Do you have blunt kitchen knives at home? Any kitchen knife as it is used over time will lose sharpness, making it not only harder to use, but unsafe too. So you should always sharpen and maintain your kitchen knives.
But have you ever sharpened a knife before? You aren't alone if you say no.
Sharpening looks tricky to do, and many people haven't considered the option of maintenance over replacement. We want to solve this problem with a free workshop all about kitchen knife sharpening!
Introducing our Trial Knife Sharpening workshop, which lets you work on a blunt kitchen knife of ours and understand both how and why you should sharpen your knives at home. This is done on all non-event days at ICHITOI, the second floor of Sakai Ichimonji Mitsuhide's main store.
Visit us, hop on a whetstone and learn the useful skill of knife sharpening! If you've never sharpened a knife before, this is the perfect place to start!
Table of Contents
Workshop Contents
This workshop takes about five minutes at minimum and consists of three major steps.
This is a mostly hands-off experience, designed to let you experience sharpening and try things freely, with basic assistance from our general staff. Experienced sharpeners are also on standby, but please consider one of our paid classes for direct coaching by them. These classes will launch later in 2026.
Whetstone Setup
You will learn about what water-based whetstones are, and how to setup a sharpening station in your home with a basic whetstone.
Sharpening Technique
You will see an easy-to-understand demonstration of how to sharpen a kitchen knife, quickly demonstrated by one of our team! This demonstration will teach not only how to sharpen in a safe way, but is designed to be easy to understand. This will be focused just on the core fundamentals to get you started.
Sharpening Experience
Hop in front of our sharpening station yourself and try sharpening using our test knives and whetstones. One of our team will give you some basic advice to keep your technique in shape, and can answer any simple questions about sharpening you may have.
This experiences takes approximately five to ten minutes, but there is no real time limit; you can sharpen as long as you like! While this is more suitable for beginners, sharpeners of any skill level can participate. Additionally, many people do this workshop while they are waiting for a knife they purchased to be engraved.
You can also do this workshop if you are curious to try our specific whetstones of ours to gauge what is best for your next whetstone purchase.
This activity is suitable to do for one to two active participants at a time, but can be done by up to four. Younger audiences aged ten and up can do this experience with adult supervision. For more than two people, please contact us ahead of time.
Why We're Doing It
The reason we host this workshop is to showcase the importance of maintaining your knives over replacing them.
While it can be easy to replace a knife at a cheap discount store and just use that, there is much value and performance to be gained by buying a good knife and maintaining it yourself. A good knife will serve you for years if looked after and perform significantly better than a cheaper knife, for a much longer time.
This is a basic workshop designed to teach what we feel is an important skill, so that you can maintain your tools at home. While we offer professional sharpening and paid classes, this workshop helps you do basic top-up style sharpening at home in between professional visits, so your knife performance decreases less and you save money over time.
Plus, you might find sharpening to be really fun! Many of our staff do it as a meditative exercise, or to pursue the pinnacle of kireaji or cutting ability.
Dates and Prices
This workshop is held any day there is not another event going on at ICHITOI.
This experience is free, and you do not need to make a purchase to participate.
We will also host paid sharpening classes in the near future that go into better technique, direct coaching and more. Please keep an eye out for when these classes start being hosted.
If you have Japanese language ability, we also offer sharpening lessons on specific knife types, and have a sharpening club called Toginowa (トギノワ), which you can find out more about on our Japanese ICHITOI website.
How to Book
Walk-in appointments are accepted and encouraged. You do not need to make a reservation with us to do this sharpening workshop, but you are always welcome to contact us if you want to have a precise time and make sure someone is available.
You can book a session by messaging us through our contact page.