Yu Kurosaki

The story

Yu Kurosaki (黒崎優) found his trade in a job listing. He told the story to NHK himself: he was at the public employment office, a posting for Echizen uchihamono caught his eye, and the first knife he was handed carried an engraving that read by Kintaro of Echizen. The man who made it became his first master.

He works in Echizen, in Fukui, where knives have been made for something like seven hundred years and where the craft was formally designated in 1979. His company's legal notice puts the address beyond argument: 株式会社黒﨑打刃物, with him as president, in Echizen City. He learned in the Takefu Knife Village shared workshop, opened in 1993, where fourteen makers work under one roof. James, who deals with him, says he trained under both Hiroshi Kato and Takeshi Saji. Retailer accounts put the Kato apprenticeship at 2002 and his independence around 2014.

What he is known for is the hammered finish. Tsuchime is old, but Kurosaki does something with it that nobody had been doing, which is polish it up to a shine. In his own words to NHK, until then no one was bringing them to a luster, and he wanted knives that looked like jewellery. It is not only decoration either. A dimpled surface gives food less to cling to.

His own store carries the series he is making now: Senko, Shin-Gekko, Shizuku, Juhyo, Fujin and Raijin, across petty, bunka, nakiri, gyuto, sujihiki and kataha, with outdoor knives and sharpening stones alongside them. Retailer listings map the steels behind the names, SG2 in Senko and Fujin, R2 in Shizuku, Aogami Super in Kokusen, Cobalt Special in Raijin, and also credit him with forging the Masakage Shimo and Sasame lines. He is a certified traditional craftsman, 伝統工芸士.

The commissions tell you who actually uses them. NHK records a Ginza sushi restaurant that asked for jet-black lacquered knives, a job that ran about a year and needed a lacquer artisan working alongside the smith, and clients from Tokyo to San Francisco. Around seventy per cent of his orders go overseas, and he keeps five apprentices.

A note on how the name is written. He writes himself 黒崎優. The brand uses a variant of that surname character, 黒﨑打刃物. The two are not interchangeable, and we keep them apart rather than tidying one into the other.