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Secrets, Rumors, and Tradecraft in Japanese Knifemaking
After the pandemic began and lockdowns bound many of us to our homes, interest surged in kitchen knives and Japanese ones in particular. Increased demand strained an already limited supply. Forum chatter increased as searchers cast their nets wider in response to shortages. On KitchenKnifeForums (KKF), a user named Omega rose to prominence thanks to a series of posts about the Konosuke company. His intensive research put him in contact with vendors and craftsmen in Japan and North America — that combined with exhaustive data collection made others look to him as an expert and his article on Konosuke is still cited today across KKF, Facebook knife groups, and r/chefknives.
But in late 2020, he was publicly chastised for his research on social media. In response to clarifications about a knife’s steel provenance, a respected North American vendor stepped in to transmit a clear message from Japanese craftsmen and industry professionals: knock it off. From the post comments, “If you don’t speak the language well…you should probably refrain from making public comments about [this]…please moving forward, try to avoid posting about things you don’t truly understand or grasp. It’s important for all of us to know our limits.”
To knife fans, the Omega melodrama lands somewhere between confusing and fascinating. In an arena with such demand for information and commentary, his contributions seem like some of the few resources that combine factual data and citations with actual narrative commentary. So where did the backlash come from?
I want to shed some light on the story. My aim is to answer three questions:
- Why do forums care so much about brands, craftspeople, and secrets of tradecraft?
- Why such a harsh response from the industry?
- Is enthusiast investigation of knife production ultimately a doomed enterprise?
One last thing before jumping in — those familiar with the Omega controversy tend to feel quite strongly about it and already have an opinion. If you feel the same way — either righteous fury toward the craftspeople/vendors or schadenfreude that a naïve forum poster got his comeuppance — I invite you to put aside those feelings and approach the story fresh. You may be surprised.
Part 1: Why do forums care so much?
Let’s begin by reviewing common knowledge about production. In general, there are separate entities involved in the production and sale of your knife. Common entities are as follows:
- Steel manufacturer: produces ready-to-use steel, generally in flat or round stock.
- Smith: sometimes called a “blacksmith,” this expert generally forges steel from blanks into shape. Optionally, the steel may be composited (forged) by the smith from raw iron or existing blanks; however the vast majority are forged or stamped from blanks. The smith also heat treats blades
- Sharpener/polisher: uses abrasives to continue shaping the knife after forging/stamping, largely responsible for the final geometry and aesthetic finish.
- Trading house and/or wholesaler: an interface between craftsmen and vendors; a typical production step here involves installing handles and chiseling/engraving marks into the steel. They also have large influence over what kinds and quantities of knives will be ordered and which vendors receive stock.
- Vendor: stocks and sells to customers; they tend to be the only interaction end-users have with production and hence are responsible for more written information than others.
Example: Tokyo Knives is a wholesaler (#4) that places an order with Bunji the blacksmith (#2) and Satoru the sharpener (#3). Bunji has some older Takefu (#1) steel in stock that matches specifications but warns he only has half as much as he needs and the next batch won’t be identical. Tokyo Knives decides to brand them as two separate lines to avoid the confusion and labels one “vintage carbon” while using Takefu’s designation for the other. They have an existing relationship with three storefronts (#5) domestically in Japan and one in North America and advise them of the upcoming line’s availability.
How it affects customers
Why are we talking about the basics of production? It’s because most veteran forum members are acutely aware of all this and want to find details about each of these entities. After all, a rushed sharpening job could mean a lemon of a knife and a novice blacksmith may miss crucial mistakes introduced during forging. Hence you see posts such as “who is your favorite blacksmith?” and “did this knife line change sharpeners?” plastered all over knife forums and groups. They want the best (but also inexpensive) people working on their knives!
Enthusiasts care deeply about this. They feel if they can nail down each aspect of production, they’ll get better, cheaper knives than the unwashed masses. It’s a common problem in watches, motorcycles, musical instruments, and many other industries. Yet in many cases, the enthusiasm may ultimately be overvalued, wrong, and/or clash with Japanese industry practices.
