2023: The Year in Review

Hello there! Thank you as always for checking our website out for new news, education and information.

We hope to do more and more with blogs to give you educational value.

To that end, have you seen our new Japanese YouTube channel? We are educating about kitchen knives there and English subtitles are available! Take a look over here!

Find a message from our president below, and we'll keep the educational content coming up in 2024!

Well, 2023 has come to a close.

Thanks to the support of so many people, this was another fantastic year to share the world of culinary knives, filled with history and complimented by the masterful skills of our craftsmen.

We’ve had a lot happen this year. I’d like to talk about some of it, and our plans for next year.

This year we took a larger focus on sharpness, analysing our kitchen knives before and after sharpening, as well as raising and teaching two new sharpeners in our store. We’d like to increase that number next year so we can bring our Ichimonji sharpness to even more people, and inspire more chefs around the world.

We’ve also launched many projects and taken new initiatives. Firstly, we are focusing on letting our younger staff form policies and ideas in the company. This gives us fresh, new perspectives and allows us to discuss our presence in this space and where we will put our efforts going forward.

We’ve also started to focus on people outside Japan more, with our international social media accounts, video work both sharpening and educational, and more newsletters and blogs like this. On top of this, our first collaboration cutting board launched with WONDERWOOD. We want to do more collaborative projects like this, especially if it is with people and companies who are associated with food and tool culture.

Finally, we started going to events once again like the Japan Craft Expo. The way these traditional arts shine is very close to how food and cooking culture shines, we think.

That said, now it’s time to look ahead and see what 2024 will bring. Our new ICHITOI cultural experience should open in April (a little late, but it is well worth it!) and we always have more on the horizon. We will have more to share on this soon.

Please look forward to what we at Sakai Ichimonji Mitsuhide will be doing next year. We will continue to create food and tool culture to promote and help create amazing dishes that are important to people. We sincerely hope you join us on this journey.

Connecting through sharpness,

Ryo Tanaka
Sakai Ichimonji Mitsuhide
3rd Generation President