Been and Gone, Sanjou City Post 2: Conception of a Kamisori

I can't really say I saw it to the end, but I was there at the beginning.


Perhaps the highlight of my trip to Sanjou (a trip that was, frankly, chock full of awesome) was participating in the creation of two Iwasaki razors. Mizuochi-san was right there holding my hand (literally) and cleaning up my messes, but I did some hammering and some welding, and got a glimpse into the real work it takes to make these razors. To be honest, it was even harder than I had imagined, and I had never imagined it was easy.

The biggest surprise was that Mizuochi-san, a man in his sixties, makes every single razor, every step of the way, alone. There are no helpers, no young staff members to handle the grunt-work, nothing. Just him...astounding.

Of course, Iwasaki-san is there to oversee the work, but his health simply isn't up to the work.

The work begins with a bar of soft wrought-iron. Here, Mizuochi-san marked the bar off in roughly 7 cm sections.

He used this machine to cut those sections off.

Here, in the blue circle, you can see the three bars we worked with (sorry for the crappy iPhone pic).

These iron bars are heated in a 1000ºC forge until they become malleable.

Then, using an automatic hammer, the rough shape is begun.

Alternating between the heavy automatic hammer and the hand hammer, the bars are heated, then shaped, then heated again.

The razor slowly appears.

You can clearly see the Iwasaki Kamisori coming into being.

Here the majority of shaping is done, and it's time to weld the Hagane (blade steel) onto the Jigane (soft iron, what we've been working on so far).

To weld, the iron is heated again, then a bit of flux is poured onto the "blade" portion, then a thin sliver of blade steel, about 6cmx1cm, and maybe 1mm thick, is aligned with the edges. This is heated again, until the flux melts and sparks, then the hagane is quickly hammered onto the blade, welding it to the iron.

I helped on two of these, but of course I probably only just made Mizuochi-san work harder.

If you look closely, you can see the line of the Hagane on the blade of this razor.

At this point, the rough work is done, but of course, tons more is needed. The blades are annealed, hammered, ground, heat treated and tempered with clay.

Here we have razors that have gone through the heat treating process and are ready to be ground into finished razors. The black is clay baked onto the razor.

These razors have had the blade ground onto them, exposing the hagane at the edge. They are ready for the final grinding and shaping, and then they'll be honed up and sent on to the distributors for final sale. By the way, if you're waiting for a razor...sorry! I might have held up process a bit.

But it was worth it!