Let’s explore the specifics of our example scenario above. What happens when speculation about Bunji’s “vintage carbon” runs wild online? A popular figure on Instagram comments they love their vintage line knife and a YouTuber does a three-part series on how great of edge retention it has. Forums are inundated with requests for a “Bunji the Blacksmith Vintage Carbon” knife in stock and before long the price doubles. Nothing about the knife or production has inherently changed; it’s strictly information (or rather, lack thereof) at cause. A perceptive buyer could get essentially the same knife for half the price — hence an intense interest in all stages of production and sale.
Everybody lies a little
Those outside production and sales for Japanese knives tend to fall victim to misleading information about manufacture. Unfortunately, even when we do have information from craftsmen or vendors about the production of a given knife, much of it is purposefully vague or only partially true. Combined with runaway speculation in secondary markets and forums, godspeed to anyone trying to untangle facts from marketing.
Craftspeople work behind identities: until now the word “entity” helped avoid specifics on who makes knives. Knife production — especially Japanese manufacturing — varies greatly:
- A tonya (trading/branding house) in Sanjo may be the sole entity handling forging, sharpening, and branding for most cases and even steel production/customer interfacing in others (a custom tamahagane order)
- A trading house in Sakai may employ 10+ sharpeners with very similar work and label them all as the same entity. This may seem deceptive, but many businesses in North America work the same way — don’t expect Mr. Goldman to be managing your 401k or Ralph Lauren to make your $35 polo shirt
- There are a number of one-person operations in Japan though very, very few. Simply suspecting a knife was produced by a single craftsman will raise its prestige and value
Unfortunately this last point is encouraged by a certain mysticism in customers who sincerely want to believe their knife was lovingly produced by a single master craftsman, ideally wearing traditional clothing, and swinging a hammer at a piece of steel made from iron ore on-site. If a customer manages to get hold of such a knifesmith they are likely to hear exactly the lie they so desperately want to hear.
As my wife gently reminds me about her nine months when ‘we’ were pregnant, sometimes oversimplifying production can leave out crucial details for the sake of a narrative:
- A legendary sharpener supervises employees who do the bulk of the work, but still releases the work as his alone
- A namesake blacksmith (e.g. Tanaka, Fujiwara) slowly begins to outsource certain lines to other workshops and does quality inspection on them
Obviously these kinds of practices make good business sense, but they also have a serious impact on price. What happens, for example, when a vendor spills the beans about the legendary sharpener and admits all his knives from the past five years were sharpened by others? Resellers can kiss their market value goodbye and customers who valued their knife based on its provenance will be upset.
Wholesalers misdirect information: because buyers want to hear certain things about their knives, wholesalers figure out a way to let them hear it. Consider the following (fictional) interchange:
Retailer: I’m interested in placing an order on these knives from your brochure. Can you tell me the craftsmen involved for my product description? They look very similar to Bunji’s work from last year.
Wholesaler: You are very observant!
Retailer: …so they are made by Bunji?
Wholesaler: <launches into a story about visiting Bunji’s shop five years ago and how far his work has come along>
Even if the wholesaler doesn’t outright lie (some do), the retailer is given plenty of information to support the idea that Bunji was the smith who forged these blades. In reality, it may be a competitor or colleague doing the actual work, but the wholesaler is motivated to move product and is not obligated toward transparency.
Quick note: the average forum reader would be astonished by how many wholesalers are involved in knife retail. Few retailers buy directly from craftspeople and certain knives cannot be bought direct at all. Wholesalers can be very aggressive and territorial in their business practices.
Vendors exaggerate: look at how vendor descriptions affect perception. One retailer in Canada is known to exaggerate the reputation of Echizen knifemakers to comical extremes before their annual “sales” where prices conveniently aren’t discounted. Another North American retailer has a reputation for finding cheap, high-markup knives and writing astonishing claims about their quality that border on Asian mysticism. Again, take the example we gave above involving the fictional Tokyo Knives order with Bunji the Blacksmith. A vendor might write “The vintage carbon line is considered some of the best work that Bunji has ever produced, hammered by hand over a thousand times. Once it sells out, it’s gone for good!” Perception of scarcity and laborious production are good for business, even if conjured out of thin air.
