Satoshi Nakagawa

The story

Satoshi Nakagawa (中川悟志) is a Sakai blacksmith. His company, Nakagawa Uchihamono, works out of Nishi-ku, Sakai. Sakai City's register lists him as a Traditional Craftsman (dentō kōgeishi) in the forging division, effective February 2023, and the trade press reported that nobody in the history of Sakai uchihamono had been certified younger.

The forge was not the first dream. He played soccer from grade school through junior high and wanted the professional's life, then let it go in high school. "Having chosen the blacksmith's life," he wrote in September 2025, "I can't reach the top unless I work harder than anyone." And the post ends with the real audience: his own child, watching the father's back.

He earned the forge the hard way. Sixteen years at Shiraki Hamono under Kenichi Shiraki (白木健一), the only disciple the master ever recognised. When Shiraki retired in 2020 the workshop, its machines and its future passed to him, and in April 2021 the sign over the door changed to Nakagawa Uchihamono. Ask him about those years and he doesn't varnish them: "My master was an old-school craftsman straight out of a picture, and a genuinely strict man. I came in with zero knowledge and zero experience. But watching, learning, practising, I began to understand how magnificent his smithing really was."

The working method is distinct enough that the trade press calls it the Nakagawa way: heated iron and steel go straight under the belt hammer and are forge-welded there, no hand-hammering first. The forge runs at about 1,200 degrees and he reads it by eye and skin, not by thermometer. The day a magazine came to watch, he put fifty White #2 deba through the fire before shaping and quenching had even begun.

Then there is the range. White steel #3 through #1, Blue #2 and #1, stainless Ginsan and VG10, and honyaki. "I pride myself on being the smith who handles the widest range of steels in Japan," he says, laughing. Among them is mizu-honyaki, water-quenched, and he says the thrill when painstaking work comes out right is what keeps him at it. His own work list gives a wait of several years for a White #1 mizu-honyaki kiritsuke yanagiba at 330 mm. His reverse-clove (逆丁子) mizu-honyaki yanagiba is limited to thirty a year, and the 2022 allocation sold out the day reservations opened. One Fuji-wave (富士波) yanagiba carries a full moon in the hamon on one face and a crescent on the other.

In our own shop his forging is behind the Hatsukokoro x Satoshi Nakagawa collaborations and his own lines in Ginsan, Blue #1, Blue #2 and VG10, as well as his White steel honyaki.

That 1,200-degree forge? James has stood right in front of it. In April 2022 he spent an afternoon at Nakagawa Uchihamono watching the work up close; the photos on this page are from that visit, and his own account of it, Fifty minutes at the forge, is just below in Stories.

On the forums, collectors talk about his Ginsan. One buyer reported that the knife came extremely dull and would not slide-cut thin paper. A commenter believed no final edge had been applied, and the thread's context was that his wide-bevel knives can leave that edge to your sharpener.