You touch the blade in the city of swords. Seki has made cutting tools for seven hundred years—once the producer of legendary samurai swords, now the source of kitchen knives prized in restaurants around the world. The name Seki, to anyone who cooks seriously, means an edge that holds. You set the blade to the whetstone and learn to keep the angle steady, and as you work, the sharpness returns to the steel—the same patient handwork the city's craftsmen repeat every single day. It is harder than it looks, this business of maintaining a single constant angle while the blade slides across the stone, and your first attempts will humble you. In the Kamakura period, swordsmiths gathered in this place because everything a blade needs was here: good clay for the forge, clean water for tempering, charcoal for the fire. The conditions were perfect, and so the smiths came, and the tradition took root and never left. Behind the simple fact of a knife that cuts well lies seven centuries of accumulated wisdom—and at the whetstone, for an hour, you join the long line of hands that have kept the edges of Seki keen.