TsukasaHinoura

The story

Tsukasa Hinoura (日野浦司) is the third generation at Hinoura Hamono Koubou in Sanjo, and the family keeps an unusually exact record of how it got there. The first generation set up as a blacksmith in 1905, in what was then the village of Ajikata. The second went independent from the main house in 1957. The workshop took its present name in 1991, when it moved.

Two marks come off his anvil. Ajikataya (味方屋) is the family trade name, carried down from that village. Tsukasa (司) is his own.

What he is known for is a damascus pattern he calls river-jump. His own description of it is better than anything we would write: it resembles water flowing, a rippled river surface, and each one is the only one like it in the world. He works two others, Flowing Clouds and a cherry pattern. Retailer accounts add the part that explains the colour, which is that he layers copper and brass into the cladding steel to get three tones out of it, and they credit him as the only smith to have taken the top knife award at the Seki Custom Knife Show two years running, both times for damascus.

A visitor to the forge came away with the detail that makes sense of the rest. He does not buy pre-laminated steel. He forges his own damascus, and his interest sits in metallurgy and hardening rather than in pattern for its own sake. The pattern is what falls out of caring about what the steel is doing.

The workshop's own timeline records the certifications: a regional meister designation in 2006, the year his father retired, and in 2012 both the traditional craftsman title, 伝統工芸士, and the Niigata prefectural Master Craftsman award.

There is one number we are not going to give you. Sources put the year he entered the trade at either 1975 or 1978. We asked James, who deals with him, and he said plainly that he does not know. So the year stays out rather than getting picked because two sources out of three said it.

His son Mutsumi went independent in 2025 under his own name, Tsuchinone. Some listings read that as Ajikataya knives being finished. They are not. The Ajikataya and Tsukasa lines stay with his father.