Forging and grinding under one roof. Takefu Knife Village puts several cutlery workshops into a single building, and the forging can be watched from close range without any glass between you and the heat. The stage where steel is heated and beaten into shape and the stage where it is ground to an edge are happening on the same floor, a few metres apart from one another, which almost never happens elsewhere. The two sounds are entirely different in character: one arrives in intervals with silence between, the other simply continues without a break for as long as the wheel turns. Standing between them you understand by ear, before you understand by eye, that a knife is the meeting point of two unrelated operations that happen to be performed by the same trade. The smiths work in near darkness because the colour of the steel is the instrument they read.

Echizen-Takefu station on the Hokuriku Shinkansen is nearby, and the town centre keeps its shops and hospital close together, so the practical side of a visit is simple. Daily life here works on foot and by car without difficulty.

A finished blade is one of the quietest objects imaginable, entirely still and giving nothing away about its making. Everything that produced it is loud, hot and physical. Echizen has been forging blades for something like seven centuries, originally sickles for the farms around it rather than kitchen knives. The cooperative building was designed to bring competing smiths under one roof, which was not an obvious thing for them to agree to. It appears to have worked. That gap is the reason to make the trip, and it is precisely the thing that does not survive being photographed.