In a small workshop in Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku, an elderly blacksmith sits at a grinding wheel with a strip of steel in his gloved hands. Sparks arc away from the stone in a thin orange spray. The shape he is working on is not a kitchen knife or a sickle. It is a whale.
The Kujira Whale Craft Knife is one of the quieter objects we carry, and one of the ones people pick up most often. It is hand-forged at Fujigen Hamono, a small workshop in Kōchi working in the Tosa blade tradition. Here is where it comes from, and why the offcut steel on our wall in Shoreditch is part of the same story.
Four hundred years of Tosa blades
Kōchi was once the province of Tosa, and Tosa hamono — forged blades — have been made there since the Edo period. The tradition covers far more than kitchen knives: sickles, hatchets, billhooks, axes, shears, saws, hoes. What distinguishes it is a method called free forging. Rather than stamping blades from a die, the smith heats the steel and hammers it out to whatever shape the work demands.
That sounds like a technical detail, but it changes what a workshop is capable of. A smith working from dies needs volume to justify the tooling. A smith working freehand can make one blade, or twenty, to a shape nobody has asked for before. Sickles from this region are still made in different profiles for different mountainsides, because the grass and scrub grow differently on each one.
The workshop behind the knives is Fujigen Hamono (冨士源刃物製作所), a second-generation family forge in Kōchi. Its smith is a sickle maker by trade — more than forty years of hooked agricultural blades, made to order for particular hillsides. The whale is the outlier in his output, and it exists because free forging made it possible to say yes to a one-off request.
A whale by accident
The knife began with a request. A shopkeeper whom the smith supplied regularly mentioned that she wanted a pencil-sharpening knife — something safe enough for her daughter to use. He worked through the problem the way a maker does: the tip had to be blunt, because a point is the dangerous part; the body had to sit comfortably in a small hand; the grip had to resist slipping; one edge had to do the actual cutting.
When he showed her the finished blade, the shopkeeper said it looked like a whale.
Kōchi sits on Tosa Bay, where whales gather and where whale watching is now one of the region's draws. The resemblance was coincidental, but it fitted, and the knife took its name from it. The series grew from there — sperm whale, fin whale, Bryde's whale, and both male and female minke — each with a slightly different silhouette taken from the animal it is named after.
One pair of hands, start to finish
In much of the blade industry the work is divided: one specialist forges, another finishes, a third sharpens. Tosa workshops tend not to split it up. The same person takes the blade from hot steel through rough grinding, hardening, tempering and final sharpening on a succession of stones.
The reasoning is practical rather than romantic. Finishing paid by the piece rewards speed, and speed shows in the finish. When the person who forged the blade is also the person who has to sharpen it, there is nowhere for a rough job to hide.
The blade itself is laminated: a hard steel core sandwiched between softer iron, a construction borrowed from swordmaking. The core holds an edge; the outer layers absorb shock and let the smith shape the blade without it cracking. It is why a knife this small can be sharpened repeatedly over decades without losing its character.
The steel on our wall
Once the whale shapes are cut, what remains is a long sheet of steel with whale-shaped holes in it — a negative of the knives, rust-bloomed and oddly beautiful. It is scrap, in the ordinary sense. We asked for it.
Those sheets now hang in the shop on Curtain Road. Most people walk past them, slow down, and work out what they are looking at. If you want to see how the knives are made, the offcuts explain it faster than we can: five whales per row, cut nose to tail with almost nothing wasted between them.
Using one
The knife is designed for pencils, and it is worth saying that sharpening a pencil by hand is not the same activity as feeding one into a machine. It is slower. There are shavings, and the faint woody smell of the casing, and a certain amount of judgement about where to stop. People who grew up doing it tend to have strong feelings about it. People who did not are often surprised how much they like it.
It also works for whittling, opening parcels, garden odd jobs, and anything else a small fixed blade is good for. Keep it dry, wipe it after use, and give it a pass on a sharpening stone when the edge starts to dull.
The five knives in the Kujira Whale Craft Knife series are each £41.50 and hand-forged in Kōchi: Sperm Whale, Fin Whale, Bryde's Whale, Male Minke Whale and Female Minke Whale. They are also on the shelf in Shoreditch, next to the steel they came out of.