Vendors may omit information: To state the obvious, publicizing wholesale prices and the network of wholesalers/trading houses that get them to market is akin to showing customers how sausage is made. It’s not good business to share such information. But even some information which seems perfectly reasonable to ask may cross boundaries that a vendor won’t answer:
- A customer on a forum writes about a knife they purchased from a vendor. They claim to have visited the knife factory and met the smith who made their knife which is not identified on the vendor’s site. If the vendor was asked not to identify the smith, how can they respond?
- What happens when a vendor receives a new batch of knives in the same line that are fundamentally different? The wholesaler claims it’s the same craftspeople changing up their style, but the vendor suspects that not to be true and thinks he recognizes a new craftsman. How should they go about marketing the knife?
- How should a retailer change their marketing when they observe a single craftsperson suddenly outputting thousands of knives more per year than should be humanly possible? Do they keep attributing these knives to that single craftsperson? Should they risk customers abandoning their orders even though other vendors keep up the (apparent) falsehood? Would their supplier be upset and refuse to work with them if they changed their attribution?
Customers lie for prestige and market advantage: customers are in many ways the most responsible for moving the needle in terms of misinformation because they fill niches that official sources cannot. Bunji doesn’t have any public contact info and the vendor won’t tell you more about the vintage carbon line? You can write a review on a forum claiming the knife is made of 12th century bloom steel and you’ll be the only source for people to read.
This problem is only exacerbated by opaque business practices — a customer who travels to visit their favorite quasi-celebrity blacksmith is more likely to meet the equivalent of a company mascot than a craftsman day-to-day. I visited one factory where forging and hammering were on full display — I fell just as naively into the mystique gaijin joy as the rest of the group until realizing that the smith was working a piece of wrought iron (much softer and cheaper than steel) and tossing the results into a bin. Away from the tourists was where the real work was done — knives stamped by the dozens from sheet metal. You’ll understand I left that part out of the narrative shared with friends and family back home. It doesn’t make for much of a wow factor.
Finally, we need to acknowledge that the secondary market is plagued by misinformation so that benefactors can resell knives at profit. From the naive (misidentifying cladding lines as hamons) to malicious (coordinating months worth of social media content/forums posts hyping up a target line), there is always a subset of end users who think of their purchases as a speculative investment. Their best interest is in tying the narrative of the knife’s production back to the idealized Japanese mysticism we’ve mentioned prior — and unfortunately it works all too well.
Enter Omega
You can still find the KKF post online that inspired all this. It is an amazing work that embodies the principle that “everybody lies a little” in Japanese production. Indeed, Omega relied on facts from vendors and craftsmen that couldn’t be independently verified. The article also falls victim to much of the marketing trap that it had hoped to set straight. Yet it was one of the few examples I’ve ever read that came close to a true analytical history with sources, cross-checked timelines, visual examples, and pages upon pages of measurements. I suspect Omega did all of this hoping that readers would recognize it as a meaningful, highly curated resource — a little prestige in return for a true labor of love.
In the comments for the public response, the aforementioned vendor seemed annoyed that forum members care so much and tend to overextend their knowledge:
“Online culture tends to create environments where people feel the need to show off what knowledge they have gleaned, share secrets not intended to be shared, etc.”
I hope Part 1 shows compelling reasons why online culture is so gossipy: end users want information they shouldn’t know so that they can benefit their own knife collections.
To put it boldly: if customers are snoopy, then it’s a problem of the industry’s own making. The industry is built upon secrets and acts shocked when those secrets are probed.
Having now reviewed many ways in which the industry passes down misinformation to customers, ask yourself: is all this secrecy and mysticism worth preserving? What right do retailers have to a monopoly of information?
Part 2: Why did craftspeople/vendors become upset?
