Been and Gone, Sanjou City Post 1: The Touristy Bits

So I've been back from visiting Iwasaki-San and Mizuochi-San in Sanjou City for a couple of days now, and I'm still not done processing all I saw and learned.



I'm not sure where to begin, actually. But I guess I'll begin with the touristy stuff.

It's a long trip from my home in Hikari, in Western Japan. Sanjou City is in Niigata prefecture, in the Eastern half of the Island, and it's very inconveniently located. To get there, I had to take the Shinkansen to Fukuoka, then fly to Osaka, and on to Niigata city where I got on another train. I left at 7:45 and arrived in Sanjou at 4. Ugh.

It didn't help that the plane was this wee thing:

But I eventually got there, and it was fantastic.

I spent the first few hours at Iwasaki-san's house, having tea and just chatting. I had brought my own Iwasaki razors, the 2 Kamisori and three straight razors (two of which are Tamahagane). Iwasaki-san seemed quite pleased to see them, confirming they were all well over thirty years old. It was such a fine thing, to see these razors in the hands of the man who had made them so long ago. Mizuochi-san reminisced about making the jimps on straight razors back in the day, sitting at his workbench tapping out a rhythm in time with his breath "ta-ta-ta" as he used a hammer and punch.

The kamisori were obviously well used, and the Omote sides showed signs of flattening and filing, so Mizuochi-san offered to regrind them.

We went out to the workshop, where Iwasaki razors have been made for almost the last 30 years (before that Iwasaki Workshop was located in the city center, now it's on the outskirts because of noise concerns.)

I watched as Mizuochi-san sat at the grinder and brought those razors back to almost new condition in a matter of minutes. The workshop was old, and cluttered, and full of amazing stuff I could have investigated for days.

Here's the honing station, surrounded by hones of all shapes and sizes. This is not where Iwasaki razors are honed now, though--Mizuochi-san does that at his own home. This place is too dirty for him, with abrasives and metal shards and things flying everywhere, it's bad for edges.

Notice the two huge Nagura--one is unmarked, the other is a Tenjou mined in the 1960s.

After the razors were finished, we called it a night...we were all tired. I went to a hotel in the city center, and we arranged to get started early the next morning.

Mizuochi-san picked me up at 8:30, and we started the day by visiting the Sanjo City Blacksmith's Dojo.

This is a public building dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Sanjou City's blacksmithing traditions. There are a number of famous smiths in the city, and all of them (Including Mizochi-san, now, and Iwasaki-San in the past) help, giving public demonstrations and teaching in the Dojo. Every schoolchild in Sanjou comes here to learn about smithing, and get some practice in hammering out knives and sharpening them as well.

They also have samples of the work of the blacksmiths, including this Tamahagane razor clad in real ivory, one of only 12 in the world.

That's an old Koma nagura next to it.

After the Dojo, we returned to Iwasaki-san's house where we got to work. The day's plan was to hone the razors Mizuochi-san fixed for me yesterday, and they wanted to show me how razors are born. And that's what happened!

But that's enough for the first post...