Nakagawa Hamono, Sakai. 4 April 2022.
My first frame at Nakagawa Hamono catches a figure tending the glowing forge, lit by it, the rest of the workshop dropping away into the dark. There is no photo of a greeting, none of anyone settling in. The record starts with Satoshi Nakagawa (中川悟志) at the fire, and for most of the next fifty minutes that is what it keeps showing.
A word on why I was pointing a camera at him. Nakagawa Hamono opened in April 2021, so the name on the door was about a year old when we visited. The blacksmith behind it was anything but new: nearly two decades of experience, most of it as a disciple of Kenichi Shiraki of Shiraki Hamono, and his single bevels already sit behind the names of Sakai's brand houses. Our maker notes call him "Sakai's leading blacksmith of the new generation." I don't know which steel was in the fire that afternoon; the camera doesn't record that, and I won't guess.
The early frames are close and dim. Nakagawa works in red-framed safety glasses and gloves, steel heating in front of him. The first blade of the visit appears in a gloved hand, held against the workshop floor. A couple of minutes later one of us stands in front of the forge, arms crossed and smiling, the obligatory visitor photo. You do that when someone lets you into a room like this.
Then the camera wanders, the way it will when the person you came to see is busy at the fire. Flames standing up out of the charcoal. Small steel billets and rings on a workbench. Trays of single-bevel blanks waiting for their next stage, more cooling on a rack. We describe Nakagawa as a high-output blacksmith in our maker notes; the photographs show what that looks like at floor level.
He was not working alone, and the photographs make one thing plain: a Sakai single-bevel house is not a one-man picture. Someone in a grey knit glove handled a whole row of blades at once. A craftsman in a cap and mask worked at the grinding wheel; a blade was checked against a paper template, then raised against the light. What was being read in it, I can't tell you. I'm leaving those people unnamed. The photographs show hands and work, and that is what I can vouch for.
Then the hammering started. My camera caught fifteen frames in seventeen seconds, Nakagawa over glowing steel in most of them. Half of the ten photographs later picked as the best of the whole visit come from that burst.
The middle of the visit belongs to the fire more than the hammer: a second pair of hands beating a glowing blade on a wooden anvil, a long blade heating in the charcoal, tongs pulling a billet out of the coals. And then my record simply stops for nearly twenty minutes. I shot nothing, and I won't reconstruct it: whatever happened then is not in a frame, so it is not in this article.
When the camera picks the story back up, Nakagawa is at the forge again, his face lit by the fire, and the hammer returns for one more short burst. Then it rests on the anvil, the forge a warm blur behind it, and a freshly forged blade lies in a metal tray, raw steel with its grinding and polishing still ahead.
Outside, I photographed the signage and the entrance. Our records note the house carries on from Shiraki Hamono, and that one line holds a lot: nearly twenty years in the trade, most of them under one master, folded into a workshop that now bears a different name.
The last photos are portraits at the entrance, the two of them side by side, smiling. Then we were off; Nakagawa Hamono was one stop on a day spent around Sakai's workshops.
Fifty minutes is not enough time to learn how a knife is made, and I won't pretend these photographs teach it. What they do show is a man one year into his own name and nearly twenty into the trade, working over a charcoal fire that was burning every time I looked at it.
