Once a month, they forge a sword in public. Seki has made blades for more than eight hundred years; the account given locally is that the swordsmith Motoshige moved here in the Kamakura period and spread the smithing techniques through the district. What the town makes now is kitchen knives and industrial blades rather than swords, and there are several places to see the work: the smithing heritage hall, the blade museums, the trade hall.

The old-style sword forging is demonstrated publicly once a month, and there are sessions where visitors sharpen a knife or make a blade themselves. Seki has long been spoken of in the same breath as Solingen and Sheffield, which is a comparison the town is comfortable with. Gifu city is about forty minutes away by car, and there is work here in both blades and automotive components, so the industry has a modern half as well as an inherited one. Sword technique did not simply become knife technique. What carried over was the handling — how steel is forged, and how it is hardened.

A blade is not difficult to make sharp. It is difficult to keep sharp, and that is a different problem: the steel has to be hard enough to hold an edge and tough enough not to chip, two properties that pull against each other. Eight centuries of refinement here have gone almost entirely into that one contradiction. Spend twenty minutes on a whetstone in one of the workshops and the difficulty stops being an abstraction; it arrives in your wrists, and in the discovery that holding a constant angle is harder than it sounds when described.