I’m not usually one for impulse purchases, but as I hold a striking handmade chef’s knife in the tiny showroom of a blacksmith’s workshop, I’m uncharacteristically decisive. I must have this beautiful blade with its brutal angles and subtly off-centre wooden handle, despite already having a razor-sharp gyuto chef’s knife in my kitchen back home.
I’m visiting 35-year-old Haruki Miyazaki’s blacksmith atelier on the outskirts of Gotō City, the largest settlement on the island of Fukue, of the Gotō archipelago. This chain of some 140 droplets of land lies off the coast of Kyushu, due south of the tip of the Korean peninsula.
Watching Miyazaki wedge a piece of steel into the centre of a super-heated rod of pure iron