the day to start by the train line rather than in the middle of town, and plan the hours either side of the session around that.

Everything above describes the craft in general. The booking page is the place to confirm which of these stages your own session covers, and how much of the work you do with your hands. Treat the stages here as a map for any Japanese knife making workshop: they let you recognize what the smith is doing at each moment and ask better questions while it is happening. For a look at how a whole community makes knives, Takefu Knife Village in Echizen was completed in May 1993 as an open factory and shop.³¹ You can walk through its museum and factory for free, and its experience programs for the public need a reservation made in advance.^29,30