The Bladesmith

Hiroshi Tanaka works in a narrow building on a side street in Sakai, a city south of Osaka that has forged blades for more than six hundred years. The forge is his grandfather's. The anvil is his grandfather's. The hammer marks on the wooden post by the door belong to three men.

He began as an apprentice to his father at seventeen. For the first three years he was not permitted to forge. He swept the floor, fetched charcoal, watched. He learned to read the colour of heated steel before he was allowed to strike it. This is how it is done.

Tanaka-san makes roughly two hundred knives in a year. Each one passes through his hands at every stage — the rough forge, the normalising, the quench, the tempering, the long patient hours of grinding on water-cooled wheels. He does not delegate. He does not produce in batches. He does not stamp.

When asked why he agreed to make a knife for a single foreign label, he said: because you wanted only one, and you wanted it correctly.