Hatsukokoro x Yoshikane SKD Nashiji Sujihiki 270mm Ebony Handle

Yoshikane is a knife maker in Sanjo, Niigata, founded in 1919 by the first generation, whose name the company writes as 吉田金吉, in the district of Shimotajima. More than a century later the company still works from Sanjo, and it has been incorporated as Yoshikane Hamono K.K. since 2022. Its history records a fourth-generation succession in 2013, naming the successor as 山本和臣.

The greeting on the company's page says that Sanjo is known nationwide as a hardware town, a standing that comes from the history of the smiths who made blades and carpentry tools and the hardware wholesalers who traded them, carrying the work from one region across the country. It says Yoshikane has carried on the old Sanjo smithing line through its century of work, making knives one by one by traditional methods. The greeting gives the motto 不易流行 and explains it: amid the way things change at speed, some things stay firmly the same. Its writer says that in the knife making he puts his care into, he tests the deep meaning of those words every day.

The company's own history marks 1919 as the year it began making Japanese knives under a brand of its own and as OEM work for Sanjo hardware wholesalers; 1922, when the second generation took the name and the company added two further house brands; 1948, when the third generation began making double bevel knives; and 2002, when it moved to the Kaneko Shinden industrial estate and showed at Ambiente in Germany under the Yoshikane name, which began its export in earnest.

As of October 2026, the Yoshikane knives we list include SKD Nashiji and White 2 Nashiji knives, each in gyuto, K-tip gyuto, santoku, bunka, nakiri, petty, sujihiki and honesuki, some stainless clad and some under the Hatsukokoro name.