Tojiro

Tojiro is a knife manufacturer in Tsubame, Niigata Prefecture — the Tsubame-Sanjo metalworking district that has produced Japanese nails, tools, and tableware since blacksmiths were invited there in the early Edo period, and which today supplies most of Japan's domestically made tableware. The company's own site traces its founding to 1953 as Fujitora Farm Equipment, making machine parts and farm-implement blades; it entered kitchen cutlery in 1955 with a stainless-steel fruit knife, at a time the site says stainless was widely considered too soft to hold an edge against carbon steel — a bet the company built its early reputation on. It was renamed from Fujitora Industry Co., Ltd. to Tojiro Co., Ltd. in 2015 as the brand name overtook the corporate one.

Tojiro's own site confirms current operations directly: it runs an 'Open Factory' and Knife Gallery in Tsubame-Sanjo open to visitors, where guests can watch manufacturing, try knives before buying, get custom engraving, and have blades resharpened on-site — a working factory-showroom rather than a dormant brand. The company manufactures using clad-steel construction that pairs a hard cutting-edge core with softer cladding steel, combining traditional forging with industrial-scale production methods distinct from Sakai's or Seki's smaller hand-forge houses.

Tojiro is one of the most widely distributed Japanese cutlery brands internationally, and its scale and factory-visit program make it a useful counterpoint on the site to the smaller single-forge houses of Sakai and Seki, while remaining a genuine Tsubame-Sanjo blade manufacturer rather than a reseller.