Sakai
— — a city of tombs and knives.
Not only on a wall.
“South of Osaka, on the flat coastal plain where the Yamato River meets the bay. Sakai is a port city that has been forging steel since the sixteenth century: fishing-village knives at first, then matchlock barrels for the warring states, then the kitchen knives that travel out of every serious cook's drawer in Japan. Above the city the giant keyhole tombs of the Mozu group hold the dead emperors of the fifth century in cedar and quiet.
Sakai, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sakai is a port city of about 826,000 people on the eastern shore of Osaka Bay, immediately south of Osaka City in Osaka Prefecture. The city sits on the alluvial plain at the mouth of the Yamato River and grew as a free-trade port during the late medieval period. Its older centre holds the Mozu Tombs, a UNESCO World Heritage group inscribed in 2019, and its industrial belt still produces the carbon-steel kitchen knives for which the city has been known since the sixteenth century.
At the northern edge of Sakai sits the Daisen Kofun, attributed to the fifth-century Emperor Nintoku and the largest tomb by area in the world. The keyhole-shaped mound is 486 metres long, ringed by three moats, and forested into a single dense green hill from the ground; the form is only readable from the air. Around it lie 44 other kofun in the Mozu group, inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019. The interiors have never been excavated.
The most useful base is Mozu Station on the JR Hanwa Line, two stops south of Tennōji in Osaka. The Daisen Kofun can be circled on foot along a 2.8-kilometre path around the outer moat; the viewing platform at Sakai City Hall's twenty-first floor gives the only ground-level view of the keyhole form. Sakai Risho no Mori museum, devoted to the city's tea, knives, and bicycle industries, sits a short walk west. The traditional knife shops cluster along Hōchō-dōri in the Shukuin district.