Ask a Japanese knife maker how long it takes to train a knife smith, and the answer comes back in decades. Not years. Not "a year of school, a few years of journeyman work." Decades. A traditional Sakai apprentice (a deshi, 弟子) starts at 16 to 20 years old and is not considered a competent independent maker until somewhere around age 35. Fifteen years is the conventional minimum. Twenty years is more typical. Some makers spend their entire lives in training and never produce knives under their own name.

This is a wildly different model from how Western knife makers train, and it explains a lot about why Japanese knives cost what they cost, why the Japanese knife industry is shrinking even as global demand grows, and why the makers you read about on the internet are almost all over 50 years old. So let us actually go through what the deshi system is and what is happening to it now.

The structure of a Sakai workshop

A traditional Sakai knife workshop has three distinct trade roles, each with its own training track and its own master.

The kajiya (forger)

The kajiya is the smith who heats and hammers the steel. The kajiya selects the steel, controls the forge, executes the forge welding (in the case of kasumi or San-Mai construction), and produces the rough blade shape. The kajiya is the role most Western readers picture when they think "knife maker," but it is only one of three trades in the Japanese system.

Training to be a competent kajiya is roughly 10 to 15 years. The first 5 years are essentially manual labor: cleaning the forge, preparing fuel, fetching steel, watching the master, and being yelled at for breathing wrong. The middle 5 years involve doing forge work under direct supervision, with the master correcting every motion. The last 5 years are independent work that the master critiques.

The togishi (sharpener)

The togishi is the sharpener who takes the rough blade from the kajiya and grinds, polishes, and sharpens it. The togishi establishes the bevel geometry, the surface finish (kasumi, mirror, kurouchi), and the final cutting edge. In a traditional Sakai workshop, the togishi is a separate trade with its own master and its own training track. The kajiya and the togishi do not interchange.

Training to be a competent togishi is also 10 to 15 years, with similar phasing. The work is finer-grained than forge work and requires precise control of stone selection, water management, body angle, and pressure. A togishi master can sharpen a blade to a level that a self-taught Western sharpener cannot reach in their lifetime, and the difference is partly tools and partly accumulated micro-skill.

The handle maker (saya, hatsuke)

The third trade is the handle maker, who fits the wa-style handle (octagonal, D-shaped, or oval) to the tang and finishes the bolster. This trade is shorter to train (5 to 10 years), and is sometimes folded into the togishi role in smaller workshops. In larger workshops, it remains a separate trade.

Each trade has its own deshi system, its own master, and its own apprenticeship contract. A workshop turns out finished knives by sequencing the three trades, with each piece passing from forger to sharpener to handle maker over weeks or months.

What being a deshi actually means

The deshi system is older than the modern Japanese knife industry. It comes out of the same medieval trade-guild structure that produced sword smiths, lacquer artists, ceramic kilns, and other formal craft trades. The structure is not unique to knife making, but knife making preserves the structure with unusual fidelity.

A deshi enters a workshop in their late teens or early twenties, often through family connection or formal recommendation. The arrangement is part contract, part adoption: the deshi works for the master full-time, often lives in or near the workshop, eats meals with the master family, and follows the master schedule. In return, the deshi receives food, shelter, training, and a small stipend (very small, especially in the early years).

The first 2 to 3 years of a deshi training is mostly observation and menial work. The deshi sweeps, fetches, prepares, and watches. They are not yet allowed to touch the actual work. This is not hazing; it is the period during which the deshi learns the rhythms and routines of the workshop, develops the eye for what the work should look like, and proves they will stick with it.

Years 3 to 8, the deshi begins doing simple operations under direct supervision. Edge polishing on the lowest grits. Forge tending. Simple striking under the master direction. Each operation is repeated thousands of times until it becomes correct, then thousands more times until it becomes consistent.

Years 8 to 15, the deshi performs full operations independently, with the master critiquing the result rather than supervising the execution. Mistakes in this period are expensive (a poorly forged blade is wasted steel) and the master measures the deshi readiness by how few mistakes they make.

