YoshihiroYauji

The story

A single-bevel blade is ground on one face only. The other face stays flat, the edge is asymmetric by design, and it has to be maintained on the side it was built on. That is Yoshihiro Yauji's certified speciality. The Fukui cooperative that recorded his certification listed him as 片刃製造, single-bevel production, and a 2025 institutional interview puts the interesting part on the record: he carries that geometry into santoku, gyuto and petty knives.

He was born on 27 January 1983. In April 2003 he joined 北岡刃物製作所, Kitaoka Hamono, and trained under Hideo Kitaoka (北岡英雄), who was himself certified as a Traditional Craftsperson in February 2004, ten months after Yauji arrived. Yauji's own certification came on 25 February 2019, in Echizen forged cutlery (越前打刃物), comprehensive division. In April 2021 he went independent under his own workshop name, 寬 -Kutsurogi-.

He forges and he sharpens. That detail explains the rest. "Since I am the blacksmith and a polisher, I can get the feedback from the polisher directly — as we're the same person," he told an interviewer in 2023, and a news photographer caught the second half of that: Yauji sharpening a freshly forged santoku.

In November 2024 a Fukui newspaper reported that he had opened a dedicated workshop of his own inside Takefu Knife Village, fitted with an original belt hammer designed to cut energy loss. By May 2025 the village's organisation document listed him among its directors. He also represents 鍛人, Kanuchi, an Echizen tatara research group, and has said he would like to build a setting where successors can be taught. His view of the trade, from a 2023 interview: the knife is "a mother tool of all the tools", and "there are parts of the process that need to be looked at and modernised."

A 2021 Echizen craft publication recorded what he was then offering to order: Aogami (V Special 2) and Shirogami (V2C), in two-layer and suminagashi constructions. That is a menu on a date, not a standing catalogue.

One last thing, because it will look like an error otherwise. The national register writes his name 弥氏良寛. His own Takefu Knife Village profile writes it 弥氏良寬, one character different, using the same character that names his workshop. Both are exactly how their sources have them, and we have left them that way rather than tidying one into the other.