Nagao Kanekoma — The Last House of Higonokami

Few knives carry the weight of a whole country's memory quite like the Higonokami. For more than a century it lived in the pockets of Japanese schoolchildren, farmers, carpenters, and clerks — a small brass-handled friction folder pulled out to sharpen a pencil, whittle a stick, slice an apple, or trim a length of twine. It was the knife of ordinary life. And today, only one workshop in the world is still allowed to stamp a blade with the original 肥後守 trademark: Nagao Kanekoma Factory, tucked into the old blade-smithing town of Miki City in Hyogo.

The story starts in the 1880s, when founder Komataro Nagao began forging knives by hand in the Hirata district alongside his colleague Mr. Murakami. In those days every blade was beaten out at the anvil, hard steel forge-welded into a soft iron body, the sheaths struck from brass or black-dyed iron and carved with portraits, horses, flowers, birds, and landscapes. A single craftsman might finish five to eight a day, and no two were quite the same.

In 1894, a hardware wholesaler named Tasaburo Shigematsu brought back a folding knife from Kagoshima and asked the Miki smiths to refine it. The result was a stroke of quiet genius: a small lever — the chikiri, or "tail" — pinned to the spine of the blade so it could be thumbed open and folded flat against the scale. Shigematsu named it after Higo, the old province of Kumamoto where most of his customers lived, and the name stuck fast. Sales exploded. By 1911 a young Crown Prince — later Emperor Taisho — spotted one at the First Kobe Export Articles Competitive Exhibition, bought it on the spot, and the Higonokami's fame was sealed.

A golden age followed. The Higonokami Knife Union, founded in 1899, swelled to forty member workshops and over two hundred craftsmen. But success drew imitators, and cheap counterfeits flooded the market. In 1910 the Miki Knife Manufacturers Association registered the Higonokami trademark, restricting its use to legitimate members. Then came the long decline — utility knives, electric pencil sharpeners, and the anti-knife social campaigns of the 1950s hollowed out the trade one workshop at a time. One by one the licensed makers shut their forges or moved on to other work. When the dust settled, Nagao Kanekoma was the last one standing.

They have kept faith with the old methods. Every blade is still made by warikomi — soft iron manually split and forge-welded around a hard steel core, the same lamination logic that gives a katana its strength and edge. The result is a blade with excellent edge retention that still yields easily to a sharpening stone. There is no lock, no ball bearing, no spring — just a single rivet, the friction of brass on steel, and a small lever to coax the edge into the light.

The handle still bears the old engraving: 登録商標 肥後守 定駒 — Registered Trademark, Higonokami, by Kanekoma. Four generations on, it remains one of the most quietly perfect everyday objects Japan has ever produced.