At this point it’s worth pointing out that this article is written for a forum audience — not Japanese vendors or craftsmen. The intent of Part 1 was to represent the viewpoint of forum readers and hopefully capture frustrations that have lingered quietly in long-time knife geeks. That meant portraying Japanese industry and their North American partners in a negative light. The aim of Part 2 is to flip this narrative. I hope this reversed perspective surprises you.
Most “secrets” don’t matter
It’s not always clear where bad information starts, but much of the “inside scoops” that customers want are based more on marketing than practice. The secret identity of a sharpener, source of steel, who trained who, etc. all really matter quite little.
Let’s start with steel, as it’s relevant to the Omega story. Most people are familiar with designations of various steel types including White Paper #3, Super Gold 2, 52100, etc. along with some rarer types like tamahagane, YXR33, and Togo Reigo. The last one was the crux of why things came to a head in our story — a vendor sold a knife with the material listed as Togo Reigo and Omega saw a contradiction between sources. One vendor claimed this knife was made with Togo Reigo while another vendor claimed Togo Reigo was vanishingly rare and required documentation to qualify as a collector’s item. Believing the latter, Omega pushed for documentation from the smith.
Funnily enough, both sources were partially correct — there is a historic steel named Togo Reigo that was imported from Andrews Steel Company in the early 20th century (Togo is the product line and “Reigo” simply designates the highest quality within that line). Google the name online and you’ll soon be frantically trying to buy some — one site claims that a single smith left in Japan has the skill to forge it while another states that the remaining supply is thanks to a single blacksmith who found a hidden trove over 40 years old. These are astonishing claims and also convenient since the writers tend to own or sell the materials. They also play straight to the theme of Japanese mysticism.
In the end, the type of steel matters less than some may think. A knife maker (especially a good one) will push their materials to the limits in ways that a collector would shudder to imagine. They’ll crack blanks and snap centimeters off edges, repeatedly bend and straighten knives, and otherwise experiment their way toward success. Compare it to a musician struggling to refine their style in a given genre and you’ll have some idea why individual skill matters more than materials — everybody loves to hate on disco music but damn if “Boogie Wonderland” won’t get even the ardent critics on their feet.
“So Trent,” I hear you say. “You admit that the skill of a craftsman does matter? Why shouldn’t we find out if a legendary sharpener farms out his work? Isn’t that a super important secret?”
Secrets about identities or specific work arrangements are largely unimportant personal matters. Craftspeople can be confused why their identity matters so much to the end user. Most are perfectly happy never meeting a customer (more on that later) and just want to get their work done quickly and well. No line cook, programmer, or house builder would be blamed for wanting to avoid customer interaction and they all know that managing others lets you scale up pay and impact. Yet collectors also don’t want to pay Legendary Sharpener bucks for a knife made by his apprentice. Though it’s painful to acknowledge, a little ignorance has its benefits — quality control and training can lead to a much better knife than if the legendary sharpener were actually doing the work alone, especially once that sharpener is past their prime.
To drive this point home, let me suggest that any mystery we enjoy observing the secretive nature of knife production will begin to lose its luster the closer we examine it. Most craftspeople think of their job the same way as you do — a way to pay bills. And in Japan, many craftspeople are pitifully underpaid.
Most employees just want to get their jobs done
Speaking of being underpaid, most craftspeople are not paid by the hour. They give a quote for an order and then are paid once they complete that order. This means a lot of unpaid overtime and years of tight budgets building revenue streams to keep stride with rising material costs. A blacksmith, then, makes zero extra money from interacting with customers. But, it’s a cost they keep paying especially if they want to build a reputation with end-users.
Many here have worked in commercial kitchens before. So imagine if you had regular customers peering through the door and wanting to watch you work, asking you questions such as:
- Why does your labor cost so much? I can make almost the same thing at home.
- Are those actual all-clad pans? Or just imitation ones from China?
- Do you have invoices to document that this fish came from the Alaskan coast?
My guess is that most of us would politely ask our manager to get those customers the hell out of our work area so we can focus. Very few of us will ever trade on our own reputation, and for the same reasons listed above actual interaction with customers may wind up harming personal branding more than it helps.
