My heart fluttered, knees weakening as I gazed at the tall, crimson felt-backed knife display, visible through the glass-paned door. I congratulated myself on once again overcoming what I’d come to find were the seemingly insurmountable odds of finding a knife shop in a city world famous for it’s knife production. Then, amidst near tearful revelry as I reached to slide open the rickety wooden door, I stopped short. No knob or hand-hold was to be found. A trick? An illusion?

“Oh no,” I thought and took a step back. There was another door a few steps away, but it was dark and obstructed on the other side by tools and lumber. I knew that my trip had occurred dangerously close to the New Year, which is Japan’s equivalent to Christmas in terms of business closings and sacred family bonding events. At this point, however, I wasn’t about to let the threat of some centuries-old, all-important cultural institution cramp my style.

Redoubling my determination, I returned to the door and tried to push or pry it open. Just as my hand touched the frame, the door flung itself open in a masterful ambush of automation. A bell dinged on the inside and a woman’s voice called, “Welcome! I’ll be out in just a moment.”

The inside of the shop was about as modern as I remember my great grandmother’s house being. And likewise it possessed the same sweet, stale odor of a place that’s been inhabited by the same beings for longer than anyone cares to recall. The floorboards were softened by years of shuffling feet, and graying cushions whose stuffing had long ago surrendered their buoyancy lined a low bench along the wall. But it was a cozy place, despite the dense thicket of knives. And it’s yet another of the fun contradictions of Japan – the building itself may be hundreds of years old without any sign of renovation since the invention of fire, but for the sake of shoppers they’ll still automate the grandfatherly wooden front door. In the States the customer is merely right, but in Japan, “the customer is god.”

A glass display counter stretched out before me. It contained three tiers of blades, scissors and snippers. Beyond that a long wall of shelves showcased knives of just about every imaginable style and length. In the corners sat more cabinets and cases of shears, saws, hedge clippers, chisels and other carving tools. I didn’t know where to begin.

A woman probably in her 60s emerged from a curtained doorway behind the counter. Her eyebrows arched in surprise at first, but she soon recovered. “Hello there,” she said. “How can I help you?”

“Hi,” I replied, still taking in the collection. I told her I was just looking for the moment. When she continued to hover behind the counter, I said, “I’ve actually been all over Sakai this afternoon. It’s been a lot of fun, I like the city. But it seems like a lot of places are closed.” She nodded, saying that at this time of year most shops close for a week or so.

“I’m glad you found us,” she said. “We actually live just upstairs, so we usually stay open longer than other places.” It was then that I noticed the patter of small children running and bumping around in the next room. It was the first time I’d encountered kids at a knife store. I tried to imagine growing up in such a place. “Alright kids, no horseplay! Just through that wide open door Grandad has a room full of the most razor sharp, deadly choppers in the world. Mind the edges.”

As usual I started out by asking if they made all the knives themselves. She said that they did, that the family had begun making knives 300 years ago in Kyoto, but had moved to Sakai in the 1920s. “Our knives are hand made,” she said, “we don’t use presses like a lot of the big names these days. A machine press can’t achieve near the quality of a hand-made knife.” She echoed the sentiments of the Yasushige proprietor I’d spoken with in Kyoto. I was beginning to get the sense that the small handcraft shops harbor a stout supply of resentment toward the big manufacturers. But who can blame them when their craft is being slowly killed off by industry?

Next, the woman, unsolicited, began telling me which knives I was probably interested in and offering to let me hold them. Before I could respond she’d nimbly flung open the farthest knife cabinet – the one containing the Western stainless steel blades – and set a short chef’s knife in front of me. “That’s handmade,” she proclaimed. “It’s a Western design, but with real Japanese craftsmanship. This style is popular among foreigners. It’s called a ‘gyutou’ and you can use it to cut meat, vegetables…”

I held it with the wariness of a pet avert whose just had a lapdog thrust into their arms. It was a nice knife, but not really what I was looking for. I made a small show of admiration before asking about some of the Japanese style blades.

“Oh,” she said, “Well then, we have some other good options for you. But they’re a bit pricy…” I said that I didn’t mind, and so we spent the next 20 or 30 minutes looking at different knives and talking about Japan. We covered the usual topics: What Japanese food I could eat, where I’d been in Japan, the country’s immaculate safety, and so on until I came upon the kind of knife I was looking for.