Around year 15, if the master approves, the deshi can begin forging knives under their own name in the master workshop, or set up their own small workshop with the master blessing. This is the conventional point at which the deshi becomes a master-level smith.

Why the timeline is so long

Western readers ask: why does this take 15 years? Couldn't you teach the techniques in 3?

The answer is that the techniques are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is consistency at speed. A deshi can learn the basic motions of forge welding in a year. The remaining 14 years are the time it takes to perform those motions correctly, in mushin, on every blade, regardless of fatigue or distraction or off-day. The traditional standard is not "can you do this once?" The standard is "can you do this two thousand times in a row, with no degradation in quality?"

This is also why Japanese knives have a reputation for consistency that exceeds most Western hand-forged knives. A Western maker may produce 50 superb knives a year and a few middling ones; a traditional Sakai maker produces 50 knives a year that are all at the same level. The deshi system is structured to eliminate the variability rather than maximize the peak.

The current crisis

The system is shrinking. This is the underreported story in Japanese knife coverage: even as global demand for Japanese knives has roughly doubled in the past decade, the number of working deshi has fallen substantially. Sakai in particular has seen significant aging of its master smiths and a slow rate of new apprenticeship.

The reasons are demographic and economic. The traditional deshi life is hard: low pay for years, deference to a master, no clear career upside until midlife. Young people in modern Japan have other options. Engineering, technology, design: all of these careers offer clearer mid-career returns and more autonomy. The deshi life competes against an economy that values different skills.

The result is that many Sakai workshops are operating at half capacity or less, with elderly masters and no younger replacement. When a master retires or dies without a successor, the workshop closes, and that lineage of technique is lost. Some lineages have been continuously operating for 200 years and are now one retirement from disappearing.

Our annual State of Japanese Knives 2026 report goes into this in more detail with regional breakdowns. The TL;DR is that the Japanese knife industry has roughly 5 to 10 more years of relatively stable supply at current quality levels, after which significant attrition becomes likely unless the apprenticeship pipeline rebuilds.

Why this matters for buyers

Two practical implications for someone shopping for Japanese knives right now.

First: the current price levels reflect a partial supply shortage. As the master generation retires, the prices of named-smith knives are likely to rise faster than general inflation. If you have been thinking about buying a serious named-smith knife (a Yoshihiro yanagiba, a Masamoto deba, a Sakai kajiya gyuto), the next 5 years are probably the lowest-friction window for the next 30. After that, supply contracts and prices climb.

Second: production knives from Japan-style brands (including Okami) are not deshi-system knives. We are clear about this. Our knives are factory-forged in Yangjiang, China, using Japanese-tradition geometry and steel, by skilled production workers operating in a modern manufacturing environment. They are honest knives at honest prices, and they fill a market segment that the deshi-trained smiths could never serve at scale. But they are not the same product, and they do not preserve the same lineage.

If your purchase priority is to support the traditional system, buy from named smiths through reputable Japanese retailers. If your purchase priority is to get a working Japanese-style knife at a price that fits a normal home cook budget, the production-tier brands (us, our peers, the larger Japanese factory brands like Seki production) are the right answer. Both categories are legitimate. They serve different needs.

What can be done

This is an article, not a manifesto, so I will keep the closing brief. The Japanese government has begun a few formal initiatives to support knife-making apprenticeships in Sakai. Some workshops are trying to recruit international apprentices for the first time in their history. A few American knife retailers have begun direct partnerships with named smiths to provide more stable revenue and longer order lead times.

None of these will fully fix the demographic gap. But they all help slow the contraction. The single most useful thing a Western buyer can do is buy named-smith work directly from Japanese retailers when budget allows, rather than buying generic "Japanese-style" production knives marketed with the language of tradition. The named smiths get the revenue. The lineage gets one more year of operation. That is the accumulating effect.

The deshi system is one of the world remaining authentic apprenticeship traditions. It produces some of the best kitchen knives ever made. It is also fragile, and the next decade is going to determine how much of it survives. Worth knowing what you are looking at when you buy.

Andrew Kuzmin · Editor-in-Chief, Okami Blades