“I knew I wouldn’t fit into [traditional] Japanese culture,” he says. “I like doing what I want.”
Ito left Japan at 19, enrolled at Southern Illinois University and never looked back. "I knew I wouldn't fit into [traditional] Japanese culture," he says. "I like doing what I want." He wanted to be close to the ocean, so after graduation he moved to California to study oceanography at Humboldt State University. With his newfound passion for rock climbing, he often wound up inland, living simply in the desert near Joshua Tree. But he missed the ocean and yearned to live in the tropics. Thus, Ito came to Hawaii, where he learned to freedive and live off the land by spearfishing and hunting. It was then, when he needed a good hunting knife, that he started crafting his own-"Good knives are expensive!" he says-teaching himself through trial and error, and by watching YouTube.
Ito discovered both a passion and aptitude for knifemaking. "Once I get into it, I go all in," Ito says. Friends and fellow hunters were impressed with Ito's clean but elegant design and wanted one. "I don't want to make anything that's not functional," Ito says. "I like simple, user-oriented design." Demand grew, so Ito started selling his knives, structuring production in much the same way metalsmiths creating kitchen cutlery and farm tools in Sanjo have for centuries. He buys many of his machined forms from the East Coast; these are heat-treated by someone else in Idaho. He employs two more people to sell his knives at the Waimea Farmers Market on Saturdays. But Ito is the artist, the craftsman designing, shaping and finishing each blade. He's made thousands of hunting, chef and everyday-carry knives over the past fifteen years, imprinting the blades with his name in katakana characters along with the knives' provenance in English: Hawaii.
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