“How about that garasuki?” I asked, pointing to a thick, broad knife used primarily for breaking down whole chickens. It was a knife whose main function was more or less useless to me, but that could be used for a variety of other tasks in the kitchen. Plus it just looked cool. As soon as I held it in my hand I knew that it was what I’d come to Osaka for. I tested the weight and balance, felt the edge, and admired the sheen of the steel. It was perfect in just about every way, except for one catch:

Garasukis are to kitchen knives what the platypus is to the animal kingdom: kind of an oddball. They don’t really follow the rules of standard knife geometry. While most knives have a curved blade that runs parallel to your arm, the garasuki has a straight blade set at a diagonal. It’s also about a quarter of an inch thick at the blade base. The basic structure was like that of a Japanese knife, but the style and materials seemed to be more Western. At this point things get arcane (or, rather, more arcane), but this is all just to say that I didn’t have a clue about how to maintain the blade.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to sharpen this?” I asked. The woman’s buoyancy wavered a bit at this point. She admitted that she didn’t, but quickly amended that by adding how her husband was rather renowned for his sharpening prowess.

“People come from all over Japan to learn blade sharpening from my husband,” she said, a new grandeur swelling up within her. Apparently students, chefs, homemakers, and all sorts of other people come from as far as Kyoto and even Tokyo to buy knives and learn to hone them at this shop. The woman beamed at me, pausing to let the weight of this revelation really sink in. Fame is an unparalleled currency in Japan. It doesn’t matter what it is, but if something local – anything at any point in the history of the universe – is even mildly celebrated, it can be pumped to draw Japanese tourists with lots of yen and cameras. Blade sharpening skill, apparently, was the claim to fame for Nagata Hamono.

There was a brief silence in which I realized she was waiting for my noises of awe and admiration. I complied, and she continued. “He is certainly one of the best, if I do say so myself. And I suppose I can say that, because it’s not just me who thinks so. They even made an instructional video starring my husband. That’s how many people were coming here to learn. He just couldn’t keep up, so a video was made.”

I asked who made the video. I’d seen several since my budding days as a knife enthusiast. “A big knife company,” she said tersely, “you know, with shops and international web sites and such.” Again I asked for a name. “One of the big ones. A famous one,” she replied. It was clear that she didn’t much care to deal in facts or certainties. But I wasn’t so bothered by that. Hand made knives are a dying craft in Japan. I get the impression that a lot of the independent shops have to fight tooth and nail to stay afloat. So if that means a little “fame inflation,” I don’t mind.

“Actually, he’d love to meet you, I’m sure,” she said, happily evading my questions. Unfortunately, her husband was out running errands and she didn’t know when he’d be back. I thanked her for her time and the information, saying that I still had a lot of Sakai left to see before it got dark. She said they’d be open until six or so, but could keep the door open later if I planned to stop back by. I really was interested in the garasuki, but after having spent a year among a people of whom nearly 60 percent claim “shopping” as their hobby, I’d learned a thing or two about merchandise reconnaissance and delayed gratification. I executed a flurry of bows and fumbled my way out the automatic door.

It was considerably cooler and darker out on the street. At nearly 4 pm, rush hour traffic was beginning to pick up and pubs’ backlit tiles flickered to life. I marched further down the road, my eyes keenly scanning signboards and shop fronts. I’d been reinvigorated, ready now to boldly fling myself into even the most entrenched, labyrinthine passages in search of cutlery.

Unfortunately, after about 10 minutes I came upon a massive intersection which seemed to be a kind of dividing line. On my side was old Sakai, ripe with traditional wooden buildings nestled in every nook and cranny, home to traditional crafts and workshops, and populated by traditional xenophobes. Crossing the roaring multi-lane highway where I now teetered curbside seemed to mean entering the new and glitzy, Pachinko parlor and shopping mall Sakai. I didn’t see any red lanterns. I didn’t see any stained, crunched-looking buildings. There were no grandmothers trolling the sidewalks or bug-eyed onion craters. End of the line.

I suddenly felt defeated and exhausted. My feet hurt. I was hungry. My backpack weighed a ton. Despite my previously unshakable perseverance, I now found myself in a thoroughly American state of mind: bored, grumpy, ready to eat and then take a nap. Plus, I’d been waiting for what seemed like half an hour for the light to change. I headed back toward Nagata Hamono. Rather than show my face there just 20 minutes after leaving, however, I found a café nearby and read for an hour or so. Somehow going out of your way to save face in Japan feels slightly less crummy than in the States.

When I re-entered Nagata Hamono nobody came out to greet me or even acknowledge that a customer had entered. I used that time to investigate the shop a little more thoroughly. Things always appear a little clearer when there isn’t somebody looming over your shoulder. My purchasing instinct works exactly opposite of the “watched pot never boils” principle. The harder someone watches me the hastier my decisions become.

In the far corner I found a kind of divided office supply holder bristling with various circular and angled chisels, used mostly for mukimono, the art of ornate vegetable carving. I’d recently purchased a mukimono book, which had appealed directly to my particular set of sensibilities: a skill that’s 100 percent impractical, overly difficult, considered a waste of time by nearly everyone, and which demands a large set of specialized and expensive hand-crafted tools. It was a natural fit.