Before moving on, it’s worth pointing out one exception to this rule: young knifemakers. Those without decades of reputation staked into their work may require some publicity in order to increase demand. Young craftspeople working with Takefu Knife Village or starting their own shops throughout Japan are much more likely to open Instagram accounts or take direct orders with options to communicate with customers. Part of this may be an increasing fluency among younger people in English, but I suspect the larger part is economic — their potential for pay increases goes way up if they can offer “custom” services to loyal clients. Consider that the most in-demand Japanese makers only conservatively increase their prices whereas their Western counterparts on Instagram can double prices seemingly overnight.
Most vendors are also enthusiasts tasked with marketing knives
If you took the arguments of Part 1 to an extreme, it would mean stripping product descriptions of all non-factual text, leaving purely measurements and lifeless text: “Weight 180g, 240mm x 48mm, made in Japan with carbon steel.” Not a particularly compelling sales pitch.
Not all vendors are equal in their familiarity with craftspeople and knife quality, but certainly all would consider themselves knife fans. The same critics who lambast exaggerated product descriptions also tend to be some of the richest providers of exaggerated knife descriptions. I count myself among them.
If you’re feeling confident, try describing the knife you’re most excited about in a way that would induce others to purchase it. Then, if you’re successful, try doing so for a few dozen more knives. Before long it’s easy to slip into truisms and exaggerations such as “one of the most exciting new smiths” or “an unparalleled work made by the King of Aogami Super.”
To think about it a little differently, consider how vendors need to sell all their knives, not just the ones they love the most. While certainly shop owners would love to limit their offerings to a few curated lines, the reality of supply is that nobody can stay in business without diversity of selection. This means, yes, attracting customers who are lured in with promises of cheap, beautifully ground carbon damascus and then selling them inexpensive Tosa knives when they realize their first pick is OOS. My friend, a major car geek, loves repeating the phrase “car brands build their reputation on limited availability sports cars, but it’s SUVs and commuters that pay the bills.” So too with knife shops.
Most vendors with good reputations are honest about these types of distinctions. If you speak with them about your needs, they’ll help you understand the tradeoffs. Be aware that their business need is to sell knives, but they are also passionately interested in them.
Why might some unimportant details still be secret?
There is a final class of “secrets” that we haven’t mentioned until now that are less about facts than sources. In these matters, it’s more important how we know the information than what the actual information is.
- The relatively rare steel type for a new knife line may not be a secret, but the way it was obtained is. For example, it may have been passed on to the smith because of an undisclosed retirement or as part of an agreement with a steelmaker to kickstart a new product offering of theirs
- A vendor begins selling a new house line with what feels like forced enthusiasm, odd since somebody in the forums says they’re made by the same factory as a shop favorite. The factory may not be secret, but the fact they strong-armed the vendor into ordering and promoting this new line is not meant for the public to learn
If these examples seem shocking, consider that your apartment lease agreement is likely several times more complicated than the typical business agreement in knife production. With demand, availability, and costs in constant variation, relationships are far more important than a few percentage points of margin.
Conclusion: are forums a doomed source of information?
A wonderful irony in writing this article is that observing the state of knife forums is in itself a recursive subject for study. Doubtless, the content will upset both some forum readers and some industry professionals. But if the only kosher way to inspect vendors and craftspeople is puff pieces with zero fact checking, how can we recognize honest practices and the real standouts?
For now the best sources of information are duplicitous — either knifemakers/vendors with conflicting interests or interlopers with just enough knowledge to get themselves into trouble. I don’t know whether forums are ultimately a good place for this kind of investigation to be presented, especially given the high-stakes environment where a click and 30 seconds of reading lead to purchase decisions. But it is clear that forum contributors and vendors need to maintain a delicate distance if everyone wants to remain happy.
Despite having written…nearly 5,000 words about the way we communicate information about knives, I don’t really have an answer for what happens from here. Can we trust what’s written in forums? Do we believe retailer descriptions? I think the biggest takeaway is neither is entirely reliable and that needs to be said even at the cost of a good conclusion.
