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Making $35,000 Bonsai Scissors

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In a city famous for knives, one blacksmith still forges scissors the old way.

Sakai, in Osaka prefecture, has spent centuries building a reputation on edged steel — sword smiths first, then the kitchen knives that chefs around the world now covet. Inside that tradition sits Yasuhiro Hirakawa, a master blacksmith who runs the workshop Sasuke and who Great Big Story identified, in a September 2018 profile, as the last traditional scissor maker left in Japan. While everyone else in Sakai chases the knife trade, Hirakawa has spent his career on a narrower, stranger craft: hand-forged scissors built almost entirely for bonsai work.

• Yasuhiro Hirakawa is recognized as the last traditional scissor maker in Japan, running the Sasuke workshop in Sakai, a city long known for sword and knife forging.
• Forging a single pair of his scissors takes four times longer than making a standard Japanese knife — often up to 10 hours of manual labor a day, spread across an entire week.
• Prices run from around $1,100 for his standard handmade tools up to $35,000 for his most intricate custom bonsai scissors.

A Lineage Built on Steel, Not Knives

Hirakawa’s blacksmithing lineage runs through generations, and Sasuke has kept its focus on a tool most of Sakai’s forges long ago stopped making by hand. His process leans directly on the methods of traditional Japanese sword-making: hand-hammering, heating, shaping, and precision grinding, all done with high-grade carbon steel rather than the mass-produced alloys used in factory scissors. It’s a slower, more stubborn way to build a tool, and it’s exactly why there’s essentially no one left doing it his way.

The Time Cost of a Single Pair

What separates Hirakawa’s scissors from anything you’d find in a hardware store is the sheer labor stacked into each pair. According to the reporting, forging one set can take four times longer than producing a standard Japanese kitchen knife — a process that can demand up to 10 hours of hands-on work a day, across a full week, before a single pair is finished. Every step is manual: no stamping machines, no shortcuts on the grind.

The High Cost of Bonsai

That labor translates directly into price. Hirakawa’s standard handmade tools start around $1,100, but his most elaborate, custom bonsai scissors sell for as much as $35,000. For elite bonsai practitioners like Masakazu Yoshikawa, that price is justified by what the tool actually does on a living tree — balance, cutting performance, and clean incisions that don’t tear or bruise delicate branches the way a lesser blade can.

Hirakawa argues that manually forged steel carries a warmth and edge retention no mass-manufactured blade can replicate — the difference between a tool and an instrument.

That distinction matters more in bonsai than almost any other craft that touches a blade. A miniature tree that’s been trained for decades can be permanently disfigured by a ragged cut, which is why growers who can afford it treat a Hirakawa pair less like scissors and more like surgical equipment. It’s the same logic that drives premium pricing in plenty of other hand-crafted goods — the kind of scarcity economics behind why certain foods carry outsized price tags, or why a name built on painstaking, generational craftsmanship — the way a storied luxury house turned meticulous handwork into a brand people pay a premium for — ends up commanding a market all its own.

Sasuke isn’t scaling up. Hirakawa is, by Great Big Story’s account, the only person still making scissors this way in Japan, which means every pair that leaves his workshop is effectively a one-man production run — no apprentice pipeline, no factory backup, just one blacksmith and a week’s worth of hammering for every order.