A Long Shot - Pt.3
My next stop was a planned one. According to my previous research, Ashi Hamono knife shop would be on a nearby block. Stumbling into Mizuno Tanrenjo had been an unforeseen, yet happy coincidence. I was now back on my pre-planned route.
In a notebook I’d sketched several maps of knife-occupied locales – I don’t have a printer at home. But with my hand-drawn charts and diagrams I felt like a real intrepid adventurer. I stopped beside a dilapidated dry cleaner to examine one such map. Now in new light, with my feet on Sakai’s holy culinary ground, the map appeared to have been drawn by an intoxicated third grader. The landmarks I’d chosen to take down now seemed hopelessly obscure. “On the left. Three blocks past the big intersection. My Hand Home Center. Around there…” The first problem was that there were no big intersections to be found… well, anywhere. I had a feeling that I may have been on the correct street, but had no idea which way to go.
I selected a direction at random and marched boldly forward. The street became narrower and narrower, and the buildings older and older. There was the sense that this particular street led not to a place, but rather to another time. I passed under a deserted cross street with a traffic light, which gave me some hope that I might have just crossed the “big intersection.”
Ten minutes or so had passed. The homes lining the street become steadily older, squatter, more compressed and less a part of the 21st century. Most had the exposed portions of their brown wooden panels stained black from age and weather. An interesting thing about Japanese homes is that, despite being wedged together so close that often the space between is hardly enough to permit a stray cat, they’re nonetheless very private structures. You’ll never see inside a Japanese home through its windows. Windows facing the street or other public arenas are inevitably shaded by a large square bamboo curtain hung about three inches from the window pane. I assume this allows a bit of light in, but keeps out the prying eyes of neighbors and strange foreigners roaming the streets. In any case, the façade of most Japanese homes makes them appear both quaint and impenetrable.
I continued down the street, the only signs of life being the occasional bicycle-mounted grandmother. When I’d abandoned all but my last thread of hope, I spotted a tile so darkened with age that the characters were barely discernable. But as my uncanny ear for cutlery-related words had leapt into action on the train, so now I quickly discerned the characters for “Blade” and “Thing.” That’s how knife stores designate themselves in Japan.
The place was pressed subtly into a row of houses, and was about as inscrutable as any private residence. There was a decided absence of fanfare about it; basically a faint knot in the wood grain of the neighborhood. The only difference was the glass latticework of the craggy front door, behind which a few slivers of steel reflected the high midday sun.
I heaved the sliding door to the side – it moved with the ease and friendliness of a hung-over sumo wrestler. Just inside the door towered a glass display case housing a dozen knives as well as a handful of small paintings and relics. Ebisu, the Japanese god of fishermen, seemed to be a popular figure in Osaka shops and restaurants. Here too, I found a few figures of him. He’s a jolly fellow, often with a fishing rod in one hand and a massive fish amidst its death throes locked under the other arm. Osaka has made a name for itself in fugu – that poisonous blowfish that’s famously tricky to prepare – and lately I’d been seeing Ebisu toting around a lot of that fish rather than the sea bream I was used to seeing in the east.
As I inspected the contents of the display, the clang of a hammer on steel rang out from around the corner. I peeked past the cabinet and found myself peering into a workshop inside which, about 100 years ago, a car full of kitchen equipment appeared to have exploded. A young man stood poised with a hammer, squinting down at a hunk of metal. Piles of steel debris, gears, engines, hammers, hooks, what could have been Darth Vader’s suit, and a million other unrecognizable gadgets lay strewn about, swathed in a blanket of grease and dust.
“Excuse me,” I called meekly, “Do you mind if I take a look at the knives?” No response. The man took a few more swings with his hammer. I called again, more loudly. He jerked his head toward me, his eyes insectoid beneath a bulging pair of goggles.
“Oh,” he gasped. “Uh… sure, whatever.” He returned to his work.
The polished blades glimmered behind the cabinet’s glass pane; treasures in a forgotten tomb. At that moment I was Indiana Jones. Checking for tripwires and poisoned arrow launchers, I wondered if my shampoo bottle would be the correct weight and swap with a knife.
