KenjiTogashi

The story

Aoki Hamono's roster lists eight blacksmiths. Three of them are Togashi smiths, and they are the only names on the page whose stated specialty reads honyaki and forged work, 本焼・打物. Kenji Togashi (富樫憲治) is one of the three.

Honyaki is the hard version of the job. Most Japanese knives are two metals: a hard core welded into a softer jacket that absorbs shock and forgives the smith a great deal. A honyaki blade is one piece of high-carbon steel, differentially hardened so the edge comes out hard and the spine stays tougher. There is no jacket to hide behind and no second attempt. The blade survives the quench or it cracks, and a cracked honyaki is scrap.

Sakai City's register of traditional craftsmen records his certification in the blacksmith division in 1996, and names his company beside it, 株式会社富樫打刃物製作所. The roster his name sits on is Aoki Hamono's own page for the Sakai Takayuki brand, which is how blades he forges reach the people who cook with them.

Retailer listings put the Sakai Takayuki Tokujō wa-bocho series with the Togashi workshop. Read that wording carefully, because it is the workshop and not the man. No first-party source attributes that line to Kenji Togashi personally, and the workshop carries more than one smith, so we have left it as a workshop attribution rather than tidying it into a name.

One thing we cannot tell you. The roster's own creed text about the younger Togashi smiths names their father as 富樫憲二, one character away from 富樫憲治. Both read Kenji. The second spelling appears nowhere on the city register. It is either a slip in a paragraph of prose or a sign that there are two senior Togashi relatives, and until someone in Sakai settles it we are not going to draw the family tree for you.