Still feeling a little out-of-sorts from my near brush with New Sakai, I reached into the thicket of tools a touch brusquely. After testing a few of the tools in my hand and wondering how on earth you sharpen a U-shaped gouge (I’ve since learned that you have to buy special sharpening stones for each shape and size of gouge. This mukimono thing soars to new heights every time I look), I noticed the 3,000 yen price tag. That was 3,000 yen (about $30) for each little tool, and an adequate set comprises about eight pieces. I put them back and returned to the sales counter. That’s when two things happened.

First, I heard a new, younger voice call from the back, “Oh, is someone there?”

“Sorry,” I called back. “I hope I’m not intruding.” Then I noticed the other thing: feeling a strange wet smear, I looked down and saw that the thumb of my right hand was gushing blood. I’d apparently sliced it open on one of the gouges.

“Wonderful,” I thought. “This is exactly where I want to look like somebody who’s a danger to themselves with sharp objects.” Before the woman came out I managed to wipe off the blood with an old receipt I had in my pocket and then make a sort of tourniquet around my thumb with my index finger. It was some real James Bond meet MacGyver type action.

“Ah, hello,” the woman said, brushing aside the doorway curtain. She appeared to be the owner’s daughter. “My mom told me you might be coming by. She’s making dinner right now and dad’s on the phone, but if you can wait for just a moment he’ll be out.” I thanked her and sat on a bench by the door.

It seemed at first like a hopeless pickle. I was going to have to admit my impropriety and ask for a tissue or band aid or something for my thumb. But by some miracle (whether that miracle had to do with my skin or the fact that I’d been absentmindedly stuffing receipts into my jacket pocket for two days) I was able to stop the bleeding in a little less than 10 minutes. The downside was that I would never be able to claim a refund for anything I bought in Osaka without looking like a mass murderer.

When the old man came out from the back I was tentatively removing my last clean receipt from the wound. I shoved it into my pocked and tried to look cool. “Hey there!” he shouted cheerfully. He was a little shorter than me and balding, with a face that had long ago yielded to gravity. In spite of that, the eyes that peered at me from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses were keen and bright. “I hear you’re interested in knives. You’re in the right spot! Let’s see, was it the deba you were interested in? Or, no, the yanagiba, right?” His words fired in loud, precise bursts, with a confidence and dryness that I’ve learned is peculiar to inhabitants of the Kansai region. It was as though he embodied a used car salesman turned preacher turned professor turned knife forger and grandpa. Or something like that.

I reeled, the explosive old man taking me by surprise in my weakened, blood loss-induced state. The best I could do was mumble something about being interested in the garasuki. “Gah!” he choked, “That’s right! The garasuki. Weird choice.” He raised one eyebrow at me as he brought it over to the counter. I held it again in my hand and knew that it was what I needed.

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” I conceded, but didn’t lessen my determination to buy it. The old man eyed me.

“Do you know what it’s for?”

“Chickens?”

“Right. You often break down whole chickens?”

“No…” I sighed. “But I’m a little interested in learning how. Above that, though, I just want a solid, heavy knife on hand.”

“I see. Well, no matter.” He’d evidently decided that I was either extravagantly foolish or insane and given up trying to talk sense into me. He explained how to sharpen the knife, after which I said I wanted to buy it. Although we’d been talking at length about the knife, my declaration sent him staggering back, gaping as though I’d stepped off a space ship.

“Really?” he gasped. “It’s expensive, you know.” I just nodded and smiled. “Okay,” he said, clapping his hands once, “In that case, let’s go back and practice some sharpening!”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. He led me back through the curtained doorway and into a gray, musky, dungeon-esque workshop. A few bare fluorescent tubes flickered to life, revealing several rectangular pools of sewage-brown water. Whet stones peeked up through the surface like angular, red and yellow turtles. And making it seem even more like a torture chamber, piled in boxes, stacks, and on shelves, the workshop was practically bursting with rusted, half-completed, chipped and cracked knives – an altogether venomous collection of unfinished blades. It was a nice place.

And again I thought of the kids. “Sally, what did I tell you? It’s completely open for you to run recklessly inside, but that’s Grandad’s workshop! Sure, it’s a spectacular hiding place, but it’s full of rusty old knives. He’d be furious if you broke one!” And as if on cue, a little girl, perhaps five or six years old, poked her head through the door and stared wide-eyed at me. I waved and she scuttled off to find her sister and relate the death-defying encounter with one of Japan’s dangerous foreign element.

