Who trained whom in Japanese blade making. Sword smiths have had genealogy records for centuries; kitchen knife smiths never got one. This is the first attempt to draw it: every line below is backed by a passage from our maker research, and you can read the source sentence by clicking any name.
54Documented Links
83Smiths & Houses
30Lineages Mapped
10Regions
How to read this page. Each card is one house or family line, oldest generation at the top. Solid lines are family succession. Red lines are apprenticeships, and the red arcs that jump between cards are the interesting part: the moments the craft moved between houses. Click any smith for the evidence behind their connections.
Where our research found no documented link, there is no line. Gaps are honest gaps.
Every connection on this page was extracted from the maker and region profiles in our knowledge base, which are themselves compiled from makers' own published histories, regional craft cooperatives, and the Seki cutlery registry. Each link stores the exact sentence it came from, and that sentence is shown in the detail panel.
Family succession means the source states the forge or title passed within the family.
Apprenticeship means the source names a master and a student directly.
Trained at the house means the source places a smith's training inside a named workshop without naming an individual master.
Traditional attribution marks lineage claims that predate modern records, reported as tradition, not verified fact.
Links marked "as reported" rest on retailer or cooperative documentation we could not confirm against a primary Japanese source. We would rather show you the seam than paint over it. If you can document a connection we are missing, write to info@okamiblades.com and we will add it with credit.
