The name is older than the company

Kanetsugu is a swordsmith's name. The company's own history opens not with a business but with a smith: the first Kanetsugu worked in the Nanbokucho period, in the fourteenth century, and is said to have been the son or the pupil of Shizu Saburo Kaneuji, who himself studied under Masamune and is counted among his ten disciples. The name runs down through Seki blades for six hundred years after that.

The company is younger and precise about it. In 1918 Kawamura Matsujiro, whom their own page describes as a descendant of the swordsmith Kanetsugu, opened a blade making business in Seki. It incorporated in 1949 with Matsujiro as first president. It is on its fourth, Kawamura Yosuke, and it employs nineteen people.

Fire, then a long way below zero

Two things Seki Kanetsugu puts forward as their own, and both are checkable claims rather than adjectives.

The first is the hamaguri edge: they took the clamshell blade geometry particular to the Japanese sword and put it on a kitchen knife. Convex, not flat, so food releases instead of clinging.

The second is sub zero treatment. After quenching, the blade is taken below minus seventy degrees. Their stated reason is the Seki standard for a sword, which they quote as three things: it does not break, it does not bend, it cuts well. Hardness and toughness are usually a trade, and the deep freeze is how they buy a little of both.

Alongside that, a micro serration they call micro dent, ground so the knife is sharpened from the reverse side only, and CNC grinding that controls blade thickness to a hundredth of a millimetre before a person sets the edge by hand under running water so the steel never gets hot enough to soften.

On specification, a caution. Seki Kanetsugu describes Pro-M steel only as molybdenum stainless and publishes no hardness figure for any knife it makes. Retailers fill that gap with grade names. We would rather leave it empty and accurate.

What we carry

Three lines, and they sit at different places.

Pro-M is the working line: a one piece bolster with no gap to trap anything, a black laminated wood handle, and 18-8 stainless for the metal inside the handle, which is the part that usually rots first on a wood handled knife. Chef's knives at 7.1, 8.2 and 9.4 inches, a santoku, utility knives at 5.1 and 5.9, and a boning knife.

Saiun is the VG-10 damascus line with micarta handles: paring, utility at 4.7 and 5.9, and chef's knives at 7.9 and 9.0 inches.

Zuiun is the top of the range, damascus over a powdered steel core: petty, santoku, gyuto and a 9.4 inch sujihiki.