Quality knives that can be used forever with proper sharpening and regular maintenance

Carefully hand grinding the knife with a grindstone while paying careful attention to the blade. Sharpening the steel forged by a blacksmith, blade sharpener Takeshi Yauchi’s job is filled with 600 years of Sakai’s tradition as a knife-making town. Yauchi is the third generation of Yauchi Hamono, which was established in 1937.

“Back in the day I had no interest in the family business, and I went to work for the railway company,” says Yauchi. “But every time I went home, I would see that the knife makers were slowly decreasing, and I realized that if I didn’t do anything, there wouldn’t be any more knife industry in Sakai.”

Returning home, Yauchi began sharpening blades under his father. In his opinion, the recent boom in Japanese cuisine was a huge help. In need of sharp knives, more and more people are visiting Sakai from abroad. Yauchi’s business has been strengthened by the many people who want to learn about the qualities of Sakai knives.

“Making new knives under our in-house brand, and winning design awards had been a really great learning experience. Now what I really wanted to do was create a new type of mechanism to go around the knife,” says Yauchi. Knife making in Sakai has a 600 year history, and the level of perfection is so high that there isn’t any additional work to do. Something else was needed, and it was an outside designer that led to the next opportunity. The designer proposed that perhaps there was a way that Yauchi could develop a relationship with professionals to periodically maintain the sharpness of their knives.

He would be entrusted as a sharpening specialist to support professional chefs. As a way to encourage cooking culture moving forward, this suggestion resulted in the “ei series,” a way to safely ship knifes back and forth while waiting for resharpening. A spare knife is shipped out before the customer sends their knife in for sharpening, so there is no inconvenience to work in the kitchen. This system allows the chef to grow with their knives, using the same product made by the artisan for years to come.