How ZAKU Knives started with Sakuraco subscribers

In late 2023, Sakuraco subscribers saw something new on the Sakuraco website: about 200 Japanese kitchen knives, offered as a test. They sold out in under a month. That test became ZAKU Knives. ICHIGO Inc., the Tokyo company behind Sakuraco, now runs it as a kitchen knife brand with four stores in Tokyo and Kyoto. If you bought one of those first knives, you were there at the start.

Knives belong to the same culture Sakuraco shares through snacks, tea and homeware. Many Japanese kitchen knives are still made by hand in small workshops, and many of the most experienced smiths are getting older. Not every workshop has someone ready to take it over.

The same is true well beyond knives. A 2022 survey by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications found that traditional craft regions across Japan face falling demand and a shortage of successors. ZAKU exists to help the craft carry on. When someone can hold a young smith’s knife in a store and take it home, that smith has a better chance of making a living at the forge.

We started with makers in Sakai, in Osaka, where knives have been made for centuries. Its small workshops, called machikoba, still sit between houses and shops on ordinary streets. We also work with makers in Seki, Tosa and Sanjo, and we plan and design the ZAKU range with them.

This year our founder, Ayumi Chikamoto, visited Takefu, a knife-making town in Echizen, Fukui. Many of the smiths there are young, and that is the spirit we want ZAKU to have. Young smiths work in small batches, so their knives reach our walls a few at a time, next to knives from the older towns.

ZAKU is written 作 in Japanese, which means to make or to create.

All four stores carry every knife type: Kappabashi, Asakusa and Harajuku in Tokyo, and Nishiki in Kyoto. You can test cut on daikon radish before you choose and have your knife laser engraved. Staff speak several languages, and eligible overseas visitors can shop tax-free.

If you’d like some background before you go, read a short history of Japanese knives and their main types. Not traveling to Japan soon? The same knives are sold online and ship from Japan worldwide.