Something about the size of the collection also made it seem more illicit, forbidden. The cabinet contained a single set of western style chef knives, and there didn’t appear to be any others on display. Instead, a miniature squad of carved wood and metal figurines perched on shelves above and below the knives. Here, too, several versions of Ebisu stood guard with laughing eyes and wriggling fugu under their arms. Although the knives had price tags, the whole display looked more like a shrine than a point of sale. Additionally, two pairs of shoes sat before a wooden staircase to my right, which led up to a carpeted living space. A family photo hung on the wall at the top of the flight. I’d either found a truly secret, hidden shop, or I’d just burst into somebody’s home. Maybe both.
I continued to examine the knives, but found little information other than the prices scrawled in ink onto slips of paper, and the family name scratched into the blade heel. I poked my head back into the workshop.
“These are some fine knives,” I began, “But you wouldn’t happen to have any others for sale?” The man put down his hammer, wiped his hands on his smock, and tromped over to where I was. Like a persistent mosquito or a sudden migraine, it was clear that my presence wasn’t exactly bringing joy to anybody. He came to a stop beside me, hands on his hips, gazing uninterestedly into the display case.
“This is it,” he said, thrusting a dismissive palm at the blades.
“Oh, I see. Well, um… do you make these here, in this shop?”
“Of course,” he huffed in a single breath. “We make all sorts of knives here. But the rest are sent to shops in downtown Osaka.” He eyed me suspiciously. “Not much foot traffic around here, you see.”
I smiled nervously. I asked if the knives were stainless or carbon steel, hoping the question would show that I wasn’t just some lost tourist or asylum escapee.
“Huh,” the man grunted. “Let’s see.” He peered at the knives. “The ones on this side are stainless, and, err… the ones over here aren’t.” He leaned back and scratched his sparsely bristled chin. “Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah, it’s hard to say. These have been here for damn near ever.” And he stopped there. He didn’t offer to investigate and he didn’t take any knives out to examine.
“I see,” I said, scratching my own sparsely bristled chin.
“Yup.” The man shrugged and then meandered back to work. I stood before the knives a few moments longer, trying to divine some meaning or purpose. It took about four seconds for that to prove fruitless. I leaned into the workshop one last time and thanked the man for his time and, well, “help.” He nodded his head without looking up.
Outside the sun was still flooding the town, making the air feel all the more crisp and the street all the more deserted. The guy hadn’t been kidding when he said foot traffic was not overwhelming. I checked my maps and headed south toward the main drag where I expected to find most of Sakai’s knife shops. About 15 minutes later I stepped out from a narrow one-lane road onto a multi-lane highway of sorts. Cars whizzed past and pedestrians stood waiting for traffic lights to change. Regular life was happening. It was a bit disappointing.
According to my maps, this was where the majority of big shops and forges were located. Google Maps had given the area a severe rash of markers signifying cutlery dealers, so I’d opted not to write down any detailed directions. I figured that if they were really so dense, I could just wander the strip and stumble door-to-door as I went. Mistake.
Japanese city planning is something I have yet to get my head around. Unlike the convenient grids I’m accustomed to in the States – 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Streets, Maple, Elm, and Broad – Japanese cities, both old and new alike, are organized more like an ant farms. Streets begin and end abruptly, few are named, and the buildings are stacked in close together like Lego blocks. Perhaps it has something to do with the architecture of castles in centuries past. Japanese castle were built so that an incomprehensible labyrinth of corridors surrounded the central quarters – an architectural strategy meant to baffle ninjas, assassins, and invading armies. I don’t know if it was an effective setup, but if finding your target in a castle was anywhere near as demoralizing as my attempt to locate knife shops in Sakai, even the blood-thirstiest, savage pack of invaders would have gone home grumpy and unfulfilled. In any case, it was a fool proof design for keeping an outsider such as myself from locating anything or ever really establishing my bearings.
I swear I completed a marathon that day. I walked and walked, passing bicycle shops, paper shops, chopstick merchants, run-down greasy spoons, everything but what I was looking for. At last I came upon a mammoth white cement brick of a building, dropped without celebration between an apartment complex and an office building. The only thing distinguishing it was a Paul Bunyan-sized kitchen knife affixed just under the front eaves. On closer inspection, I found a banner outside the entrance that read, “Japanese Kitchen Knife Museum.” I practically flung myself through the automatic sliding glass doors, which, in my frenzy, seemed intent on having an extended consensus-building conference before finally deciding to open.
