About
Written from the Japanese sources, in Japan.
The questions worth asking about a Japanese knife — what the steel actually is, what "hand-forged" actually means, what the connection to swords actually was — have answers. The material holding them is mostly in Japanese: manufacturer documentation, regional industry bodies, the records of the towns that make the knives. Very little of it has ever been translated. This site works from that material.
What this site is
Wabi Sabi Made is an independent guide to Japanese-made kitchen knives and the craft behind them. Every article starts from Japanese-language material — manufacturer documentation, regional industry associations, trade bodies, local government records of the production towns — and explains, in plain English, what is actually true and what is marketing.
It is not a shop — nothing is sold here — and no brand has any say in what gets published. If a piece is ever sponsored, it will say so at the top, before you read it.
Who writes it
Wabi Sabi Made is written and published by Shoki Satake, based in Japan. The qualification on offer here is a narrow and specific one: reading Japanese well enough to go to the primary source, and caring enough to check it.
No claim is made to being a chef, a smith, or a metallurgist. Where a question needs that kind of expertise, the article quotes the people who have it and says where the quote came from — rather than paraphrasing it into an anonymous fact.
How an article gets made
- Start in Japanese. Sources are gathered in Japanese first, so the article is not just a rearrangement of what is already on the English internet.
- Check every claim against the source. Each factual statement is matched back to the passage it came from.
- Keep the hedges. If the source says "in some cases" or "research suggests", the article says that too. Removing a qualifier to make a sentence punchier changes what is being claimed, and we treat that as an error.
- Refuse the tidy story. The popular version of Japanese knife history — that today's kitchen knives descend directly from samurai swords — is tidier than the evidence. We write the connection as one of regions, trades, and techniques, because that is what the sources support.
- Say what is unknown. Where the record is thin or contested, the article says so.
Images and AI
Explanatory illustrations may be generated with AI and are labelled Illustration where they appear. We do not present AI-generated images as photographs of a real product, workshop, or person. Every article is checked claim by claim against its sources before it is published.
The reasoning is simple: a site whose whole argument is about telling the genuine from the merely Japanese-looking cannot be coy about how its own images were made.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing. Write to hello@wabisabimade.com with the article and, if you have one, the source. Where a correction changes the substance of an article, we note it in the article.
How it is funded
Some outbound links may earn a commission at no cost to you. That arrangement never decides what gets recommended, and the full terms are set out in our Affiliate Disclosure.