Seki's smiths once supplied blades to armies on both sides of the same war. The city's reputation for cutlery predates the Meiji Restoration by roughly six centuries, seeded when swordsmiths migrated south from Yamato in the 1200s and found what they needed in the valley: clay for forge linings, pine charcoal from the surrounding hills, and the clean water of the Nagara and Tsubo rivers for quenching. By the fifteenth century, some three hundred smiths worked here. Their mark, the Mino tradition, produced blades known for two qualities rarely combined — orenu, magaranu, yoku kireru, meaning they did not break, did not bend, and cut well. Magistrates recorded the names. Warlords bought the output. The Seki mark travelled far beyond Gifu. What distinguishes seki city knife making today is that the craft never became a museum piece. When the sword ban of 1876 removed the trade's foundation, the forges did not close. They converted. Pocket knives, razors, scissors, and kitchen blades replaced katana, and by the twentieth century the city was producing a large share of Japan's household cutlery. The industrial estates on the outskirts and the small workshops in the old quarter still run on the same folded-steel logic: laminate a hard core between softer jackets, heat, hammer, differentially quench, polish. The Seki Traditional Swordsmith Museum at 9-1 Minamikasuga-cho anchors this lineage for visitors. Admission is 300 JPY. Its displays trace the Mino school through tang inscriptions, tempering patterns, and the tool sets a smith would have kept — hammers graded by weight, tongs shaped for a single task, the straw ash used to control oxidation. Adjacent to the exhibition space is a working forge floor where tanren, the folding of billets under hammer, is demonstrated on scheduled dates. Modern Seki attraction tours often pair the museum with a hands-on Damascus knife crafting workshop in the historic quarter, where layered pattern-welded steel is shaped and revealed through acid etching. Others fold the city into a wider Gifu itinerary alongside Inuyama Castle, Takayama, and the thatched farmhouses of Shirakawa-go. The result is unusual among Japanese landmarks. Most craft heritage sites preserve a memory. Here the hammer noise is contemporary, and the object under it will be sold. Anyone tracing seki city knife making finds not a preserved past but a continuous one — a supply chain that has simply changed what it makes.