The place was about the size of a small gymnasium and contained an arsenal sufficient to equip an entire army of cutlery-snob chefs. The museum attendants sang out a hearty, “Welcome!” but trailed off in shock and horror as they watched the deranged foreigner reel drooling from display to display. My enthusiasm peaked at about the 90 second point, and then faltered and plummeted. Emotionally, I felt akin to Wiley Coyote suddenly realizing mid-sprint that the cliff had ended a dozen yards ago.
It is true that the place was a knife museum, which at face value is awesome. It’s also true that by “museum,” they actually meant “retailer,” and by “kitchen knife” they actually meant, “elaborate, impractical collectibles.” As knife making becomes more and more a craft of the past, modern cutlery producers have turned to banging out fancy, over-polished blades with color-infused steels and fanciful etchings of maple leaves and cherry blossoms covering the blade. Sure, they’re beautiful, and I’m sure they’re sharp, wonderful knives. But ultimately I feel they’re just too ornate or delicate to be of much use in a real kitchen. They do, however, appeal to tourists who want a lavish piece of cutlery to display on the wall next to their useless bronzed pots and pans – the kind of things that decorate the kitchens of people who never use their kitchen.
The truth is, buying a knife means buying the piece of steel which will best resist your attempts to destroy it. The basic act of cutting is essentially pitting one object against another and hoping that the one you control will win against the other. And so, a beautiful knife is not a bad thing, but a knife that exists for the sake of its own beauty isn’t something that I’m particularly interested in. Once I buy a knife, it’s going to look good for one or two uses, tops. Even sharpening and polishing a knife means essentially that you grind off the bits that are dull or marred.
Anyway, that’s my knife-soapbox rant for the day. And it’s also why I left the Sakai Kitchen Knife Museum glum despite the glorious potential it held. Let me take a step back, though. Inside the museum there was a large alcove in which a handful of elderly attendants sat at desks with computers, pamphlets, and gads of informational brochures. Although the place was arranged more like a sales floor than a conventional museum exhibit, each display did have a placard that provided information about the knives themselves and the people who made them. So the place wasn’t without an educational element. And as such, I thought maybe somewhere back in those piles of papers and handy info tips there might be a map showing where to find the actual knife shops.
I approached the counter. A grandmotherly woman stepped forward and asked if I needed help with anything. “Yeah,” I said, trying to appear as sane and non-menacing as possible, “You wouldn’t happen to have a map showing where to find the knife makers, would you?” The woman made a face like I’d just asked to see her tax filings for the past 20 years.
“A w-what?” she stammered.
“A, uh, map. Like, to help me find the knife makers. I’ve enjoyed seeing everything you have here, but I really like to meet the people who make them.” The woman turned a wide-eyed, imploring look at her colleague, a man probably in his early 300s, or at least 70s, and rather unstable on his feet. He took a few steps toward the counter, grasping the edge of a desk and fastening a hard stare on me. Despite his age he had a hawkish, take-no-prisoners look.
“Come again?” he croaked, his voice gargling ancient and draconian. “What’re you looking for?” I paled a bit.
“Err… well, a map. You know? I want to visit some of the shops in the area.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “We have knives from all over right here. You don’t need to go visiting anybody.”
“Yes, I know. But… well, see I came to Sakai to see the knife shops. My main purpose is… well, to actually go to those places.”
“No, no,” the man grumbled. “Everything is here. There’s a video in the next room. It explains everything. You want to know how to sharpen a knife? It’s in the video. Right over here,” he shakily waved his arm toward another pair of sliding doors, “You can learn everything over there. Want to know how knives are made? It’s in the video.”
“Oh, well, yes, that’s great,” I began, “but I really want to talk to the makers themselves. You know, see their…” But he cut me off.
“The video shows some of the workshops. It even has English subtitles. You want to see the workshops? They’re in the video.” The woman still had the look of a small, cornered animal. Her eyes pleaded, begging with me to go watch the video like all the other good tourists.
My objective proved totally incomprehensible to the old man. “Why do you want to go to the shops when there’s a video right over there. You can even sit on the bench, which is quite comfortable. You want to see the knife makers? They’re in the video. Go on, right through those doors.” It was like negotiating with an automated message. So at last I conceded that, “Wow, you’re right! That video will no doubt complete my Sakai knife experience to the fullest,” and went feeling browbeaten into the next room.