The old man led me over to a wide sink filled with what appeared to be a pristine sample of muck from the Black Lagoon. Across the sink lay a board covered in several layers of cloth, stained, ragged and essentially mummified from centuries of use as a hold for whet stones. The stone sitting atop it was worn nearly to inexistence – in other words, the newbie practice stone. As I pondered the miniature swamp before me, the old man rattled through crates of blades, some broken in half, some without handles, and others rusted beyond recognition. He finally settled on a mostly intact sashimi knife. It wore a red, furry coat of rust.

“You really shouldn’t ever let your knives rust,” the man said. “But if it happens, it’s not the end of the world. Anyway, let’s give it a whirl.” He set the blade on the stone and within a moment had ground off the first layer of rust, exposing the glimmering steel beneath. He then showed me where to put my hands, how and where to apply the correct amount of pressure, and generally gave me a beginner’s crash course on blade polishing. I sharpen my own knives all the time, so I know the basics. But what I know I’ve learned from books and the Internet. Being walked through it in practice by an ancient knife guru was a whole new experience.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked as I carefully ground the knife across the stone. “I’m a…” he paused, descending deep into his memory’s catacombs. “Ah! Heavy smoker!” he exclaimed in English. He hacked out a laugh, quite self satisfied with his foray into internationalism.

I continued to scrape the knife against the stone, dribbling the “water” from the sink over it whenever it dried out. I prayed that my sliced thumb wouldn’t gush open and become infected with whatever deadly organisms that might dwell in the muck. I also noticed two small faces gawking at me from the doorway. The girls were playing at espionage about as well as any elementary schooler can be expected to. They scattered whenever I turned my head, only to creep back moments later.

“That’s good,” the old man said. “But move your fingers a little bit back. You need to maintain the curve of the blade.” A few moments later he motioned for me to hand him the knife. He checked the edge. “Not bad. It’s not completely sharp yet, but you were on the right track.” He tossed the knife back into a crate with its corroded brethren.

Next I was led to a whiteboard, and the man began drawing diagrams and labeling figures and giving me a full-length school lesson on the dos and don’t of sharpening all sorts of different blades. I understood probably 70 percent of what he said – enough anyway to be able to laugh with him whenever he said something meant to be taken as a joke and nod thoughtfully at his admonitions.

When he was satisfied that I’d reached my brain’s capacity for knife lore and his carefully unlade mysteries, we returned to the front shop. His wife had boxed up my knife and wrapped it in gold paper with characteristic Japanese care and precision. Almost nothing goes un-beautified in Japan. Even the bowls and plates I’ve purchased from 100 yen shops must be laboriously wrapped in newspapers and dolled up to look like something expensive.

“Thanks so much,” I said, holding the package and doing my best to appear as sincere as possible. I really was sincerely thankful, though. But just saying it didn’t seem like enough. The old man just smiled. Then his eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward and said in a low, confidential voice, “Oh, and I have something else for you too!” Bending down and digging into a low shelf he retrieved another box, this one white and hefty. He handed it to me. I looked at him questioningly.

“Go ahead. Take it. You did a good job back there sharpening. I want you to take good care of your knives.” The box contained a large medium-grit whet stone. A small price tag on the end read “5,000 yen.”

I protested. “I really can’t. It’s very nice of you, but this is too much.” He insisted.

“Please,” he said. “And I hope you’ll come see us again the next time you’re in Sakai.” I offered my heartfelt thanks and for the zillionth time that trip performed a desperate series of bows. This time they weren’t escape bows, though. They were “Thanks so much and sorry for being an ungainly barbarian freeloader,” bows. As I was turning to go, the old man stopped me one more time.

“Hold on! One more thing!” He dashed to a corner of the store and dug quickly through a bin, groping as one searching for a single coin in a pocket full of change. A moment later he presented me with another small box. “Some clippers,” he said and winked. “Just as a memento.”

The bullet train ride home felt long. I’d somehow managed to navigate the three local transfers in Osaka, getting lost only once and for a trifling 40 minutes, before finally settling in for the main, two-hour leg of the trip. In addition to my corpse-like, deadweight book bag, I now also had a knife, whet stone, and a pair of heavy duty, Japanese steel forged toenail clippers to keep me company. It had been quite a productive day, all in all. And as for the trip itself, in terms of the Andrew Book of Adventures, I counted it a success. I hadn’t been robbed, taken hostage, or murdered, still had some money in my bank account, and was making it home more or less on time. And actually, in that sense it was slight disappointment as far as thrills and tomfoolery go. But an overall success nonetheless.

“One down,” I thought, mentally checking Sakai off the list. “Money and time permitting, next stop: Seki city.” And so officially begins my knife tour of Japan.

The top three pictures are, from left to right: Mizuno Tanrenjo, the Sakai Knife Museum, and Nagata Hamono. The bottom two are the garasuki I bought.

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