Knives History of japan

"Hou-cho" is a sword of "Houtei"

Regarding kitchen knife, we call "Hou-cho" in Japanese that originally means a sword of "Houtei".
In Chinese characters, "Hou" means a "Chef" and "Chou" is considered as a name of a craftsman who served a King Hui of Wei in China during the Warring States Period in 300 years B.C. "Houtei" was an actual legendary chef existed more than 2,000 years ago and he was written in Chinese old Taoist book "Zhuangzi" as well. A story which has been passing down form generation to generation is that because he was extremely good at dealing with a knife, he could cut as many as thousands of cows into slices without sharpening the knife for several decades and nobody ever seen any nicks on the edge.
It is said the word "Hou-cho" is originated from "Houtei-to" (the meaning is also "Hotei's knife"). One interesting thing is that even in China, they do not call kitchen knives "Hou-cho". Only the Japanese call that way for general cooking knives.

Original Development of Japanese kitchen knives

Needless to say, because our ancient civilization has started from stone implements including knives, we have been using knives form thousands years ago.

The oldest kitchen knives currently exist are the Nara era period's and they are maintained in "Shosoin" now. Though, we have very few such an old kitchen knives actually used in hundreds years ago, it is considered Japanese people used to use kitchen knives before the Nara era. The shape of the oldest kitchen knives look like Japanese Samurai Sword, "Katana" as they have very long handles. These types of kitchen knives were used by the beginning of the Edo era and from the middle to the latter period of the Edo era, they were changed to modern shape during the period. Japanese traditional kitchen knives "Deba" for fish, "Yanagi" for sashimi and "Nakiri" for vegetables have started to be used from then. Edo era was most peaceful and politically stabilized period in Japanese history and various kinds of cooking cultures were highly developed, grown and flowered as we could see.
In the Meiji era, westernization brought western knives from overseas with new methods of cooking and the new western knives spread over. In Japan, especially, we called chef knife "Gyu-to" (means knives for beef). This is just because we did not have custom to eat beef, we did not have any knives for cutting them either.
In the Showa era, "Bunka" knife, which had advantages of both "Gyu-to" and "Nakiri" invented. After the development of "Bunka", we improved the shape then finally tip-rounded shape of "Bunka","Santoku" was born, which became very popular for common household use. "Santoku" is also very popular in foreign countries in these days called as Japanese traditional shape "Santoku".

Today, Japanese kitchen knives have been recognized as high quality product and also highly skilled techniques are in there. Even famous knife manufacturers in foreign country, sometimes ask for making their flagship model to Japanese manufacturer as their OEM. The fact reveals Japanese eminent skills were accepted just like as Japanese food did.
We, Fujitora Industry Co.,ltd are currently putting great deal of effort into exporting. Our product range got really good evaluation from many users all over the world because of its sharpness, functions and the refined modern design.