Just as the old man had said, there was a TV set playing a video on loop. A couple sat on the cushioned bench in front of it, glued to the images of steel and hammers and glowing red sparks. I wandered around the room, looking at arrays of kitchen knives paired with info-tags expressing the knifes’ complex culinary identities with brilliantly economical English like, “Vegetable knife,” “Fish knife,” “Big fish knife,” etc. I gleaned about as much culinary insight there as I did in my junior high home ec class, which is to say: nothing.
It would be an understatement to say that I left the museum disheartened. I’d caught a glimpse, a fleeting taste of what treasures lay in the area. But still I was no wiser as to how to find them. I continued on my path along the on-and-off busy highway. Striking down the median, screeching along a rusted set of tracks, a trolley car shuttled tottering grandmothers from place to place.
I really didn’t see anybody but elderly ladies using the trolley. There is a phenomenon in Japan where women simply live forever. They grow older and older, and their backs twist and arch, submitting a bit more every day to the laws of gravity, to the point where many old women’s faces are literally parallel to the ground as the walk. That’s not a joke. At the supermarket on Sundays I’m often swept along in a creeping tide of old ladies who barely come up past my waist. And yet, they persist, buying groceries, roaming the streets, using their last remnants of strength to crane their necks upward, peering awe-stricken at passing foreign creatures such as myself. It was these undying relics who climbed painstakingly into the trolley, taking each step as though it might be their last. And then once aboard, they were too short to be seen from the outside. So to me, it looked like a ghost train lurching back and forth down the street, collecting and depositing invisible passengers at each stop.
And for that reason, I didn’t use the trolley. Additionally, I couldn’t make rhyme or reason of its coming and goings, but I like to think the haunting ambiance was what really kept me trekking along the sidewalk. In any case, I didn’t know much where I was, where I was headed, or what I was looking for. I just had the Chinese characters for “blade” and “thing” emblazoned in my mind as I scanned the storefronts for anything matching the pattern.
It was getting on toward three, and I’d been in Sakai for several hours. The sun was drifting toward its point of retire, and a chill began to test the air. Daylight savings doesn’t exist in Japan, so in winter it gets dark around four or five o’clock. I didn’t want to be wandering the streets after dark, more for fear of suspicious locals and police than for my own safety. So I decided to employ a new tactic and take to the side streets, despite the peril and navigational uncertainties that awaited.
I took an impulsive left and wandered toward an intersection where a red lantern hung from the eves of a noodle shop. I passed a man making exaggerated noises of physical exertion over a crate of onions. He stopped and set the box down as I walked by, eyeing me about as inconspicuously as a 4-year-old with acute Stranger Danger anxiety. He stayed fixed in a tense fight-or-flight stance until I’d disappeared around the corner, ready lest I leapt out and strangled him. I could see the headlines: “Brutal case of murder and grand theft produce – Japan’s foreign element strikes again.”
It’s a widely held belief among Japanese law enforcement, grandmothers, and the generally paranoid that the vast majority of the country’s miniscule crime rate is thanks to a subversive and unruly foreigner population. It doesn’t help that shows like 24 and CSI are super popular over here. I expect people are prepared for a building to explode or a drive-by shooting every time they see a Caucasian in public.
I strolled with as little menace as possible down the side street, trying to keep parallel to the main road. While the highway had been stacked with office buildings, hotels, and shops (I was gradually moving from a small town setting to the usual Japanese urban catacombs), the side street was cluttered with the red lamps and unlit tiles of bars, pubs, and restaurants. One thing I have discovered about cities here is that similar businesses tend to cluster together. That means that you might find three bars and five cafes all on one block, but it’s unlikely that an ancient knife manufacturer is going to be in the mix. So after a few blocks I made a right and returned to the main drag.
As I’d been off it for a few blocks, I check back over my shoulder to see if I’d missed anything along the highway. That’s when I saw them: “Knife,” “Thing,” the combination of strokes that I’d held tenderly in my heart from the moment I opened my eyes that morning. I made an about-face and marched toward the sign, praying that it wasn’t a mirage. And sure enough, despite my cartoegraphic handicaps, I’d landed myself in front of Nagata Hamono, the Ikkanshi Tadatsuna knife shop and forge.