From Japan · Updated 2026-07-03
The three blade towns behind the knives you own
Tsubame-Sanjo, Seki, and Sakai each specialize differently. Knowing which town made your knife explains its design choices.
Tsubame-Sanjo (Niigata)
Tojiro forges in Tsubame-Sanjo; its DP series clads a VG10 core in softer stainless so home users can sharpen it easily. Global's maker Yoshida Metal Industry is in Tsubame — it shipped the world's first all-stainless one-piece knife (blade to handle) in 1983.
Sources: 藤次郎 (Tojiro, official) · 吉田金属工業 GLOBAL (Yoshida Metal, official)
Seki (Gifu)
Seki has forged blades since the age of its medieval swordsmiths. Kai makes its export flagship Shun here — 33-layer Damascus over a VG-MAX core, with roughly 97% of production shipped overseas — alongside the home-market Seki Magoroku line. MAC's blades are also produced in Seki, while the company headquarters sits in Sakai.
Sources: 貝印 (Kai, official) · マック株式会社 (MAC, official)
Sakai (Osaka)
Sakai remains the professional kitchen-knife town, and its shops publish the deepest free sharpening columns in Japanese — Ichimonji Mitsuhide and Jikko among them. MAC (est. 1965, over 25 million knives sold) is headquartered here.
Sources: 堺一文字光秀 (Ichimonji Mitsuhide) · 實光刃物 (Jikko)
These summaries extract facts from Japanese primary sources and rewrite them in our own words, with attribution. For the full detail (and the original nuance), follow the source links — they deserve the traffic.