What could you achieve if you spent your entire career focused on one task?
If you worked ten hours a day, six days a week, on the same craft and the same set of skills, how good would you be after ten years?
What about twenty?
What about fifty?
Shoichi Nagatsu is a saw sharpener based in Kyoto.
He sharpens, tunes and restores Japanese saws.
That is his trade, his profession and, by all appearances, his obsession.
And his work is extraordinary.
When the Rules Become Suggestions
Japanese sawmaking is full of established conventions: tooth geometry, rake, set, plate thickness and tension all have an enormous influence on how a saw behaves.
But when someone has spent decades working almost exclusively with saws, those conventions become tools rather than limitations.
We are fortunate enough to own a Japanese ryoba that Nagatsu-san has filed with push-cutting teeth.
We have also heard of him doing the reverse: filing Japanese-style pull teeth into an old Disston saw plate.
That alone tells you something about the way he thinks about saws.
The form is not sacred.
Performance is.
Tuning a Saw Without Touching the Teeth
One of the most memorable things we have seen Nagatsu-san do involved no filing at all.
We watched him take a saw and improve its performance simply by tapping along the middle of the blade.
He did not touch the teeth.
He worked only on the plate.
The change in the way the saw behaved was immediate.
For those of us watching, it was also slightly humbling.
How do you learn to read a piece of spring steel well enough to know exactly where a tiny hammer strike will change the way the entire saw cuts?
The answer, presumably, is that you spend a very long time doing little else.
The Nagakatsu Saws
The saws sharpened under the Nagakatsu name — Nagatsu-san's maker's mark — capture much of what makes specialist Japanese toolmaking so fascinating.
They look simple.
The work behind them is anything but.
Over a period of around two years, we received three separate shipments of Nagatsu-san's work.
Until recently, you would not have known it from looking at our website.
The numbers were simply too small.
Previous shipments were sold one at a time through our Kogarah workshop, or guarded rather jealously in sturdy boxes while we decided what to do with them.
In our most recent shipment, Nagatsu-san generously allocated us a larger number of saws, making it possible for us to offer them more widely.
Old Saw Plates, Newly Finished
There is another detail that makes this particular batch especially interesting.
Nagatsu-san buys unfinished saw plates from makers and suppliers he trusts, then performs the tooth-setting, filing and plate tuning himself.
The plates used for this shipment had reportedly been waiting since the late 1980s to be filed, set and finished.
These were the final plates from that particular stock.
Once they are gone, these exact saws cannot simply be reordered.
Two Models
For this shipment, we selected two saw types:
- A 240 mm ryoba, with cutting edges on both sides of the blade.
- A 240 mm kataba, with a single cutting edge and no spine.
We also hope to receive backed dozuki saws from Nagatsu-san in the future.
Those saws require new plates to be produced first, so they belong to a different production cycle altogether.
So What Does Nagatsu-san Actually Do?
The short answer is straightforward:
He sets the teeth, files them and peens the saw plate.
Technically, that is correct.
It is also a hopelessly inadequate description of the amount of judgement involved.
Each of those operations affects how the saw tracks, how aggressively it cuts, how easily it clears waste and how the blade behaves under tension.
Tooth shape matters.
Tooth set matters.
Plate tension matters.
And the relationship between all three matters even more.
What makes Nagatsu-san's work special is not that he performs some mysterious hidden process.
It is that he performs familiar processes with a level of sensitivity that can only come from decades spent working with saws.
The tools themselves are the visible result.
The remarkable part is the experience behind them.