YoshikazuIkeda池田美和

The story

Yoshikazu Ikeda (池田美和) apprenticed to his father in 1967 and did not open his own forge until 1983. Sixteen years sit between those two dates. The workshop he founded, Ikeda Tanrenjo (池田鍛錬所), stands at 3-1-24 Kitatadeicho in Sakai-ku, Sakai, Osaka, and its mark is 堺北辰, Sakai Hokushin.

Sakai City's roster of traditional craftsmen sets one word beside his name that tells you what he actually does: 鍛冶, blacksmith. In Sakai the forging and the sharpening are separate trades held by separate people, so that single word narrows him precisely. He heats and shapes the steel; the edge, in Sakai's division of labour, belongs to another trade. The national register supplies the date to go with it — Osaka, Sakai forged cutlery (堺打刃物), comprehensive division (総合部門), certified on 16 December 1988. Five years after he lit his own fire, twenty-one after he started.

The line behind him is long. An Aoyama Square interview introduces him as born into a family of blacksmiths continuing from the Meiji era, and Sakai Film Office describes the workshop as a Sakai forge running four generations. Read that carefully, because it counts the workshop and not the man; no source we have hands him a generation number of his own. What is on the record is that he did not come to the fire alone. Tatsuo Ikeda is his elder brother.

There is a second certified Ikeda in Sakai forging, and the registers are careful about him in a way retellings usually are not. The national roster records 池田良一, Ryoichi Ikeda, certified for Sakai forged cutlery on 25 February 2008. Sakai City's roster pairs him with a different workshop, 池田刃物製作所, while Yoshikazu stays paired with 池田鍛錬所. Two names, two workshops, one craft, and the paperwork does not connect them. On one point we can go further than the paperwork does: Ryoichi is Yoshikazu's successor at the forge. Anything past that — how the two houses connect, who stands where in the family — we do not have, and we would rather say so than fill it in.

His reading is recorded too: いけだ よしかず. The same characters can be read several ways, and the record settles which one is his — the first thing you owe a craftsman whose work you are describing.